Haverhill Speech

On Monday the 2nd of March, 2026, we hosted a Q&A event at the Haverhill Arts Center to hear from the people of Haverhill and the surrounding area. The free event, advertised on Facebook, the Haverhill Echo and leaflets in shops and through letter boxes, was at full capacity.

Thank you to the whole team at the Haverhill Arts Center who were fantastic, proactive, and professional throughout.

We would also like to thank all who attended, in particular a woman in her early 20s, a born-and-bred Haverhillian, finding it impossible to afford a home in the town she grew up in.

What follows is the prepared speech delivered by Shiv at the opening of the event.

When I was growing up the idea was simple. Do well at school, leave home, maybe go to uni, work hard, and you can soon buy a house, and then raise your own kids. You’d do better than your parents. Life for the next generation would be better than the last.

That’s the social contract.

For the last 15 years - as a country we’ve stagnated. It’s been awful. You’ve all seen it. Here on the highstreet for example. I met a couple on Friday who told me just how much the high street had changed from a vibrant place, full of people, to a place where even some great businesses are struggling to make anything work.

And if you’re under 40, you know what I’m talking about most especially. Buying a home is often a distant dream. Raising kids - just so hard when you could get thrown out of where you rent.

15 years ago, when I was 29 and I could still be considered young - I’m not young anymore - I wrote a book warning anyone who’d read it. It said that if we didn’t sort housing and infrastructure my generation and younger would be screwed.

Well nothing changed. In fact things got worse. And if I’m honest, I got a bit heartbroken and depressed.

I watched as so many of my friends, my cousins, my own sister, moved abroad - to Germany, the US, and Norway. I’d thought our kids would grow up together as we did. But they moved. All because housing was too expensive.

But the problem is bigger than just housing right? Water is scarce, electricity is scarce, there’s no way to expand businesses, especially if you’re in Cambridge. No transport. You can’t get a bloody GP appointment when you need it.

Our economy, the economy right here, is flat on its back. It means you have to fight so much harder, even just to keep things as they are. People are fighting in Stetchworth to keep their post office open. Or there’s the Cornexchange, which Colin has tried to fight for to have it reopen.

Or you have to travel an hour in the morning to Cambridge over pothole-ridden roads - I almost bust my car the other day - because there will never be any money from Government for a train line. Or the bus service is getting scrapped.

It’s painful to see the country that gave the world the steam engine, the jet engine, penicillin, nuclear power plants, the country that gave the world the industrial revolution and the greatest increase in living standards in human history, completely on its knees.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

I know it doesn’t. We have a way out. Not for the whole country. But at least for the people here. In Haverhill, Cambridge, and East Anglia more widely.

Not by begging the Government for spare cash. Not by putting up taxes until we bleed everyone dry. But by creating something new. Something that a lot of people are crying out for and just can’t get: Space.

Space for new businesses. To work in. Space to live in. Space to move and travel. To enjoy nature and ramble freely. Space to fall in love, to have fun in and socialise and to raise children in. A new space that people can afford, so they don’t have to worry about the rent or mortgage at the end of the month. Or the bills piling up, unopened by the door. So they finally have some money in their bank so they don’t have to fret about buying a birthday present for their child’s classmate, or having enough petrol to go out.

But this space, which we call Forest City; it’s a change. It’s a change. A massive one. One that will be painful for some. But also full of opportunity for others.

It’s been called ‘mad’ and ‘bonkers’. It is radical. But make no mistake, we’re taking it seriously. We’ve had 40 people working on this, including people from Haverhill itself, all of them experts in their field, for free, pro-bono. There are already thousands who support it, and also some very experienced people who have done great and radical things themselves like our board member Steve McAdam, who helped plan the Olympics. They all believe it’s possible.

In a few weeks their reports will be published but we wanted to come here to share those ideas with you first and understand your thoughts.

So what is Forest City?

Well. The first thing, it’s both big and small. It’s not a town. It comes with a major commercial centre and more than 370,000 homes. But it’s also small - just 1.6% of the arable land in the East of England.

