Simon Dudley: ‘Forest City 1’ is a recipe for disaster dressed up as progress, and will end up a migrant city

Simon Dudley is Former Chair of Homes England and a Senior Fellow at Onward

Every few years, Britain’s wonk industrial-complex coughs up another grand housing vision that claims to fix everything at once.

A brand-new city. Hundreds of thousands of homes. Permanent affordability. Green growth. High productivity. World-class infrastructure.

Each time, it is sold as hard-headed realism when it is anything but. A wishful stylised fantasy designed to impress policy conferences and think-tank panels, not to survive contact with the harsh realities of local government, land ownership, finance or delivery.

Forest City 1 is the latest and most audacious entry in this tradition.

A million-person settlement on farmland east of Cambridge, permanently affordable by decree, fast-tracked through Parliament, shielded from local consent, and marketed as an innovative model for the future. Yet it is neither innovative, nor a model. It is an all too familiar policy wonk kite-flying exercise dressed up in the language of moral urgency and technocratic inevitability.

I call this sort of thing Progress Slop: a cycle of grand, abstract schemes often designed by people with no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything, all for the approval of their peers who also have no experience of building, financing, or maintaining anything.

Like every scheme of this kind, it relies on a simple sleight of hand: that bold CGIs and confident rhetoric can override the constraints that govern cities; incentives, capital, infrastructure, and human behaviour. They never do. I say this as someone who chaired Homes England, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, and spent years turning ambitious housing policy into actual homes as the Leader of Royal Borough and Windsor and Maidenhead Council. At Ebbsfleet, we lost 1,300 homes to imaginary spiders. Natural England designated land as protected based on a species that did not exist. Surveys proved it. It did not matter.

The moral centrepiece of Forest City 1 is permanent affordability. Land value is removed from the market. Homes are sold with land appreciation, in the plan’s own words, “effectively nullified”. Resale values capped. This is presented as ethical clarity. It is a design choice with unavoidable consequences.

Housing markets exist because people believe their homes will hold or increase in value. Mortgage finance exists because lenders believe assets can be realised at market value. Development exists because uplift pays for roads, pipes, schools, and risk. Forest City 1 explicitly removes all of this, effectively leaving the state to pick up the tab.

The plan never confronts what follows. Instead, it performs contradiction in plain sight: claiming land value appreciation is nullified while also promising to fund city services from ground rents from the appreciating land value.

Either land value exists or it does not. Either households can benefit from it or it is centrally captured. Forest City 1 wants the moral credit of abolishing land value and the fiscal benefit of exploiting it, without admitting the conflict.

Once appreciation is capped and resale controlled, private demand changes fundamentally. Buyers cannot build equity. Lenders cannot rely on exit. Developers cannot recycle value into infrastructure. At that point, there is only one counterparty left with guaranteed cashflow, infinite patience, and a reliable source of housing demand: the state.

We have more than a million households on social housing waiting lists. Over 130,000 families in temporary accommodation. Tens of thousands of people housed under asylum and refugee support schemes. Councils are close to insolvency because of nightly-paid accommodation.

Forest City 1 is engineered to be perfect for this purpose: large-scale, permanently affordable, centrally controlled, and legally insulated from local resistance. When housing is permanently affordable, centrally controlled, and stripped of market exit, the state becomes the buyer of first and last resort. This would be true even if net migration were zero. The mechanism is baked into the proposals’ very design.

Supporters insist the city will be economically vibrant. Jobs will come. Innovation districts will emerge. Anchor tenants will arrive. Cambridge spillover will do the rest. But this is not a serious analysis. It is amateurs asking the state to give them unfettered powers over land they barely understand. Claims that high-value life sciences employment will simply materialise are especially hollow at a moment when central London schemes have faltered. Maersk’s withdrawal from the proposed life sciences campus at Kings Cross, citing the UK’s deteriorating policy and investment environment, was a market signal of the clearest kind. If that sector will not commit in Zone 1, it will not anchor a speculative city in the Fens.

Furthermore, Forest City 1 provides housing numbers down to the last decimal. It specifies land take, forest cover, and building heights. But it offers no named employers, no committed relocations, no quantified jobs target, no floorspace delivery schedule, no phasing for employment space. Housing appears to be certain. Jobs are hypothetical. At the same time quietly assuming that a reservoir-scale water supply will materialise in East Anglia, one of the UK`s most water-stressed regions.

Britain has seen this pattern repeatedly. When housing arrives before jobs, it is not entrepreneurs who arrive first. It is placement. Milton Keynes avoided this fate only because the government deliberately relocated employment early. If this is built as proposed, it will follow a predictable path: slow private uptake, heavy public placement, weak job creation, rising welfare spending, and because permanent affordability implies permanent subsidy, structural state dependence.

I am told the project’s founders and supporters regularly boast in meetings with local stakeholders that the project is being taken into consideration by Labour advisors in MHCLG. This would come as no surprise to me because Forest City is perfectly designed to become a managed settlement for new, state-dependent arrivals the system cannot place elsewhere. In other words, Britain’s new migrant city.

The next centre-right government must reject this model outright. It should instead focus on expanding and densifying successful towns and cities, especially in the South East, through muscular planning reform, including Statutory National Development Management Policies and tougher compliance with local plan-making. It must also restore genuinely representative planning, so that silent majorities, not organised blockers, shape a country capable of reindustrialising, securing its own energy supply, and defending its national interest.

Britain does not need more wonk-industrial complex visions or quasi-public-sector overreach. It needs institutions that work, incentives that align, and leaders willing to confront reality. Forest City 1 will not be a city built for growth, enterprise, or opportunity; it is a settlement structurally engineered to absorb pressures the state has failed to manage elsewhere, financed by permanent subsidy and populated by administrative necessity rather than genuine choice. That is not a future-facing model.

It is a recipe for disaster, paid for by the taxpayer and dressed up as progress.