One of the simplest yet paralysis-inducing truths of our time is that demand for housing easily outstrips supply in London and has been doing so for a long time.

Population growth, which is expected to add the equivalent of a city at least the size of Birmingham to the capital’s headcount over the next decade, will make this much worse. George Osborne’s plan for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet is certainly welcome— it ticks key boxes for getting homes built quickly, such as transport, infrastructure and the right planning consents. But the 11,000 homes planned are just one part of a much bigger puzzle.

London First’s new report, “Home Truths,” offers 12 practical solutions to London’s housing crisis and, while it’s up to the politicians to decide which of these are the most palatable, there is one that we simply can’t ignore: the building of whole new communities to house tens of thousands of people.

This is an obvious solution in a city whose population is forecast to increase by a further million people by 2021 and where the latest house building figures show that only 18,380 new homes were built in 2012/13.

In recent months the concept of new towns has been promoted more and more vociferously. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Labour leader Ed Miliband, the Town and Country Planning Association, Centre for London and Legal & General are among those pinning their hopes on new towns, garden cities, call them what you will (at the moment these concepts tend to be used interchangeably and indiscriminately).

We accept these may be useful elsewhere, but in the context of London this isn’t a helpful idea. For the capital we propose something slightly different: new suburbs.

This may sound like nothing more than semantics, but we make the distinction for three important reasons. First, we want to make clear that this is simply carrying on with the way London has evolved over centuries— all we are doing is giving this evolution a shot in the arm.

Second, the politics: we worry that talk of new towns, however merited, is a sure-fire way of mobilising the vocal anti-development lobby and killing the concept of large new communities stone dead.

Finally, we don’t want new communities that stretch across boundaries, raising questions over exactly what will go where and who is in charge. We want these suburbs to be within the control…

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