IF any of the developers behind the shortlisted eco-towns thought that they could simply greenwash some standard designs and add the odd windmill a report today from a government advisory panel wil give them a rude awakening.

Experts on the eco-towns challenge panel set them a whole series of challenges from examining the impact of oil at $300 a barrel to quantifying how the transport strategy wull contribute to a 80-90% reduction in CO₂ emissions. 

The experts include architects and transport planners as well as environmentalists. And while they found some proposals to be 'encouraging', 'impressive' and displaying a 'strong vision', others left them distinctly underwhelmed. Transport and employment emerge as key concerns.

At Curborough in Staffordshire, 'at the moment the ‘eco’ element feels like an "add-on" to an existing application rather than embedded in the concept' and widening a nearby road risks residents continuing to rely on cars. 

Promoters of the Rossington scheme in South Yorkshire are told they have 'an excellent ambition to be a UK exemplar, but can the development work in this location?'. And the experts tell the prospective developers of New Martson in Bedfordshire that 'an eco-town should be a trailblazing development, although at present the New Marston bid looks like a typical commercial scheme' and lacks a sense of identity.

The Ford scheme in West Sussex is praised for strength of vision but told to abandon plans for a new bypass as 'not consistent with sustainable principles'. Promoters of Weston Otmoor in Oxfordshire are asked to explain what will stop it becoming 'commuterville'.

The criticisms are certainly rigorous enough to give confidence that the schemes that are eventually successful really will be eco-towns. But even that won't be enough to stop local objections. The real challenge could be to show whether they still stack up economically once they have raised their game on sustainability. 

Posted by Jules Birch, June 23  

Posted in Environment, Housebuilding

ANY idea opposed by Jeremy Clarkson, Janet Street-Porter and Tim Henman's parents can't be all bad but a succession of backbench MPs left the government in no doubt yesterday about the extent of opposition to eco-towns.

MPs with constituencies affected by the 15 shortlisted schemes - and all but three of them are Conservative - queued up to have a go at the plan at a Westminster Hall debate yesterday. Like the local objectors competing to make the most noise with marches and pantos and demonstrations, all had arguments at their fingertops about why their particular local scheme was completely inappropriate. More worryingly for the government, they also teamed up to criticise the entire process.

Leading the way was Vale of York MP Anne McIntosh, who at one stage had to apologise for hitting her microphone because she was so angry. She was one of the MPs consulted by housing minister Caroline Flint in a conference call at 9am on the morning of the shortlisting. 'I found it a little offensive and insulting that the constituents that I have the honour to represent were excluded from the process of open parliamentary scrutiny,' she said. 'I was kept on the phone for a full three or four minutes before deciding that this was not the best way forward.'

What made things even worse for McIntosh was that the shortlisted site for her local eco-town has not yet been identified but will just be somewhere in the Leeds City Region (the former pit at Gascoigne Wood now looks to be favourite). She was backed up by a succession of mostly Conservative MPs queuing to denounce the proposal affecting their constituency.

However, it was the more general criticism of the programme that will worry ministers more. McIntosh argued that eco-towns will flout normal planning rules and that there was no clarity about where people living in them will work, what standards they will be built to or even whether they will sell. Another Conservative, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, claimed the Treasury would make a £1 billion profit from selling public sector land.

And Tory backbencher Tony Baldry - a former planning minister - complained that the idea of issuing a planning policy statement listing the approved eco-towns. 'For the first time since 1945, the government will effectively direct local authorities that they have little alternative but to approve planning applications for those eco-towns identified by the government under the planning policy statement.

However, the programme was supported by York Labour MP Hugh Bayley because it would provide desperately needed new homes and because new sustainable technologies need to be tested on a community scale.

But will eco-towns ever get built - especially if the Conservatives win the next election? Tory housing spokesman Stewart Jackson said the party was not against eco-towns 'per se' and would support plans for 'genuine brownfield sites'. That would appear to rule out most, if not all, of the proposals since the rules dictate that they should be new communties rather than existing ones.

Housing minister Iain Wright rejected criticism of the consultation - Flint's conference call had been in addition to normal parliamentary convention, he said - and argued that scrutiny of the 15 proposals would cover all of the sustainability points raised by MPs.  And he pledged: 'Decisions will not be made in some darkened room, but as part of the full planning application process.'

Posted by Jules Birch, June 4

Posted in Environment, Housebuilding

A NEW campaign was launched today calling for concerted action on carbon emissions from existing homes, which are 'not fit for the 21st century'.

