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Housing expert rubbishes Forest City plan: Former Homes England chair dismisses proposal as ‘recipe for disaster’
A housing expert has slammed proposals to build a city of a million people between Haverhill and Newmarket as a ‘recipe for disaster’.
The plan to build a Forest City on 45,000 acres in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk was rubbished by Simon Dudley, former chair of both Homes England and the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, and a Senior Fellow at the Onward think tank.
Mr Dudley argued the scheme is economically unviable, financially dependent on state subsidy, and would likely become a managed settlement for state-dependent arrivals from overseas.
In a piece for the Conservative Home website, Mr Dudley delivered a damning assessment of the Forest City plan, warning there was no guarantee that jobs would materialise alongside the 400,000 planned new houses, and suggesting it would put a massive strain on water resources.
“Forest City 1 provides housing numbers down to the last decimal. It specifies land take, forest cover, and building heights. But it offers no named employers, no committed relocations, no quantified jobs target, no floorspace delivery schedule, no phasing for employment space. Housing appears to be certain. Jobs are hypothetical. At the same time quietly assuming that a reservoir-scale water supply will materialise in East Anglia, one of the UK`s most water-stressed regions.”
In one passage, Mr Dudley added: “Forest City 1 will not be a city built for growth, enterprise, or opportunity; it is a settlement structurally engineered to absorb pressures the state has failed to manage elsewhere, financed by permanent subsidy and populated by administrative necessity rather than genuine choice… It is a recipe for disaster, paid for by the taxpayer and dressed up as progress.”
And, on the crucial matter of financing, Mr Dudley wrote: “Housing markets exist because people believe their homes will hold or increase in value. Mortgage finance exists because lenders believe assets can be realised at market value. Development exists because uplift pays for roads, pipes, schools, and risk. Forest City 1 explicitly removes all of this, effectively leaving the state to pick up the tab.”
Commenting, Nick Timothy, the MP for West Suffolk, said: “The analysis by Mr Dudley shows only too clearly why the Forest City scheme is completely unrealistic. The city would not be an eco-friendly utopia but dystopian, state-subsidised concrete sprawl. It would destroy Newmarket’s position as the home of modern horse racing and lead to the bulldozing of huge tracts of beautiful countryside and ancient villages like Wickhambrook, Cowlinge and the Thurlows.“