But let’s start with the Forest - the woodlands. We’ll create the largest, contiguous land-based nature reserve in England. 12,000 acres. It will take time. But it will be a legacy fit for generations to come.

Transport - You’ll have a station in Haverhill. But not just to Cambridge, but direct to Stansted Airport and then London.

Then there’s water - we’ll build a reservoir built as a lake at the heart of the city, you can swim in and boat on. The project will spend a total of £4bn on water and water treatment. And of course, as we said last year, there’ll be full protection for the chalk streams.

If this goes ahead, the city will generate £53bn for the region each year.

Right here that means tens of thousands of jobs for a generation just in construction alone but also jobs for teachers, and nurses, doctors, and salesmen and software engineers. New markets to sell food, and clothes and furnishings, and windows and signage, and tools. New people to drink in pubs and eat in restaurants. People who’ll need to find garages to service their cars or businesses to repair their computers or have their accounts completed or pets treated. The list goes on and on.

£53bn is more than twice the size of Suffolk’s current economy. It’s the size of Oxford, Cambridge and Leeds combined. It’ll be transformational.

Europe’s first city in half a century, world-class employers, all here right on Haverhill’s doorstep.

And what about everything else?

We’re planning for a tramway, and by the time it is fully built, 4 new hospitals, over 200 primary schools, scores of secondary schools, new churches, GP surgeries, activities for kids, leisure centres.

And on housing - £350,000 for a 4 bed home is our ambition. Even the cheapest 2 bed house, near, say Stradishall costs £200,000. And there will be questions I’m sure about how exactly we’re making it affordable, and what that means for house prices more generally.

It’s an incredibly radical undertaking.

Before I close

Before I close I want to say a few final things:

Firstly: What’s our job? ACDC is owned by Joe and me. We’ve put in a little over £4000 of our own money. That’s it. No one has gotten paid except our operations person. Our job is a bit like Seb Coe and the Olympics - to go around and try and make the plans work.

From the business case and the charters for residents, all the way down to planning the houses and the schools, and the four new hospitals, talking to the land owners, talking to the politicians and community leaders and trying to understand from you, what you think would work.

And yes, we do need to raise money in order to do all that work. I wish it could all be free. But it can’t. That will cost £280m including optioning land.

What we will ask in return, as a company is not cash, but 80 out of 45,000 acres in the city. If it works, and the plans come good, because we did our job, then that will be worth a lot. If we fail, investors, us, in fact everyone involved with the project, loses everything.

Secondly, private development for at least the last twenty years has been awful. It’s just so hard to believe anything could be done well when it comes to new homes.

So it’s a huge leap of faith for you guys to believe that we can do better than what’s come before. I get that. But I’ll say two things on this. Firstly the scale is what makes it easier to build in a completely different way. We’re not trying to squeeze every last bit of value from a small plot of land on the edge of town. And you have to do the infrastructure first to make any of it make sense. There’s no escaping that.

And it will be a non-profit making organisation, who does the development, not private developers. So any money made on building goes back to infrastructure and community assets. No one else.

Also this will be my home and Joe’s home. So whatever we end up planning, and building, we’ll be living here too.

Thirdly, I know this is causing anxiety. For those in the villages of Kirtling, Great Bradley, West Wratting, Coolinge, Dullingham, Thurlow, even just the idea has caused stress and worry.

I’ve had both barrels on many occasions. Some people simply don’t want a thing to change. Some know exactly how beneficial the change could be for others, and they get our social purpose, but they don’t want the change happening to them because they’re right in thinking it will be disruptive. And there’s no getting around that. It will be disruptive. You didn’t ask for this.

For all that anxiety we’ve already caused, I am truly sorry.

Fourthly and finally, why are we here? Tonight. Standing on this stage? We’re here to answer as many of your questions as possible. To be as accountable as we can. We don’t have all the answers yet. It’s impossible for anyone to have all the answers so soon. We’ve been at this for only four months. But we’re trying. And where we’ve failed, that’s mine and Joe’s fault and our fault only.

What we eventually want from the people of Haverhill is the permission, the consent to try. To try and get a full plan together. To see how this really would work. It’s not yes to a city, it’s just yes to the idea of trying.

Thank you.