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Eco-towns
Shelter - 4
April 2008
Timing, they say, is everything. This is particularly true of politics. Timing dictates to people and it dictates to policy. Get into Parliament towards the end of a tired administration as an Opposition MP and you can begin to visualise the ministerial Ford Mondeo (whoops, Toyota Prius) and the bright red box one election away. Get into the same Parliament as a Government MP and your fate may be to sit through a long period of opposition hoping that there will still be enough sap in the veins to have a valedictory stab at office before the younger generation overtakes you as the political pendulum swings again.
On the policy front it is difficult to imagine a less helpful moment to announce the 15-strong short-list for eco-town new settlements. The economic mood-music is simply awful. Mortgage lenders are queuing up to announce tougher terms, interest rates in the real world are proving resilient to central bank rate-cutting, and house prices are perhaps at last on the brink of the much forecast “correction.” The talk is all about repossessions as people fail to meet their mortgage payments. Add to that the certainty that if private house-building takes a dive affordable housing will take a heavy tumble with it - after all, around 48 per cent of social housing is built in association with market housing. And just to complete the gloomy scenario note that the cost of living is sharply on the rise as basic agricultural commodity prices soar – a particularly helpful moment for the government to make the lowest-paid workers worse-off because of the abolition in Gordon Brown’s last budget as chancellor of the 10 per cent income tax band.
The contrast with the mood at the genesis of the eco-town project is acute. Then house prices were continuing to soar, (along with City bonuses!); Northern Rock was aggressively selling one in five mortgages in the UK; the stain of unaffordability was still spreading across the country and no-one had ever heard of the expression “sub-prime.”
I could, of course, simply be cynical. The Government has used the rhetoric of sustainability in so many contexts that eventually you tend to get a green haze before the eyes. And, I say to myself, the remarkable thing is not that Government wants to build eco-towns: the truly remarkable thing would be if it were proposing to build…well….non-eco-towns. After all, we either have to re-engineer our culture to make our very genes green or wait for the melting ice-sheet to drown us.
At least the Government seems to have seen off some proposals which have been around for decades. The fear was that developers would think that if they blew a little green dust over their long-cherished schemes they would seduce the government. Not that the publication of the short-list will produce joyful processions of grateful residents waving trowels and ready to lay votive offerings before the new wind turbine gods which will soon be installed in their neighbourhood. Put another way there will be pitched battles with local residents over most of these proposals.
About a third of these schemes will fall by the wayside: the remainder will have to submit planning applications (to the Government’s new fast-track infrastructure planning authority?) with the first construction getting under way around 2010. The Government’s am is to address two major issues: shortage of affordable housing (the 3m new homes by 2020 looks increasingly aspirational) and climate change. It promises a “new way of living” – something I am instinctively wary of- for the 200,000 or so eco-pioneers who will inhabit the 10 new towns.
I cannot summon the gushing enthusiasm of the Town and Country Planning Association- a veteran believer in the lever-pulling power of Whitehall. The eco-town project is bold because of the re-espousal of the new town concept. But eco-towns will not save the planet: to do that we have to address the existing stock of houses- something the Commons Select Committee has reminded us of. Its key point is that relatively small incremental change can amount, over a generation, to a revolution. Efficient boilers, loft insulation, double glazing – the hum-drum mechanics of normal living- these are the real life-belts of the next generation.
© Shelter
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