BLOGS

A new pipeline takes shape

After more than a year of taskforce reviews, consultations and shortlisting, the UK's new towns programme has moved from concept to something closer to a delivery plan. Seven locations - Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Leeds South Bank, Crews Hill and Chase Park in Enfield, Manchester Victoria North, Thamesmead in Greenwich, Brabazon and the West Innovation Arc in South Gloucestershire, and an expanded Milton Keynes - have been proposed to anchor a housebuilding effort the government is calling the biggest in over fifty years. Between them, these sites could deliver well in excess of 150,000 homes over the coming decades, with Tempsford and Brabazon alone each pitched at up to 40,000 units.

For institutional investors, lenders and developers, this is more than a policy headline. It reshapes where long-term residential supply is likely to land, which local authorities will see sustained planning and infrastructure activity, and where large-scale forward-funding, build-to-rent and land promotion opportunities will concentrate over the next 10-20 years.

Large-scale schemes already working their way through local plans and outline consents - places like Elms Park and other major strategic sites sitting outside the seven formally designated locations - now have to be read against this backdrop. They won't carry the same development corporation powers or dedicated funding as the flagship new towns, but they represent the wider category of large, infrastructure-led communities that the government's own taskforce flagged as central to closing the housing supply gap. Understanding where a scheme like this sits relative to the seven-town programme, in terms of scale, transport dependency and delivery mechanism, is now a core part of underwriting any major residential land position.

Where the seven towns sit in the pipeline - and what's missing from it

The scale differences between the seven locations are stark, and they matter for anyone assessing delivery risk. Tempsford and Brabazon are largely greenfield, rail-anchored settlements dependent on new infrastructure - East West Rail in Tempsford's case - that has yet to be built. Manchester Victoria North and Leeds South Bank are inner-city regeneration and densification plays, tied to existing or committed transit upgrades (Metrolink, and Leeds's wider £2.1 billion transport investment). Thamesmead depends on a still-unconfirmed Docklands Light Railway extension. Milton Keynes is the outlier: an established new town undergoing a "renewal" expansion, arguably the lowest-risk site in the group given its existing infrastructure base.

This spread illustrates a wider point for the pipeline as a whole. REalyse data on planning pipeline activity consistently shows that unit delivery timelines correlate closely with infrastructure dependency - schemes reliant on new transport nodes or utilities upgrades tend to see materially longer gaps between outline consent and first completions than urban extensions or brownfield regeneration sites with existing connectivity. Investors comparing the seven towns against other large-scale schemes in their target regions should weight infrastructure readiness at least as heavily as headline unit numbers when assessing delivery risk and phasing.

It's also worth noting what didn't make the final seven. Of the original twelve sites recommended by the New Towns Taskforce, five - including Adlington in Cheshire, Heyford Park, Marlcombe in East Devon, Plymouth and Wychavon Town - were held back as "credible development opportunities" rather than formally designated new towns. For developers and land promoters active in those areas, this is a meaningful signal: these sites may still progress through conventional planning routes and existing housing programmes, but without the accelerated delivery vehicles, safeguarding directions or dedicated capital that the seven headline locations are expected to receive. Comparable schemes in the wider pipeline, wherever they sit geographically, will need to be assessed on their own planning merits rather than assumed to benefit from new towns-style tailwinds.

The National Scheme of Delegation: a lever for speed, not certainty

Running in parallel to the new towns programme is a structural change to how planning decisions get made across England. From 31 October 2026, the National Scheme of Delegation - introduced under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 - will require every local planning authority to sort applications into two fixed categories. Schedule 1 applications (householder developments, minor residential and commercial schemes, reserved matters on non-phased sites, and various technical consents) must be decided by planning officers, with no route to committee at all. Schedule 2 covers larger and more sensitive applications - including major residential schemes - which remain presumed for officer determination unless a joint sign-off between a nominated officer and committee chair confirms the application meets a "significant local issue" test.

The practical effect for major schemes is nuanced. Government figures already show that around 96% of planning decisions in England are made by officers rather than committees, so the reform is as much a codification of existing practice as a revolution. But for large-scale residential and mixed-use schemes specifically - the Schedule 2 category most relevant to new towns, urban extensions and other major pipeline sites - the reform removes some of the unpredictability that currently comes from council-by-council variation in call-in powers and objection-based referral triggers. A scheme that might previously have faced late-stage committee referral in one authority, and skipped it entirely in a neighbouring one, will now be assessed against the same national criteria everywhere.

That consistency should, in principle, tighten the range of realistic decision timelines that developers and lenders build into their appraisals. It does not, however, guarantee faster outcomes for the largest and most contentious schemes. Applications for more than 150 homes that are refused will still be referred to the Secretary of State for a 21-day call-in review, and Schedule 2's "significant planning matter" test leaves room for genuinely major or Green Belt-sensitive proposals - including large phases within the new towns themselves - to continue facing committee scrutiny. For a scheme like Crews Hill and Chase Park, which involves politically sensitive Green Belt release on London's edge, or Tempsford, which sits across multiple parish and district boundaries, the delegation reform is unlikely to remove local consent risk altogether; it simply standardises how that risk is processed.

What this means for underwriting and site selection

For investors and lenders assessing exposure to the new towns pipeline or comparable large-scale schemes, three practical implications stand out.

First, infrastructure timing remains the dominant variable in phasing assumptions. Schemes anchored to committed transport investment (Leeds South Bank, Manchester Victoria North, Milton Keynes) carry materially different delivery risk profiles to those dependent on infrastructure that has not yet reached construction (Tempsford, Thamesmead). Development appraisals and GDV assumptions should reflect this spread rather than treating all seven towns as a homogeneous asset class.

Second, the National Scheme of Delegation is a reason for cautious optimism on decision timelines for medium-scale and technical applications within these new communities - reserved matters, non-phased development, discharge of conditions - but not a reason to compress overall build-out assumptions for the headline strategic sites themselves, where committee referral risk persists under Schedule 2.

Third, sites outside the seven designated towns - including large-scale schemes like Elms Park working through conventional planning routes - deserve continued scrutiny on their own comparables, absorption rates and local plan allocations. REalyse's planning and pipeline data allows this kind of analysis: benchmarking a given large-scale scheme's unit mix, tenure split and pricing assumptions against nearby transactions and active listings, independent of whether it carries a "new town" label.

Outlook

The new towns programme and the National Scheme of Delegation both point in the same direction: a planning system trying to trade local variability for national consistency, in the hope of unlocking large-scale delivery at a pace not seen since the post-war era. Final decisions on the seven locations are expected in late summer 2026, with the ambition of getting "spades in the ground" on at least three sites within this parliament. Whether that ambition is met will depend less on the strength of the policy architecture - which is now largely in place - and more on the unglamorous mechanics of land assembly, infrastructure sequencing and viability under continued affordable housing requirements.

For developers, investors and lenders, the task now is to keep mapping individual schemes, whether inside the seven-town programme or in the wider pipeline, against granular local data: comparables, absorption rates, planning history and infrastructure delivery timetables. That is where the real underwriting risk lives, well below the level of national policy headlines.