You may have seen and heard about proposed garden communities.

A joint project between Colchester Council, Tendring Council, Braintree Council and Essex County Council, we are exploring the potential for three new communities based west of Colchester, close to Marks Tey, east of Colchester, close to the University, and west of Braintree off the A120.

We use the term communities because we as councils, regardless of political persuasion, believe a new way of approaching development is needed.

As councils we need to ensure we are building homes and providing jobs.

We face a housing shortage, we’re living longer, and our population is growing.

To meet our needs in the Colchester borough alone this means 920 new homes each year, while the population of north Essex is predicted to rise by some 190,000 over the next 30 years.

The risk of not addressing this issue cannot be understated.

Not only will this see house prices continue to rise, we will open ourselves up to speculative and predatory developers.

But on the other side of the coin, when we do provide planning permissions we often see development a developer is willing to do rather than they should do – and the new build that stops at 499 homes for years, because the 500th triggers the necessity to provide a new road, business space or community building is frustrating to us all. So why is the garden community project different?

Well, our vision is to create three new large-scale communities which would grow over many years, so addressing long term housing needs.

Led and developed by local people, the primary aim will not be simple financial return but the creation of vibrant thriving communities.

What we will not accept is the creation of a commuter town, and this means ensuring we create not just homes, but the conditions and infrastructure to attract businesses, while ensuring the schools, health, leisure, cultural facilities and green spaces are all in place to allow people to live, work and spend time within their community.

Through taking control away from developers we can ensure that infrastructure comes first, possible through the critical mass of such a large scale project.

And we can focus on things that matter - quality of design, speed of build and a mix of housing so ensuring we have good affordable housing mixed with aspirational and larger family homes and even self-build plots.

The potential of these communities is huge.

We have the opportunity to think about every aspect from how the design and layout can aid our blue-light services, to how green technologies can be implemented, to how waste is stored and moved.

But of course this needs to be viable, and while as councils we have committed in principle to this approach, they must work and meet the vision and principles we have set out, and that is why we are working with leading experts to test and model every aspect.

You can find out more on the project at ne-gc.co.