In 2026, Transport for New Homes turns ten years old. To celebrate, let’s take a look back at what we’ve achieved and our impact.

Transport for New Homes was set up by Jenny Raggett as a project of the Foundation for Integrated Transport in 2016. Jenny had noticed lots of new housing estates being built far away from anywhere and not connected to walking, cycling or public transport networks. The project was initially set up to find out more about these estates and why they were being built.

The results of these first investigative visits were published in 2018 in our first research report called Transport for New Homes.

The report found lots of poorly designed and poorly connected places, so in 2019 Transport for New Homes set up an award to find the best examples of transport and housing planned together. Although we found a few good places, we sadly weren’t drowning in applications. Also in 2019 we wrote a charter to encourage better house building around sustainable transport and a checklist to help assess new housing proposals.

In 2020 we launched our Garden Villages and Garden Towns research. This looked at the government garden communities programme and how Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) money was being spent.

Transport for New Homes became an independent social enterprise in 2020. We ran a successful Homes without Jams crowdfunder to respond to the Planning for the Future white paper that was published that year. We thought the reforms would cause car dependency to become much worse and were very happy to see them withdrawn in 2021. A major win!

Government had responded to our reports that we just needed to wait a few years and the public transport and walkable neighbourhoods would appear. So, in 2022, we went back to check for our Building Car Dependency report. And the places we’d previously visited had got even worse, often losing bus services in a decade of cuts. Quite a low point really.

However, from 2024 things started to turn around. The government updated the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) to recognise the importance of vision-led transport planning. We don’t think this goes far enough, but it is a good start. In 2025 we published our first What is being built? report. Starting a continuous cycle of visiting and reporting on new homes and the improvement in transport provision (or lack of it). We have a fantastic group of volunteers to thank for widening our reach and visiting more housing estates than ever before.

In 2025 a number of further planning changes were made, adopting ideas we’d pushed for. The DfT Connectivity Tool was launched to direct housing to good locations, the Bus Services Act enabled councils outside big cities to run buses and the Planning and Infrastructure Act reintroduced strategic planning outside London.

After many years of things really looking like they are only going to get worse, there has been a positive shift in the last couple of years (at least in policy terms). But there is much more to do.

The future

Government clearly has an appetite for planning reform and has made some positive policy changes. However, not much evidence of this can yet be seen in new house building. We will continue to visit new housing as it is being built and will recommend policy changes. We will look at the next generation government housing programme—the new towns—where we would hope to see some new exemplars. Thank you for your support!