So, just how green will the eco-towns be?

The plan to build 10 new eco-towns across the UK has been beset by fierce local opposition and concerns over the state of the housing market. But there has been little examination of the towns' green credentials. Robert Booth went to two of the proposed sites to discover how 'eco' they will be
Robert Booth
The Observer,
Sunday July 13, 2008

By the banks of the fast-flowing Arun, fields of corn ripen in the summer showers and peas soak up the late evening sun. It is a picture of productive plenty on the fertile farmlands of southern England.
But in less than two years all this could be torn up by fleets of diggers to create an eco-town - Gordon Brown's utopian, but increasingly fragile, vision for housing in the 21st century.
On 350 hectares spread between the pretty villages of Yapton, Climping and Ford, a consortium of local landowners and housebuilders Redrow Homes and Wates Developments want to build 5,000 homes in a supposedly carbon-neutral town. Cycle lanes and footpaths will wind between allotments and 'eco-gardens' to zero-carbon homes fitted with solar panels and wind turbines. A vast biomass boiler will produce communal electricity, topped up by hydro-electric power from the ebb and flow of the river. It will be a 'healthy, vibrant and engaged community', the consortium promises.
Rubbish, say many local residents, who have formed a highly organised campaign group to block the plan. They say the eco-town will damage local countryside and wildlife and only create, rather than solve, environmental problems; they claim it will become just another enclave of car dependence.
Ford is bidding to become one of up to 10 eco-towns - chosen from a list of 13 contenders - providing 100,000 new homes by 2020, but problems for the programme, which stretches from Yorkshire to Cornwall, are mounting.
The Observer has learnt that the government's decision on which sites will go ahead has been postponed until the end of the year at the earliest - partly because of problems identified by a panel of experts appointed to scrutinise the bids. 'Some of the sites have changed; they have reduced in size or numbers of houses,' said Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister. 'We are going to have to think about making sure we have a timetable that allows us to do the best appraisal we can, but might have to allow a little more time.' Furthermore, thousands of redundancies were announced this week at housebuilders Persimmon, Bovis Homes, Redrow and Barratt.
Lord Rogers, the Labour peer and award-winning architect who was also a former government adviser on towns and cities, has branded eco-towns as 'one of the biggest mistakes the government can make'. The Local Government Association has said they will be 'eco-slums of the future' if they are built without regard to where residents can get jobs or training. Even the Conservatives, who recently experimented with a rebranding in green, believe that the claim that eco-towns will be environmentally sustainable is 'a sham'. There is a gathering sense that the eco-towns initiative hangs in the balance.
But is the idea, announced by Brown in the buoyant days before he assumed his premiership last summer, really as bad as all that opposition suggests? After all, a YouGov poll at the end of last month showed 46 per cent of adults supported eco-towns and that only 9 per cent were opposed (although, perhaps tellingly, far fewer said they would support a development within five miles of their home).
The good and bad sides of the eco-town initiative are embodied in two proposed sites straddling the picturesque border between Hampshire and West Sussex. Bordon Whitehill, a scruffy garrison town on the edge of the South Downs in east Hampshire, is a leading contender to secure eco-town status. Even the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which has called on the government to go 'back to the drawing board' on the whole project, has given it conditional backing.
That is because Bordon Whitehill is one of the few proposals planned almost solely on brownfield land. Its 5,500 homes - just over the minimum 5,000 needed to qualify for eco-town status - will be built in place of tarmac parade grounds, tank garages and barracks that will be left behind when the army training camp moves to South Wales. Fifteen thousand people already live in the town, which means that the eco-town's infrastructure has a head start. The numerous tattoo parlours and betting shops that serve the soldiers might not be much use for the eco-townies, but the cottage hospital, three churches, schools and pubs will certainly stay. There's even super-high-speed, military-standard broadband already installed.
The emerging vision is for car-free residential streets lined with allotments and gardens, with the area's managed forests used to build prefabricated wooden housing. Existing homes will be retro-fitted with solar panels and wind power.However, if you travel 40 miles east, the canvas is rather blanker and, for opponents of eco-towns, bleaker. The Ford eco-town is proposed for swaths of low-lying arable land and an airstrip between three villages in the Arun district of West Sussex. The plan features 5,000 homes, with at least a third targeted at the area's large ageing population.
Opposition to the proposal is palpable. Hundreds of 'No Ford Eco-town' placards are fixed to gateposts, fences and hedges of the attractive country houses and cottages in local villages. Last month 2,000 people marched in protest at the plan; 10,000 have signed petitions against it; and nine parish and town councils in the area have signed letters of opposition. With an eye to lending their campaign a topical edge, they point out the twisted logic of ripping up fertile cornfields in the name of the environment when there are global food shortages.
'There's a housing shortage, a food shortage and oil prices are soaring - and it all comes together here,' says Terry Knott, co-chairman of the Communities Against Ford Eco-town campaign. A former Royal Marines officer living in Yapton, Knott, adds: 'Gordon Brown has been on the radio urging us not to waste food, so it would be a strange move to rip up these fields. There is enough agricultural land on the site to keep the 26,000 residents of the nearby town of Littlehampton in bread.'
The government is understood to have placed Ford among the least likely proposals to be granted eco-town status. Puzzlingly for a policy that Caroline Flint has said was about alleviating 'extreme pressure both in terms of supply and affordability' of housing, the need for new homes in both areas is far from clear-cut.
'We haven't got a classic housing shortage,' admits David Parkinson, deputy leader of East Hampshire District Council, which is leading the Bordon Whitehill bid. 'A lot of people in Bordon Whitehill have said this will be over-development, but the government has made it so our minimum requirement for eco-town status is 5,000 homes. We want to grow our economy and we want those people who go to Guildford, Farnham and London in the 25-40 age group to come back to East Hampshire. We have an ageing population and it doesn't give us a vibrant economic base from which to build a community long term.'