But an immediate indication of the size of the task facing the Existing Homes Alliance came with new figures from the RICS showing that the cost of home improvement work has soared by 20% over the last two years thanks to rising costs of transport and raw materials and a shortage of skilled workers.

The alliance boasts an impressive list of supporters including WWF, Friends of the Earth, the Energy Saving Trust, the UK Green Building Council and the Empty Homes Agency as well as the Chartered Institute of Housing and Places for People. Housing minister Caroline Flint was due to speak at the launch event today.

It argues that carbon emissions from UK households are rising rather than falling and that action on new homes alone will not be enough to meet reduction targets - 85% of the housing stock in 2050 has already been built.

It wants action including tighter building regulations, more financial incentives, new advice services and more reliable energy performance data and a major programme of exemplar low energy developments to show homeowners what can be done.

However, convincing homeowners to act could be a problem if the soaring cost figures revealed by the RICS are anything to go by. Rising oil prices and skilled Polish building workers returning home are two of the main reasons. Roofing costs are up 26%, plumbing and electrical work 22% and painting 17%.

If existing homes are not fit for the 21st century, neither is the building industry. You can almost hear the builders whistling through their teeth: 'New windows, wall insulation, solar panels? It'll cost you.'

Posted by Jules Birch, June 3

Posted in Environment

IT'S always seemed churlish to criticise anything as ambitious as the government's target that all new homes should be zero carbon by 2016. Yet it's been almost as hard not to snipe from the sidelines about the way that the Treasury's definition of 'zero carbon' for tax purposes was all but impossible for developers to achieve for practical ones - just ten homes approved for exemption from stamp duty in the first eight months tells its own story.

So yesterday's sensible report from the zero carbon task group of the UK Green Building Council is definitely to be welcomed. It argues that the Treasury definition, which excludes off-site renewables, is not achievable by 80% of new homes and proposes instead: strict minimum energy efficiency standards on building design and appliances supplied by the developer; all new buildings would be required to  mitigate carbon emissions on or near the development - where this is not possible, a minimum level of carbon mitigation must be met.

Above that, off-site renewables would be allowed, without requiring private wire networks, provided they can be shown to be additional and have been built specifically to meet the needs of the development. Or the developer would be able to pay into a community energy fund that would ensure equal or greater net carbon savings but with a price set higher than that of community-based solutions.

Coming from the UK Green Building Council, the defintion has the support of both developers and environmentalists. Some work may still be required to allay Treasury concerns about tax evasion and about whether renewables really are additional, but it seems like a good start.

However, it is still just a start in terms of the broader issue of reducing carbon emissions from housing. It still takes no account of embodied energy - emissions from making the materials used to build the homes - or our tendency to fill our new homes with energy hogs like plasma TVs - or the fact that Britain's privatised electricity supply industry seems to have little interest in real community-based solutions like district heating. And that's before you even begin to consider the thorny issue of what to do about existing homes.

Posted by Jules Birch, May 13 

Posted in Environment, Housebuilding

CAMPAIGNERS for better housing often find themselves at loggerheads with environmentalists in a debate that quickly degenerates into one side shouting 'nimby' while the other mutters darkly about 'concreting over the countryside'.

So it's good to see a report today from the CPRE today that shows it is possible to campaign for both at the same time. The Campaign to Protect Rural England has long recognised that sniping from the sidelines is not enough - although it is quite prepared to stick the boot in as it did yesterday over the loss of green belt land -  and that it needs to do something about urban England too.

The report argues that one of the key pressures on the countryside comes from an exodus of young families from cities in search of housing they can afford. Not providing enough family-sized accommodation causes social division within cities split into neighbourhoods very rich people and very poor,  as well as growing strain on the transport infrastructure and greater strain on the supply and price of accommodation in the countryside.

The key, says the CPRE, is to increase the density of new development in cities - and the political will to overcome public resistance to higher density caused by the mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s. It settles on a density of 50 dwellings per hectare - enough to support transport links within 10 minutes' walk - as opposed to the 30 typical in suburbs but points out that popular Georgian squares in London have a density of more like 80.

That sort of message chimes clearly with that of housing campaigners warning that the existing push for higher density has merely resulted in more one- and two-bed flats for buy-to-let investors and a dire shortage of family accommodation. New London mayor Boris Johnson also made that one of his housing priorities.

It's much less clear where the political muscle - let alone the will from developers or the money to fund the increased bill for affordable homes - will come from. But it's definitely a start.

Posted by Jules Birch, May 8

Posted in Environment, Planning