Eco-towns 'will weaken social fabric of communities'

Published by Jon Land for 24dash.com in Housing and also in Communities, Environment, Local Government

The Government's plans for a series of eco-towns is helping to disperse communities and weakening their social fabric, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) claimed today.

A report from the CPRE called for a housing policy which supports "high density living" in which people live closer together and near to amenities such as schools, shops and healthcare.

The conservation charity said settlements in which people lived in closer proximity to one another would boost community interaction and make public transport, local services and environmental initiatives more viable.

The Proximity Principle study said the 20th century had seen people dispersed widely into suburbs and new towns, causing loss of countryside, pressure on water resources and a growing carbon footprint.

But while recent policies do support higher density living, brownfield development and better public transport, the Government is still encouraging large new settlements and a focus on road transport, the report said.

The plans for eco-towns, which would be separate new settlements of 5,000 to 20,000 homes built to high environmental standards, was worsening the dispersal, the CPRE said.

The conservation group has previously welcomed the eco-towns initiative in principle but remains concerned about the siting of whole new settlements.

Instead, it believes priority should be given to "eco-quarters" or "eco-extensions" around existing urban areas and on brownfield sites and that the new developments should only go ahead in consultation with existing communities.

The report, which said high-density living could be the answer in rural as well as urban areas, criticised the restrictions on development within existing villages while eco-towns were encouraged.

According to the research, which focused on four towns and villages in Cambridgeshire, South Shields and Newcastle, well-designed high density living could improve social cohesion and activities such as community recycling schemes which generated funds for the residents.

It could also cut the carbon footprint through reducing car use, while building terraced houses or flats could reduce heating bills and high-density homes were more suited to district-wide heating schemes and local power generation.

Marina Pacheco, head of planning at CPRE, said: "Current housing policy is causing settlements to spread out wider, and people are now living further away from each other than at any point since the birth of modern cities.

"The creation of 10 new eco-towns, the centrepiece of Gordon Brown's housing plans, will only worsen this drift and will weaken the social fabric of existing towns."

And Becky Willis, the report's author, said: "Despite the advantages of proximity, Gordon Brown's housing policy is causing greater dispersal, by promoting new eco-towns outside existing settlements and refusing to provide incentives for development within existing towns and villages.

"This report suggests that housing policy should focus on supporting existing communities."

Professor Anne Power, of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, said the report "reinforces the urgency of compact development where people, services and amenities are all located close together so that people can live more sustainably in a more socially integrated way".

The CPRE has also warned that the 10 potential new eco-towns will account for just 3% of the promised three million new homes, and those in turn were a fraction of the existing housing stock.

The report suggested "refocusing on what we have already" would be a more effective way of improving housing in the UK.

A spokesman for Communities and Local Government said the analysis in the CPRE report was "fundamentally flawed".

"We believe we can build the homes our first time buyers and young families desperately need in all parts of the country whilst protecting our green spaces and preventing urban sprawl - which is why we are already building at a higher density with the amount of the new housing on brownfield land having increased from 57% to 75% since 1997.

"At the same time, the overall amount of green belt has also increased by 33,000 hectares.

"But we simply cannot ignore areas where there are acute housing shortages, and our plans for eco-towns will bring forward thousands more affordable homes that will meet the highest environmental standards, and have the infrastructure in place needed to ensure that they are well linked and bring benefits to surrounding communities."

But Liberal Democrat communities spokeswoman Julia Goldsworthy said the Government needed to rethink its eco-town policy.

"New homes are not enough - we need to build sustainable communities as well. This report raises real concerns about the environmental viability of eco-towns.

"What will the Government do to prevent these new developments simply becoming dormitory villages to Leicester, Cambridge or Stratford, with residents commuting to work by car every day," she said.

And she branded the eco-towns initiative a smokescreen for the Government's "poverty of ambition", making just a small percentage of new homes reach high levels of sustainability.