Over in Ford, the village of 1,400 which gives its name to the eco-town, there is only one houshold on Arun District Council's waiting list, while there are 1,605 seven miles away in Bognor Regis and 861 in Littlehampton, three miles away.
'It makes the 5,000 homes proposed here look like overkill and people are very angry,' said Knott. 'The people on these waiting lists are on relatively low incomes and probably don't have a car. They want to live near their mates and near their jobs, not out in the country.'
Keith Annis, Redrow's regional planning director, who is leading the bid, said rapid public transport connections from the eco-town to Bognor and Littlehampton will solve that problem, making the field and airstrips of the Ford site the best available site in the locality. 'In terms of environmental impact, this is benign compared to a normal housing development,' he said.
Among eco-town supporters, there is a feeling that this should be a time for dreaming of a utopia as much as worrying about housing targets. So that is exactly what Wendy Shillam, the planner in charge of design for the Bordon Whitehill bid (her first job was helping to design Milton Keynes), is doing. On Wednesday she took a hat stand to the town's Phoenix Theatre and asked children to imagine it as a tree under which they had fallen asleep and woken up 20 years later. What would the eco-town around them look like?
The council is keen on such brainstorming. Shillam's boss, East Hampshire District Council chief executive Will Godfrey, pulls out a sheaf of felt-tip scrawlings by a class at Mill Chase secondary school. They want safer walking areas, better youth clubs, a branch of Primark for the girls and Madhouse for the boys, and even skiing and rock climbing.
'We are not trying to create a 1960s new town,' Godfrey insists. 'Over the last 50 years, people have grown up believing it is normal to commute 50 miles, but that is not sustainable for the 21st century.'
The dream is that, by winning eco-town status, Bordon Whitehill will attract a new kind of employer keen to polish the green sheen of its image. Three-quarters of the dwellings will be houses rather than flats to attract economically active young families. Cars will have to be left at the edges of new areas of housing and residents will walk or cycle on 'eco-streets' lined with allotments. A bus service will ply a figure-of-eight through the town. Homes could be built from prefabricated wooden panels sourced from local managed woodlands. Sewage is being investigated as a possible fuel for the biomass power station.
Godfrey said he was determined to involve the local community in drawing up the plan and had avoided publishing any architects' images of what the town might look like. Continuing to consult the community 'is much more important to me than a consultant's report, because this is created by real people who are going to live here in 20 years' time'.
There is strong local support. A poll of 1,161 residents in East Hampshire last October found that 77 per cent believe the Bordon Whitehill eco-town bid is 'a real opportunity to develop a new kind of town'.
'The circumstances of this bid are completely different to a greenfield development,' said Ian Dowdle, 53, the owner of a bike shop on the tatty parade of shops that serves Bordon Whitehill. 'This is about safeguarding our environment. When you think about the price of fuel, eco-towns look the best way there is to live in the future in this country.'
Dan Powell, a 17-year-old carpenter, said the plans offer him hope of affording a home in an area where the average house price is £250,000: 'It would be good to make this town bigger because there's really not much going on. It's really hard to get an affordable house round here.' Jane Wilson, a 54-year-old housewife, agreed: 'The town needs much more development, but there is a feeling that this could amount to empty promises and I don't think the eco-town tag is convincing. The thought of it becoming another Basingstoke with one roundabout after another isn't a good thing.'
Despite the lack of detail, Wayne Hemingway, the fashion designer turned housing designer who is helping to vet the proposals for the government, said Bordon Whitehill has 'strong potential'.
'It is wanted by the locals and the council,' he said. 'It also seems sensible to build on brownfield land and this is in a nice part of the world in easy reach of London.' The Ford eco-town seems less popular. TV presenter and local resident Ben Fogle has become the poster boy of the 'no' campaign. He stood up at last month's march and said: 'For heaven's sake don't get rid of some of the most productive arable land in one of the most built-up counties in England ... At a time when food prices are at an all-time high and we're trying to eat local produce and reduce food's air miles, this government thinks it prudent to build over these bountiful fields ... New Labour may want to turn the countryside concrete-grey, but we will fight for our green, productive lands.'
Gazing over those fields on a sunny evening, Knott said the bid was 'like shoe-horning a size-10 foot into a size-four shoe'. He said: 'They will have to pack so many houses into it to make a profit and in today's housing market nobody is sure a profit will be possible.'
Developers appear to be deciding just that, adding to the sense of an initiative in doubt. Gallagher Estates has withdrawn from proposals south of Bedford and the consortium behind plans for a 5,000-home eco-town called Curborough, near Lichfield in Staffordshire, has pulled out. Flint has also told opponents of the scheme that a decision may not be made on the selected sites until next year and that the government's own advisers were trimming their expectations.
'If they are not good enough, the government should say no,' said Hemingway. 'The idea was to get 10 eco-towns away, but I think that if we could get one brilliant one away that would be fine.'
With Gordon Brown having invested such personal political capital in the scheme, it will take a brave Housing Minister to do that.
The contenders
Pennbury, Leicestershire
Middle Quinton, Warwickshire
Bordon and Whitehill, Hampshire
Weston Otmoor, Oxfordshire
Ford, West Sussex
St Austell, Cornwall
Rossington, South Yorkshire
Coltishall, Norfolk
Hanley Grange, Cambridgeshire
Marston Vale, Bedfordshire
North East Elsenham, Essex
Rushcliffe, Nottinghamshire
Leeds City Region, Yorkshire