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Greenflint
Local Government
Chronicle - 7 April 2008
I have a soft spot for Caroline Flint. For one thing she is quite a handsome figure with her jet-black hair. For another she is a Yorkshire MP- one of what is quite a Yorkshire Mafia in the ministerial ranks of the limping Brown government. But most important of all she invented the “duvet day” –days when, she says, she retires to bed and, like a grand royal mistress holds court in her bedroom.
I do not know whether the day the 15 candidate sites to become eco-towns were named was a duvet day. I can’t blame her if she opted to retreat under the blankets. Certainly the Government hardly gave the impression this was one of its flagship green ideas –the announcement came on the last day of the parliamentary term by written statement.
Perhaps this was to do with the background mood-music. Between conception and what I suppose we can call the first scan of these projects we have had the collapse of Northern Rock, the credit crunch, and a third of all housing deals falling through because purchasers cannot obtain the mortgages they need as lenders retreat from the market. A far cry, indeed, from the heady days of announcing 3m new homes to be built by 2020 when it looked as if no corner of the country had escaped from the creeping stain of house price unaffordability.
Eco-towns come in the category of ideas that receive wild plaudits in theory but sharp hostility in practice. I bet my bottom dollar (admittedly not an extravagant wager at current exchange rates) that the first thing MPs did was to check that they did not have one in their constituency. I can think of few things more likely to send the fiery cross of protest through the ranks of outraged middle England than the prospect of having a new town of 20,000 or so inhabitants dropped into their countryside.
The Government has hastened to say that these are still early days: there will be intense work on these projects to make sure they are absolutely state-of-the-art sustainable; stacks of consultation; a national planning framework under the new planning regime; and, finally planning applications. Don’t expect the first bulldozer on site within two years.
I do not think we should be too dazzled by the label “eco-town.” After all, in a political culture where climate change sprawls across virtually every agenda could anyone imagine the government promoting non-eco-towns? If the Government believes that its home-building targets can only be delivered by creating new towns it would be absurd if they did not seek to incorporate technology and promote styles of living which were as sustainable as possible. By emphasising the green credentials of the new settlements the Government has, perhaps, diluted the simple powerful message – accepted by the Conservatives – that we need more homes.
They protest that the 15 short-listed settlements are, for the most part, squarely in Tory territory. Whatever the national line might be the Tory MPs representing those areas will have no choice but to fight tooth and nail against the projects as middle class ire focuses into a campaign. With the party having come out against a third runway at Heathrow don’t expect heroics over eco-towns.
Eco-towns have their gushing enthusiasts, led by the Town and Country Planning Association, a veteran believer in the power of state direction. But the TCPA is right to point out that virtually every technical aspect of living can be engineered from scratch in a new settlement – transport, water-cycle management, waste and recycling, energy and even, the TCPA includes in its “worksheets” green collar jobs. The most challenging will be the one aspect which is not technical- building communities out of the eco-pioneers who will inhabit the new machines for living.
Somewhat overshadowed by the eco-town shortlist was a modest document from the Communities and Local Government Select Committee with the workman-like title “Existing Housing and Climate Change.” It is visionary in the sense that it reminds us how dramatically a culture can change within half a generation, but severely practical in its analysis of what needs to be done for the ordinary housing stock if we really are to save the planet.
Now that is something Carole Flint could profitably read under the duvet!
© Local Government Chronicle
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