Nick Timothy

I completely agree, and I will come to the needs of Cambridge and the surrounding area. You will have noticed, Madam Deputy Speaker, that none of the examples that I have just given is in a western country. That is because advanced economies do not build artificial communities from scratch in the hope that economic growth will follow. That is the logic of the autocrat and the socialist planner, and there is enough evidence from history to inform us of its chances of success. In truth, the Government know that. In the small print of the new towns programme, officials were dismissive of Forest City, saying that it had no local support, no landowner backing, no broader development interest, and no route to delivery. They said that Haverhill did not meet their economic tests, and that the area near Exning and Newmarket had too little water. Simon Dudley, the former chairman of Homes England, called Forest City “a recipe for disaster, paid for by the taxpayer and dressed up as progress.” Simon Lovegrove, an expert in new towns and cities around the world, has said that there is “no need for such a city”, that the proposal has “major flaws”, and that—for the reasons that I have already given—it is “unaffordable”. As Mr Lovegrove says, according to the employment-population ratio and the labour force participation rate, a city of 1 million people would have a working population of nearly 400,000, but the city of Cambridge has a working population of less than 70,000. The developers talk about the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, but I wonder whether they have even looked at a map, because we are on the wrong side of Cambridge for that.