Ecotowns plan may be illegal, say local government lawyers

Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
The Guardian,
Thursday July 24, 2008

The government's housing strategy came under renewed pressure yesterday when it was warned separately that rising rural property prices were destroying village life, its ecotowns building programme may be illegal, and that there was a nationwide shortage of housing planners.
Lawyers acting for the Local Government Association said yesterday that the government's desire to deliver 10 ecotowns outside the normal planning process may be open to judicial review, and that there was no obvious reason why the government sought to do so other than "to avoid the system due to the proper need for scrutiny, which takes time."
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "We absolutely disagree with the LGA's claims and believe this legal advice can only have been obtained on the basis of a misrepresentation of our policy."
In a separate development, a report by the select committee monitoring the DCLG found a shortage of planners could delay housebuilding programmes. Government insiders pointed to 500 bursaries already allocated to students to train as planners and a further 300 to follow.
The housing minister, Caroline Flint, will publish the next stages of the controversial ecotowns programme today.
She will seek to bolster the green credentials of the towns after they were criticised in May by the Campaign to Protect Rural England for potentially increasing car dependency through increased commuting distance.
Flint will say: "We need to build more homes in this country, but given housing contributes 27% of our carbon emissions, we must also take this opportunity to trial new ways of tackling climate change."
The legal challenge to ecotowns emerged the same day as the MP appointed by Gordon Brown to investigate affordable housing in the countryside, Liberal Democrat Matthew Taylor, reported a marked lack of such properties.
Taylor found countryside communities risked being destroyed by the huge gulf between house prices and local incomes. He said villages would become "exclusive enclaves of the elderly and wealthy" unless planning restrictions were eased to allow more affordable housing.