Opening bids

Posted by: Jules Birch

16/07/2009

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The successful eco-town bidders were meant to cross the finishing line in triumph and kickstart a green revolution. Instead they have staggered over the line in front of a crowd that is either hostile or indifferent to the whole idea.

The longer the process has carried on, the clearer it has become that the concept was fundamentally flawed. Stipulating that the schemes should be additional settlements not extensions to existing towns ensured that many would be on greenfield sites and raise real questions about how residents would travel to work. Insisting that they should be additional to existing plans led to inevitable accusations about ignoring the planning process and local democracy.

The four schemes announced by housing minister John Healey are the least objectionable and all are supported by their local authority. Whitehill-Bordon is even conditionally supported by the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the organisation is also sympathetic to the St Austell China Clay Community in Cornwall. North West Bicester was put forward as an alternative to the controversial Weston Otmoor scheme. And Rackheath in Norfolk was the only one to get a top rating in an independent appraisal last year. 

Yet even these four have problems that need to be addressed. The detailed location decision statement recalls the findings of the independent appraisal that:

• At Whitehill-Bordon ‘trying to create an eco-town by grafting on development to an existing town will pose particular challenges and it may be more difficult to achieve a strong sense of living within an eco-town’. 
• North West Bicester ‘is adjacent to Bicester and, as such, it may be challenging to fully realise the eco-towns concept’.
• At St Austell, ‘development over several sites is unlikely to deliver the critical mass required to support a stand alone sustainable community’.
• At Rackheath ‘the location is split into two sites extending either side of the proposed Northern Distributor Road (NDR)’.

The truth is that any site that had been chosen would have problems that need to be addressed. Designing and building eco or sustainable or zero carbon communities, whatever you call them, was always going to be infintiely more complicated than any previous new town or new settlement proposal. 

The selection process, however flawed, has amply demonstrated that plus some other valuable lessons on issues like public transport. It’s also raised the prospect of an alternative approach - eco-quarters to existing towns and cities that provide zero carbon new homes and address the much bigger issue of emissions from existing homes.

The announcement envisages a second wave of eco-towns from 2010 onwards, which sounds optimistic given Conservative hostility. But the idea of sustainable new communities, and the need for them, are not going to go away.