Over the past decade, garden communities have become an increasingly popular way of delivering housing, with Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all attracted to their positive branding. 

In 2014, the Lyons Housing Commission, set up by the Labour opposition as part of a public policy review on housing and led by Sir Michael Lyons, concluded that garden cities were “essential to meeting housing need over the medium to long term”. Although then local government secretary Eric Pickles suggested this meant “dumping rebranded eco-towns on local communities”, a year later the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government released a prospectus entitled Locally-led garden villages, towns and cities with a support package for areas that wanted to create a garden community. It also announced that it would back a 15,000-home garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent.

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