Housing Secretary takes the case for new communities to an audience of 1.5 million at Alconbury Weald
Content creators covering homes, trades, mortgages, design and community life joined the Rt Hon Steve Reed OBE MP to see how large-scale development delivers homes, jobs, skills and green infrastructure together.
The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government visited Alconbury Weald in Cambridgeshire on 2 July, joining ten of the UK's leading property, construction and lifestyle content creators for an immersive day exploring how new communities are planned, built and brought to life.
The event, organised by MHCLG and hosted by master developer Urban&Civic, was designed to take the Government's housebuilding ambitions to audiences who rarely hear from the industry directly. The creators attending, whose subjects range from interiors and renovation to mortgages, skilled trades and sustainability, through design and architecture to community life, reach a combined following of more than 1.5 million people.
Alconbury Weald provided the evidence on the ground. One of the largest new communities in the country, the development is delivering homes alongside schools, transport, employment and green space, and demonstrates how large-scale sites can meet national priorities on housing supply, skills, nature and climate resilience at the same time.
“This government is doing everything it can to speed up planning and deliver the schools, green spaces, jobs and transport links that turn new housing developments into thriving communities.
“Alconbury Weald is a perfect example of this brought to life in Cambridgeshire and exactly what I want to see happening all over the country.”
Guests then moved through four zones covering sustainability and innovation, planning and design, construction, and business and community. Highlights included laying bricks alongside a graduate of a construction skills bootcamp now working on Cambridgeshire sites, testing a groundworks simulator, designing a new play park with the development's landscape architects, and hearing how the Zero Bills pilot with Octopus Energy and the Water Savers campaign with Anglian Water are cutting household costs and consumption in new homes.
The construction zone put the industry's skills challenge centre stage. Urban&Civic's jobs and skills partner Constructed Pathways showed how large sites create structured and ongoing routes into construction careers for local people and priority groups, including getting more women into the industry, opening up opportunities for the long-term unemployed, prison leavers, and military veterans, with training embedded in the supply chain from the outset.
“The country needs homes, but it also needs them delivered alongside the schools, transport, green space and jobs that make places work. Alconbury Weald shows how this can be done and done well. If we want the next generation to build these places and to choose to live in them, we have to tell that story beyond where they are already listening. Today demonstrated across multiple channels that successful super strategic sites don’t just have schools but they are schools providing opportunities for jobs and skills throughout their life.”
“We were delighted to host this event and to showcase, with our partners, everything that goes into making successful places. Alconbury Weald shows how new communities can be planned and delivered with sustainability, infrastructure, skills and community life at their heart, and today brought that process to life: the many people, partnerships and decisions involved in creating places that will grow and evolve for generations.”
