THE NEW TOWNS

tion is in the hands of public corporations, appointed by and responsible
to the Minister of Housing and Local Government. These Development
Corporations, which publish annual reports, are financed by loans raised
through the Treasury, and they design, build and manage housing, commercial
 and industrial premises, as well as some amenity buildings. They
may act, temporarily, as statutory undertakers, laying main services; they
may provide other statutory and local government services, or act as agents
for these authorities; they may divert roads, demolish property, create new
town centres, provide public and amenity buildings, lay out playing fields,
help form neighbourhood association and encourage local newspapers. They
have, indeed, powers under the New Towns Act of 1946, ‘ generally to do
anything necessary or expedient for the purposes of the New Town or for
purposes incidental thereto,” although the Minister can and, in practice, does
* give directions . . . for restricting exercise by them of any of the powers
ander the Act.’

Differing Development Problems
The Corporations, in short, have considerable authority and a great
deal of discretion. But they remain’ development corporations. They must
work in harness with, not supersede, the Parish, District, Borough or County
Councils which operate within their designated areas; for these are still
the rating authorities which must supply all the services normally rendered
by local government. It-is a tribute to the capacity of the Corporation
members and of local councillors, as well as to the co-operation of permanent
officials on both sides, that the inevitable frictions have been minimised, and
that this complicated relationship between old and new has not prevented
the New Towns from growing at the intended rate.
The problems have been different in each town. Harlow, for instance,
has been built around a small village nucleus, and the immigrants have been
dependent from the start on the facilities provided by the Corporation.
Stevenage and Crawley have been based on small country towns, with established
 shops and services and an existing community life; Basildon has been
seeking to knit together a scrappy and, in part, semi-blighted development;
Hemel Hempstead is expanding a borough which already had eighteen
thousand inhabitants. The New Towns, therefore, have not coincided with
previous administrative boundaries, nor have the local authorities had
sufficient powers or resources adequately to cope with the large intake, In
Crawley, to take a striking example, the designated area originally fell into
the territory of three county councils, three rural districts and five parishes.
In Harlow, it has already been necessary to create a new urban district
council.
In the accompanying Table are given the latest figures of physical growth.
They show a considerable achievement. The eight New Towns in the London
area, for example, are building at the rate of about nine thousand houses 2
year, or about twice the rate of the London County Council, which is now
faced with a desperate shortage of housing sites. In the first years, naturally,
construction was not so rapid, for the plans had to be made, the contracts