Eco-towns may be wide of the mark

Government proposals for eco towns, which will comprise between 5,000 and 10,000 sustainable homes in 15 shortlisted areas, represent an all-too-common smoke and mirrors exercise.

For a start, the sites chosen are all classed as brownfield. But they look more greenfield than a lot of greenbelt to me and have flourishing wildlife.

I can’t see any environmental benefit in building 5,000 new homes in open countryside, miles away from any places of work and recreation that will require a car to do anything useful.

All the savings made by producing homes to the highest eco standards will be dissipated through digging up green fields and increased transportation.

The proposals don’t seem very popular either. Moving to a big housing development in the country and having the daily grind of travelling back to the city is not going to lead to an enhanced lifestyle. Besides which, by the time you have paid the special rush hour charges to get in and out of the eco-town, £20 a gallon on petrol to get to the nearest rail station running the same number of trains as before the town was built, the gloss is taken off the eco dream.

Much better to build eco-communities in our existing towns and cities and turn them into a better environment in the first place. Admittedly this is a tougher proposition. But the way to reduce our carbon footprint is not to build more zero-carbon homes, but to replace and improve the existing housing stock and remove carbon from our use of energy. It’s a political and financial minefield which the politicians probably don’t have the guts to address.

Sites in relatively low population areas seem attractive, but they are low population areas for a reason: there is little or no work to hand. Unless there are plans to build eco-industrial estates and eco-office blocks into the eco-towns the whole exercise looks more like one of gesture politics. Except for one factor: the proposed changes to the planning legislation will enable the promoters and sponsors of these eco-towns to ride roughshod over local opinion in the so-called national interest.

Of course, with my industry hat on I should welcome any changes to the planning regime that prevent unrepresentative minorities from holding the national interest to ransom by delaying the development. But it’s interesting how often the ‘national interest’ has been used recently to undermine liberty and freedom and what an easy and profitable bandwagon it is to join when long-established principles are discarded.