Which shadowy MoD figures are blocking London’s secret new town?
With a £4.7bn black hole in defence funding and a 1.5m home building target both likely to test Andy Burnham, could creating a new town on a west London airfield be a welcome revelation for the new PM? If, that is, he can face down a shadowy opposition, asks Andrew Teacher
Fifteen years before he became foreign secretary, David Lammy reportedly told a developer he could ask no questions in the Commons about the potential to redevelop RAF Northolt. When pressed, the MP allegedly responded: “Just don’t go there. We’re not allowed to ask.”
Seven prime ministers later, and the crisis of defence spending (estimated at £4.7bn) is competing with the housing crisis (anyone remember that 1.5m target?) and the black hole in graduate jobs created by Rachel Reeves as the biggest policy headache of the day.
One of Reeves’s recycled dance moves from 50 years back is the government’s new towns programme. Chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, a dozen places have been mooted for around 300,000 homes, and some of the best sites are, you’ve guessed it, former aerodromes: Heyford Park near Oxford and Brabazon near Bristol. One of the best opportunities of all (not on the list for some reason) is smack bang on the Central Line, inside the M25.
The point is a simple one. Set aside the 448 acres Northolt occupies, which is near seven times the size of the or more than four times Canary Wharf. Use the proceeds to build a new town of 10,000 homes, thousands of which could be “affordable”. Then channel rents into defence, education or any other reservoir of cash ministers need to water.
Sadly, the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) record on selling and buying back its estate is truly woeful; rivalled only by the chaos endured by Lammy’s local football club, Tottenham Hotspur, which narrowly escaped relegation this season on the final day. In 1996 the MoD sold the bulk of its married-quarters estate, some 55,000 homes, to Annington for £1.66bn, then rented them back. Then in December 2024, sick of laying out £230m a year in rent, it bought 36,347 of them back for just under £6bn, with the defence secretary pictured touring service quarters at Northolt itself for the announcement. This is singularly reviled as the worst property deal in history for the public sector, and the National Audit Office agrees: it now estimates the deal has left the MoD around £14.5bn worse off, even as it judged the buy-back itself the best value available.
Turning airfields into housing
Despite that chaos, the broader idea of releasing airfields for housing has fared rather better. Defence officials will always insist they need fenced-off land for secret work, yet in the United States, and closer to home in mainland Europe, the military rubs along happily in dedicated military enclaves with civil airports taking on the operational strain and cost of running the runway, and Britain is hardly short of those.
Of course, releasing public land in this way carries real complications. A site turned into housing can’t be used to defend Britain if Russia does attack, or if we need pop-up hospitals or labs to deal with a pandemic or biological attack. The nearer-term challenge, though, is paying for the military, housing today’s soldiers and finding decent homes for the millions who lack them. Around 4m homes in England fail the Decent Homes Standard, meaning roughly 8m people are living in damp, cold, leaky and unsafe homes, like many of our heroes serving in the military.
On its 448 acres Northolt could take a new town of up to 10,000 homes, with room to spare for schools, doctors’ surgeries, shops and a data centre or two. It already sits in zone 5, on the Central line, roughly 30 minutes from the West End.
The main objection will be that Northolt still carries genuine defence use. It is the RAF’s strategic site in London, home to 32 (The Royal) Squadron and around 2,000 personnel across 38 resident units, with a ceremonial and royal-transport role and the contingency value it proved when it became a fighter station during the 2012 Olympics.
The reality is that most of the traffic is now civilian. Ministers spent years assuring residents that commercial flights would stay capped at 7,000 a year, yet the Ministry of Defence later lifted the ceiling to 12,000, a rise of more than 70 per cent, with no visible public consultation. Even so, the base sits well below that ceiling, handling around 8,500 movements last year, the overwhelming majority of them civilian, with 32 Squadron now operating just two Falcon business jets. A city this desperate for housing, and a country this desperate for defence cash, could put hundreds of acres of land to far better use than a few take-offs that could happily be accommodated elsewhere.
In 2014 the government revealed the Northolt’s net operating costs were an eye-watering £45m a year. Even if that has slowly increased, saving say £500m over a decade on top of the Northolt land receipt adds up to a lot of drones.
Burnham will need both bulletproof armour and some big ideas when the gloss of his ascension fades, and it may quickly do. Teachers, carers, blue-light workers, civil servants and journalists are all struggling to make ends meet in a market where housing delivery has all but ground to a halt and where the Green opposition offers the snake oil of damaging rent caps.
London could hardly stand in starker contrast to Manchester, where pragmatism, collaboration and certainty have driven a housing and infrastructure boom over the past decade. The King of the North inherited a template laid down by the late Sir Howard Bernstein, which he ably took credit for, as a good politician does.
And while Lammy may not have had the stomach for the fight, Burnham has shown he likely does. Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman’s man and Burnham’s likely economic adviser, has called for billions in borrowing to fund infrastructure. Yet given the likely response of the bond markets, which we are of course “in hock to”, clinging on to Northolt is one battle we should hope the MoD loses.
Andrew Teacher is co-founder of Lauder Teacher Associates