Leader of Hertfordshire County Council since May 2021, Cllr Richard Roberts writes on creating fantastic Garden Town communities that will support sustainable growth and building for future generations over the coming years.
And with Hertfordshire having a long history with the Garden Town/Village/City movement, Cllr Roberts is looking forward to a new era of housing delivery and employment opportunities.
More houses were built in Hertfordshire last year since 2001 and we are committed to ensuring that as a county council we continue to create the conditions that allow for the delivery of good, sustainable housing.
A key element to delivering on new housing for the county will be Harlow & Gilston Garden Town, one of the biggest developments we’ve seen proposed for Hertfordshire for many decades and it will bring an exciting new era for the county, providing a much-needed boost to employment, community facilities and how we travel locally.
Hertfordshire historically has an excellent reputation for building great settlements – places like Letchworth and Welwyn stand out nationally as the first areas to embrace Garden City principles, the best of town and country living.
The 10,000 homes planned for the Gilston Villages will add to the county’s stock of well built, beautifully designed houses seen across the breadth of Hertfordshire.
Gilston will, by delivering new quality homes for Hertfordshire, enhance and build on our reputation as a powerhouse in the region. Hertfordshire helps keep the country afloat with £40 billion going to the Exchequer every year.
At present the county sees about 4,500 new homes built every year in Hertfordshire. Over my own time as a Councillor, some twenty years now, we’ve seen 83,000 new homes and around an extra 165,000 people who have been integrated into our existing framework of hamlets, villages, towns and cities. That’s impressive!
The aim is to keep this positive momentum going, creating more success stories of sustainable growth, integration and building for future generations over the coming years with the Harlow & Gilston project bringing great Garden Town benefits to its residents and the wider county.
It is imperative that we take environmental impacts into consideration, both within the development and also nearby to ensure that Hertfordshire remains a place where people want to live and work and where families and businesses can thrive.
I believe we as a county council have a duty with developers to go on that journey together.
While it may take nearly 40 years to build all the new elements of the Harlow & Gilston project, we want to ensure that it is done right, sympathetically to the area but ultimately delivers a new garden town that other counties look on with envy.
As financial pressures and housing shortages both here and nationally continue to weigh heavy on the minds of residents, the delivery of affordable housing is also key, and I’m pleased that on average across Hertfordshire 18 per cent of residential properties fall into this category.
The Gilston villages will have just over 23 per cent designated as affordable housing and while that is not quite the same as saying it’s social housing or council housing, it does show a clear commitment to building properties that will help the younger generation get a foot on the property ladder.
It is often said that housing developments spring up with little thought for the delivery of public services, and this is why close partnership working between developers and the council is key. Not only do people want access to public services, but they also want a corner shop, pub, green space, footpaths and cycling routes because, with more people working at home, a small community nearby lends itself to taking a break away from a computer to get out for lunch or meet someone for a walk.
Building a community is important, one that isn’t in front of a phone or computer screen and it encourages people to get out of their houses and start connecting with one another.
I grew up on an estate in a village and with that came children playing and families coming together.
We had a field that was big enough to have summer fetes and the whole village would go to that. The field was seen as a central point and it enabled the village to socialise and interact and that’s what we envisage for Gilston.
Connectivity across the local area is also going to play a big part, not just between the Gilston Villages but into Harlow, where the major employment opportunities will be. If we are collectively to reduce our carbon footprints we have to look at how people travel but that doesn’t mean being anti-car – we recognise that people need access to transport, but what is key, is ensuring that people have affordable, reliable and frequent access to cleaner forms of transport and for that, public transport will be key.
We’ve got to bring all that together with some energy over the next few years so that young people, who don’t want to pay for the cost of running a car, have a public transport offer that is good enough for them.
We’ve been looking at how other areas of Hertfordshire can connect into this infrastructure and the plans we have for the Herts and Essex Rapid Transit system [HERT], would allow people living in central Hertfordshire towns to travel eastwards to Gilston, Harlow and onto Stansted Airport via an innovative bus or rail network. It has a hefty price tag but also the potential to be fantastic.
The garden town, with Harlow at the centre, will have a high quality cultural, residential and commercial offer. Not only will that attract people wanting to live there, but it will bring in new businesses and investment and that is a match made in heaven for the local area.
Gilston can be a place for people to raise their families, run a business and realise their dreams while living in a cleaner, greener, healthier Hertfordshire.
