Reimagining new towns: Innovation, digital first delivery and new statecraft

Despite 80 years of extraordinary technological progress, from the internet to AI, how we plan, fund, and deliver places has barely changed. We still identify land, analyse infrastructure, and develop master plans using methods that would feel familiar to post-war planners.

But with a renewed focus on new towns from the central government, there’s a growing sense that we can and must do things differently.

At UKREiiF 2025, we hosted a panel exploring how the latest phase of new towns should be designed and delivered, and how development corporations can take a test-and-learn approach to innovation, finance, and delivery. From stewardship to digital planning and long-term investment, the conversation spotlighted the opportunity and the responsibility of doing things differently this time around.

Our panel featured expert voices from across policy, planning, investment, and delivery:

• Sophie White, Regeneration Director, Aviva

• Dr Wei Yang OBE, CEO & Founder, Digital Task Force for Planning

• James Scott, Group Director of Strategy and Planning, Urban&Civic

• Ellie de la Bedoyere, Deputy Director, New Towns Unit, MHCLG

• Richard Irish, Chief Operating Officer, LLDC 

• Chaired by Kate Taylor, Senior Partner, Place and Infrastructure, TPXimpact

Here are the key themes that emerged from the panel discussion.

New towns require a new form of ‘statecraft’ 

New towns are not “just housing”. They are a once-in-a-generation chance to reimagine how people live, work, learn, and grow in an age of climate, political and technological disruption. This means that every part of government has a stake in new towns, whether that's housing, transport, education, energy, health, or skills. But too often, the budgets, powers, services, and products to deliver this agenda are owned by disparate departments. The result? Timidity of ambition, slow decision making and a failure to create the alignment needed to deliver places at the quality and scale required. 

To avoid this, we need to make the design and delivery of new towns a shared national mission. They must be delivered collaboratively with cross-sector teams, empowered delivery agencies, aligned budgets, and long-term accountability.

This requires:

• Cross-departmental coordination with new innovative governance structures designed from the start.

• Development corporations and delivery vehicles with clear, multi-year mandates and the right level of autonomy and power to innovate

• A shared framework for social, environmental, and economic impact, not just housing numbers.

Digital and data: From buzzwords to systemic tools

This generation of new towns has a historic opportunity, starting with a near blank sheet of paper, unburdened by legacy technology. We must use digital tools not just to speed up planning, but to fundamentally rewire how we understand, plan, and govern places.

Digital, data and artificial intelligence (AI) can help us:

• engage communities digitally from day one, capturing their needs, ambitions, and feedback in real time.

• coordinate across disciplines—planners, engineers, ecologists, economists—using shared data platforms and digital twins.

• monitor delivery live, flag risks early, and adapt phasing and investment dynamically with real-time feedback loops.

• simulate scenarios, test trade-offs, and future-proof decisions in the face of uncertainty.

AI is not a silver bullet, but as one panellist noted, it’s a tool that can dramatically enhance human-centred design and delivery if we remain focused on outcomes: resilient, inclusive, livable places.

However, everyone recognised that delivering on this digital promise requires not just technology, but transformation and upskilling of how built environment professionals think and work, which demands training for leadership and unexpected futures. This is not just technical skills but the ability to lead cross-functional teams, and space to experiment and fail. To grasp the opportunity of new towns, professionals need to be empowered to try new approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together digital experts, planners, designers, community engagement professionals, and social scientists from day one.

Government must design for learning and leadership

One of the clearest messages from the roundtable was this: we don’t just need projects, we need a system that learns.

We’ve had generations of development corporations, growth deals, and programmes like Eco-towns and Garden Villages. But we still don’t have a coordinated way to learn from them, replicate what works, or retain institutional memory.

To change that, we need to:

• build structured knowledge-sharing across projects.

• invest in the capability of delivery bodies, not just their mandates.

• create roles that bridge policy, delivery, and community voice.

New towns are a 30-year journey. The capacity to learn and adapt must be baked into the governance from day one.

Creating confidence for long-term investment

Finally, unlocking new towns at scale demands designing bold, innovative funding models built for the long term. 

This isn’t only about money; it’s about building trust from investors, communities, and partners that these places are solid bets for the next 50 years. Government backing through using its guarantees and covenants will be critical, as well as creating space to design and pilot new ways of underwriting projects and unlocking private capital early, when risks are highest. Key to delivery will be designing ways to bring in the right partners, both public and private, at the right time, based on their appetite for risk and capital type. 

LLDC, with its significant investment in enabling infrastructure and joint venture partnerships with the private sector, taking a long-term view on returns and delivery, provides a case study we all need to look to. 

That means:

• treating land as equity and building partnerships with landowners, not just acquisitions.

• aligning infrastructure funding to place-based delivery timelines.

• using public guarantees and investment to unlock private capital in early, high-risk stages and exploring new innovative approaches to revolving loans and facilities.

Looking ahead

At TPXimpact, we believe that the revival of new towns is a once-in-a-generation opportunity—not just to deliver homes, but to reshape how we imagine, plan, build and manage places

That means bold thinking, collaborative leadership, and mission-led delivery grounded in long-term stewardship, innovation and adaptive learning.

We’re committed to supporting local and national partners to embrace this challenge through digital strategy, innovative organisational design and skills and talent development.

To learn more about our thinking on new towns, read our blog on the New New Towns programme.