New challenges for eco-towns

So the funding for eco-towns has been cut in half. It wasn’t announced – in fact, officials at the Communities and Local Government department only confirmed that the money - £60 million for the four projects in the first wave, and £10 million for projects in the second wave – was going to be cut when Inside Housing managed to get a copy of the letter which announced it. That letter was written by Grant Shapps to council leaders on 2 July, and CLG had initially refused to share it with us.

A spokesman told me: ‘Grant Shapps wrote to local authority leaders engaged in the eco-towns programme to set out thinking on eco-towns. He has made clear that plans are well-supported locally and will achieve genuine improvements in sustainability.’

But what the spokesman failed to mention was that Mr Shapps' letter also said: ‘The need to act quickly and the wider pressures on the housing budget means that difficult decisions have had to be made about reducing grants due to be paid to local government.

‘Taking these factors into account, I am reducing the awards payable in 10/11 to authorities by 50 per cent.’

Even though the government sneaked out this cut, few in the planning and sustainability sector seem surprised about the decision to cut the funding, especially when other large-scale projects such as Building Schools for the Future have been axed. But what is interesting about Mr Shapps’ letter is that he says he will only release funding once he has received details of how each eco-town is ‘engaging the community on the development and enabling it to help shape its character.’

There’s always the possibility that some eco-towns may find themselves without any funding at all if CLG find sufficiently fierce local opposition to the developments: after all, the department pulled the plug on one unpopular development in Middle Quinton only the other week.

So local authorities and their development partners may need to pull their socks up over how well they inform and involve the local community about their plans. It will be interesting to see whether Mr Shapps feels their efforts are impressive enough to release the rest of that depleted funding.