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Tesco Village

Ross Clark

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Ross Clark looks into eco-towns

Developers were invited to submit bids — which in the event 57 did, a large number of them dusted-down proposals which had previously been rejected by planners. From these, housing minister Caroline Flint picked a shortlist of 15. Among them was Hinxton Grange, now rebranded Hanley Grange but otherwise remarkably similar to the scheme which had already been rejected.

Planners, unsurprisingly, were furious. Sir David Trippier is chairman of Cambridgeshire Horizons, a not-for-profit company set up by local authorities in Cambridgeshire to oversee the Northstowe development and other large housing projects in the county. ‘This appears to bypass the local and regional planning process and we will oppose it vigorously,’ he says. ‘There is an absence of high quality public transport at Hanley Grange. The Cambridge to London railway line would have to be accessed by road, and the proximity of the A11 and M11 would make the development highly susceptible to car-based commuting.’

So how do the revised plans for Hanley Grange suddenly make it an eco-town, when it had already been rejected for housing development on environmental grounds? ‘There is going to be a sophisticated bus network with hopper buses and longer-distance buses,’ says Bob Selwood, the planning consultant employed by Jarrow Investments. ‘No one will be more than 400 metres from a bus stop.’ But how is he going to persuade residents of this town to jump on the buses when there are already so many buses running empty around the district? ‘You can’t make people. We’re not a Stalinist society,’ he says. Indeed not, which is why you can be sure that if Hanley Grange ever gets built there will be a long queue of cars every morning getting on to the M11 to commute to London or Cambridge.

An eco-town, according to the government, must be ‘carbon-neutral’, which it says means that over the course of a year the buildings between them must generate as much renewable energy as they consume carbon energy. There is no requirement, on the other hand, for transport to be carbon-neutral, so there is no need to fuel your 4x4 on carrot-peelings. Nor does all the renewable energy have to be generated on-site, so long as all sources are connected to the development ‘via a private wire’.