Policy makers have relied too heavily on private house builders to bring forward new communities, a senior director of one of the UK’s biggest housing associates has told our Oxford Cambridge Corridor Economic Growth Conference.

During the conference’s panel debate on housing, Places for People Group Director Mary Parsons said: ‘’We’re not very good at delivering at scale in this country because we’ve relied on a private sector model which defines places by the number of houses, not infrastructure. The clue is in the name housebuilder, which suggests what they want to do. We’ve tried to get their business model to deliver something that the public sector needed to lead.’’

It’s necessary to ‘cut through the politics of planning’, she said, citing projects that had taken 10 years to even get close to an outline planning permission with others taking six years despite the support of the local planning authority.

Parsons, who is also Chair of the Town and Country Planning Associate, also called for strategic infrastructure providers to be repurposed to become investors and partners in large scale development proposals.

New settlements in the Cambridge-Oxford growth corridor are likely to be delivered in the latter phases of its scheduled growth plans, said Richard Harrington, Chief Executive of the Buckinghamshire Thames Valley LEP: ‘’New settlements will be at the tail end of the process not in the first 10-15 years.’’

Adrian Brown, Managing Director of Berkeley Strategic, said he has never seen a time when as many homes were in the pipeline as are currently being proposed in plans for the Cambridge to Oxford Corridor.

And Paul Kitson, General Manager for the South East at Homes England, said that the housing agency had demonstrated its commitment to quality design by signing a memorandum of understanding with the Design Council.