George Osborne's announcement that 15,000 new homes at Ebbsfleet can help solve the housing crisis is pie in the sky
Hail glorious Ebbsfleet, gateway to the south. Never was a kinder deed done than George Osborne's pre-budget announcement of a new "garden city" at Ebbsfleet (really Northfleet) on the Thames estuary near Gravesend. It is to be focused on old cement workings and is to comprise just 15,000 houses. To call this a garden city is satire. Has Osborne ever been there?
Ebbsfleet is nothing but the ghostly stopping point on the high-speed line (HS1) from St Pancras to France. Hardly anyone gets on or off. The trains only stop because, when HS1 was planned in the 1990s, Ebbsfleet was to be Michael Heseltine's Canary Wharf on the south bank. Plans for a new town emerged in 1996, 2007 and as recently as 2012, when the government and local councils agreed with the developer, Land Securities, to build 22,000 houses at Ebbsfleet.
Nothing happened. Ebbsfleet deserves to rank among the great failures of central command planning. Rather than ask why, Osborne appears intent on bailing out the local developers, much as Margaret Thatcher had to rescue Canary Wharf in its early days. He is putting in £200m or £4,000 per house. This hardly merited air time on the BBC. The project is also hoping to rescue HS1, given its poor commercial record in generating business to Europe. Osborne sees it as a new commuter line into St Pancras "just 19 minutes from London".
Development at Ebbsfleet is no bad idea. The land is derelict industrial or swamp – alarmingly low-lying – and if the government really feels the need to subsidise housing in the overheated south, this is a good place to go. But the idea that replacing the local council with a "development corporation" (for just 15,000 houses?) will transform this project is optimistic. Osborne's real attention should go to proper urban renewal, the revival of rundown city areas and increasing housing densities. As a brave new dawn for the quaint garden city, Ebbsfleet is a joke.