A re-brand for eco-towns

The government is dropping rather big hints at the moment that it may re-brand the eco-towns programme.

Funding for the projects is, like everything else, frozen at the moment while ministers decide where the axe is going to fall, but it seems unlikely that the Tories will want to scrap the scheme entirely when so many of the towns are being led by Conservative councils.

Instead, a source close to the eco-town movement tells me that instead the projects will be re-branded.

And housing minister Grant Shapps recently indicated a possible re-brand would include demands for higher standards from developments. In an interview with the Western Morning News, he criticised the previous government for requiring developments to reach only level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes.

Mr Shapps said: ‘It is ridiculous to have towns that have eco as a tagline falling behind eco standards.’

This would make complete sense as the previous ‘challenging standards’ for housing in eco-towns actually matched the standards new homes will have to conform to across the board. When he launched the second wave of eco towns in December, the then housing minister John Healey argued that the houses would ‘actually reach code level four and a half’, which isn’t really a standard at all.

But with the first large-scale level six developments well underway, eco-towns are already lagging behind the rest of the industry. Let’s hope that the new government takes a harder line on the ‘tough new standards’ it wants the re-branded developments to follow.

The Communities and Local Government department insists that ‘no decisions’ have been made on whether the developments approved by the Labour government will receive the same level of funding as promised, or whether the scheme will change.

A spokesman says: ‘We will back genuine new eco-town or eco-village developments, which have broad-based local support and are genuinely environmentally sustainable.’