Huge new £450m town with 4,500 homes in countryside outside UK city

A UK city is set for a new £450million town with 4,500 homes on its outskirts as Labour aims to build new settlements across the country. Thorpebury would be located just outside Leicester on 900 acres of land. A housing development, Thorpebury-in-the-Limes, is already being constructed in Charnwood, with satellite images showing houses in some streets and others awaiting new properties, which include starter homes. A quarter of the houses are set to be affordable. Overall, the settlement is due to take more than a decade to put together.

Shops, healthcare facilities, a school - a two-storey building on a 4.5-acre site with a parking area big enough for 42 vehicles - and walking and cycling routes also included in planning documents. Sports pitches, play areas and parkland would also prove crucial leisure areas. A care home for the elderly is earmarked for the area, too. It comes as another new town is set to be built nearby next to East Midlands Airport.

The proposal for the up to 4,500-property settlement, named Isley Woodhouse, is also in Leicestershire.

It includes a secondary school and two primary schools, in addition to shops, hotels, a leisure centre and sports facilities.

The project could bring as many as 10,000 new residents to the area, it is believed.

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is aiming to oversee the delivery of 1.5million new homes by the next parliament.

The Government is relaxing planning laws in order to help reach this goal, which includes reviewing the current Green Belt policy "to make sure it better meets the needs of present and future generations".

Labour says its new towns programme will include "large-scale new communities built on greenfield land and separated from other nearby settlements, but also a larger number of urban extensions and urban regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area".

The Government added in July 2024: "The unifying principle will be that each of the new settlements will contain at least 10,000 homes, although we expect a number to be far larger in size. Collectively, we expect they could provide hundreds of thousands more homes in the decades to come.

"Our new towns programme will not just make a significant contribution to meeting housing demand and housing need across England, but will also support economic growth by releasing the productive potential of constrained towns and cities across England and ensuring our housebuilding drive is aligned with our industrial strategy and national infrastructure plans."

Ministers have also announced that a National Housing Bank, a subsidiary of Homes England, will be publicly owned and backed with £16billion of financial capacity, on top of £6billion of existing finance to be allocated this parliament, in order to accelerate housebuilding and leverage in £53billion of additional private investment, creating jobs and delivering more than 500,000 new homes.