UK Government must raise its ambitions with the New Towns Plan

Last Thursday, the House of Lords Built Environment Committee published its inquiry into the Government’s flagship housing policy, New Towns: Commit and Build. Having given oral evidence to the Committee earlier this year on behalf of the timber industry, it is encouraging to see how closely the report conclusions echo my own. Yet the report also delivers a sobering wake-up call to Westminster.

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We are now approaching two and a half years since the 2024 general election. In that time, we have had a policy statement, a New Towns Taskforce, a draft consultation, a new Prime Minister, and a returning Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. What we do not yet have is a final list of locations, a single established development corporation, or a spade in the ground.

The Committee’s verdict is blunt: either the Government commits relentlessly to treating new towns as a central national infrastructure project, or the programme will fail. For the UK timber sector – and the wider built environment – the findings get to the very heart of what is holding back British housebuilding, while showcasing the exact reasons our industry is positioned to fix it.

Breaking the construction ‘doom-loop’

One of the central questions the Committee put to during the inquiry was whether the UK has the material supply and manufacturing capacity to build a new generation of towns at scale.

My answer to the peers was straightforward: in the timber sector, there is no shortage of raw material. However, what we have suffered from is a prolonged downturn in production capability driven by a lack of consistent demand. As the Committee rightly identifies in its report, the UK’s building materials and construction products sectors have been trapped in a “doom-loop”. Depressed housebuilding rates cause demand to contract, forcing manufacturers to reduce supply and mothball production capacity.

When we talk about Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) – such as factory-built timber frame, floor cassettes, or other offsite practice – these economics are unforgiving. Offsite manufacturing facilities are expensive to set up and run. They cannot simply be switched on and off to match the stop-start whims of political cycles; they need to be in constant use. Suppliers make capital investment decisions over years, not fiscal quarters.

The shadow of cancelled projects – such as the northern leg of HS2 – still hang heavy over the built environment, leaving what witnesses to the inquiry described as a “massive deficit of trust”. Why should a sawmill, a timber engineering firm, or a volume housebuilder continue to invest tens of millions of pounds in new plants and machinery, or hire a new intake of apprentices, if the tap might be turned off at the next cabinet reshuffle. In the current economic cycle, the risks apparent to firms in the built environment are clear.

New towns have the scale to break this doom-loop. As I told the Committee, the programme is a hugely attractive opportunity for our sector precisely because it can provide long-term certainty. If the Government follows the Committee’s recommendation to place the new towns programme formally into the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) pipeline, and establishes autonomous Development Corporations within three months of site selection with ring-fenced funding, our industry can forecast demand accurately and scale up domestic manufacturing to meet it.

Standardisation and circularity: Challenging the misconceptions of timber

However, a visible pipeline is only half the equation. How we design and procure these settlements – and whether we move past outdated misconceptions about low-carbon materials – matters just as much.

During the evidence sessions, I made the case that the new towns programme is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine construction supply chains around circularity and standardisation. Historically, the word “standardisation” has made planners and architects nervous, conjuring up post-war images of ‘identikit’ estates. At the same time, lingering misconceptions persist among some procurers around the durability, and structural versatility of timber.

As the Committee accepted in its final report, the fear that standardisation leads to uniformity is misconceived. Standardising the core technical parameters of construction – building code expectations, energy performance requirements, floor-to-ceiling heights, structural spans, and the basic chassis of affordable housing – has zero negative impact on the visual identity of a town. You can have rich architectural diversity, rooted in local vernacular styles and varied external facades, while repeating the same high-performing engineered timber wall panels and floor cassettes underneath.

You only need to look at TDUK’s online Case Study Library to see how real-world UK projects are already shattering these misconceptions across every building typology a new town requires. Whether it is the homes, the schools, healthcare, or community hubs, we have a wealth of design experience – particularly in the timber industry – to build these quickly, sustainably – and safely – using MMC and low-carbon materials.

By standardising components across multiple new towns and engaging with the materials sector at the earliest master planning stage, Development Corporations can aggregate demand – allowing factories to run at capacity, driving down unit costs, and de-risking innovation for SME developers.

Solving the skills ‘permacrisis’: From the factory floor to Wood Campus

Standardisation and timber MMC also offer the most practical answer to another major barrier identified by the Lords: the construction skills “permacrisis“.

With an ageing workforce, trainee drop-out rates reaching 50% for men and 70% for women, and Skills England forecasting a need for over one million additional construction workers by 2035, there was a telling disconnect during the inquiry. While Housing and Planning Minister Matthew Pennycook suggested skills shortages posed “no specific challenge” to the new towns programme, Skills England’s own Deputy Director warned the Committee that there was “no question that skills shortages are a real delivery risk”.

As I warned the Committee, if the Government expects these new towns to be genuine exemplars of sustainable design and low-carbon construction, the multi-disciplinary workforce required to deliver them onsite does not currently exist at the scale required. We cannot magic a million traditional site tradespeople out of thin air before the end of this Parliament. What we can do, as I explained to peers, is move more construction into factories: putting people into controlled manufacturing environments and training them to operate modern machinery is a far faster, more inclusive way to ramp up a high-quality workforce than relying solely on muddy, freezing building sites.

Crucially, our sector is not waiting around for Whitehall’s promised construction jobs plan to start building that competence. Following the publication of our Timber in Construction Skills Action Plan alongside NMITE, TDUK has teamed up with Built Environment – Smarter Transformation (BE-ST), Donaldson Timber Systems, the Structural Timber Association, NMITE, and Edinburgh Napier University to deliver the CITB-funded Timber in Construction Skills Programme . This industry-led initiative is building the exact modular, employer-facing training and entry pathways the Lords Committee is calling for – equipping contractors, architects, engineers, and site managers with the practical skills to manage moisture, durability, logistics, and regulatory compliance across timber projects.

Alongside this, TDUK has expanded Wood Campus, our online learning platform developed in partnership with Swedish Wood. With more than 60 on-demand CPD modules delivering hundreds of hours of structured training – covering everything from timber grading, engineered wood products, and moisture protection to stock handling for builders’ merchants and fire-safe design – Wood Campus can help upskill the entire supply chain from the sawmill and merchant branch right through to the design studio and building site

As I urged the Committee, if New Town Development Corporations integrate dedicated training facilities into the early stages of development – and partner directly with ready-made industry frameworks like the Timber in Construction Skills Programme, Wood Campus, and our member businesses – which exist right across the UK – they can build a local, multi-disciplinary workforce tailored to the needs of modern settlement delivery.

Joining up Whitehall’s ambitions

Ultimately, the Built Environment Committee’s report exposes the same fundamental challenge we have been highlighting across the regulatory landscape all autumn: a lack of joined-up government.

We see this across regulation (with these issues highlighted in our responses to the Draft London Plan, and earlier this year in regards to the consultation on Approved Document B). We see this in the new towns programme itself, six of the seven initial sites consulted on earlier this year are urban extensions or regeneration schemes. It is not clear that the Government’s rhetoric on their ambitions for New Towns will be brought to life.

The mid-twentieth-century New Towns – which this programme is supposed to allude to –were a central pillar of national reconstruction. If today’s Government wants to leave a similar legacy – and meet both its housing targets and its legally binding 2050 Net Zero obligations – it must heed the Built Environment Committee’s call.

Through initiatives like the Timber in Construction Skills Programme, Wood Campus, and our library of proven low-carbon case studies, our supply chain is already building the skills, the technical standards, and the material capacity Britain needs.

Just give us the delivery pipeline and a coherent regulatory framework that champions standardised, low-carbon timber construction – and we can support you to begin to build out today.