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Saturday 4 July 2009

Tesco Village

Ross Clark looks into eco-towns

I have been trying all week to work out exactly what an ‘eco-town’ is, and have finally come to the conclusion that the term is derived from Umberto Eco, the Italian professor of semiotics whose novels revolve around dark conspiracies. In fact, for his next work he may well care to investigate how New Labour’s cardinals came to designate 15 sites across England for vast new housing developments.

The process certainly doesn’t owe a lot to democracy. Let’s just take one of the ‘eco-towns’ announced last week. Twenty years ago developers put forward proposals for a new town on farmland outside Hinxton, just off the A11 ten miles south of Cambridge. The proposal went through the normal planning process and was rejected by Cambridgeshire’s planners as being an unsuitable site: not being attached to any existing town, it would simply become a commuter dormitory.

Ten years ago the government decided that it no longer trusted Conservative-dominated councils to allocate sites for new housing, fearing that the Nimby tendency was thwarting the expansion of the nation’s housing stock. To that end it set up regional assemblies, made up of councillors, business leaders, quangocrats, trade union leaders and assorted worthies to influence planning decisions over a much wider area. Cambridgeshire, for example, came under the East of England Regional Assembly, an unelected body of 105 members which met in Bury St Edmunds four times a year. Part of its job was to come up with a regional plan to decide, among other things, where the 478,000 dwellings which the government wants to be built in the east of England over the next 20 years should go.

In 2005, the regional assembly carried out a Regional Spatial Strategy which analysed several dozen proposed sites for new housing developments, involving a long consultation process with businesses and residents. Among the sites considered was ‘Hinxton Grange’, which had been proposed by a developer called Jarrow Investments, later revealed to be a front for Tesco. The proposal came low down the list of preferred sites, thanks to its location on greenfield land and the lack of public transport. Instead, the Assembly recommended that new housing development be concentrated on the site of an old airfield and barracks at Longstanton, to the north-east of Cambridge, which would be connected to the city via a new guided busway.

A dispassionate observer might well conclude that this was Labour’s ‘stakeholder society’ functioning in exactly the way it was intended to. But it appears that the stakeholder society is just a little too democratic for Gordon Brown. In one of his first speeches after becoming Prime Minister last July, he announced that national housebuilding targets would be increased to provide three million new homes by 2020. In order to soften the blow, he said that some of these would be provided in a series of new ‘eco-towns’ in which all buildings would, over the course of a year, produce no net carbon emissions. What he didn’t make clear at the time was that the government itself would choose where these eco-towns would go.

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