It’s pie in the sky and we need more than windmills

Published in Tribune, 11 April 2008

JOHN PRESCOTT, in one of his more perceptive moments of accidental wisdom, once said that the green belts surrounding our cities are a Labour achievement that this Government “means to build on”. That was in 1998, back when Labour still dared to talk of an “integrated transport policy”, when the Millennium Dome was going to be a smashing success and when a popular new Prime Minister talked with enthusiasm of the dawn of a new interactive information age. Ten years on, the transport policy is deeply buried in the recycle bin of discarded policies, along with the other embarrassments (including the PM), but somehow the slip of Prescott’s tongue has become a guiding principle of the Government’s housing policy.

Every few years, a new and trendy word seems to come from nowhere to attach itself to every Government initiative and policy before vanishing without trace. Back in the days of the integrated transport policy and the Dome, it was “millennium”, a deliciously content-free word that nicely encapsulated the spirit of “new” Labour. A few years later, at the height of the technology bubble, “electronic”, “online” and “interactive” made an appearance. Although loaded with hubris, these usually meant at least something tangible – but not so concrete that the words couldn’t be discarded when the market crashed and technology went out of fashion. Now, with the emergence of the environment as a big political issue, no policy is complete without a claim to be clean, green, eco or bio – no matter how incongruous the concept.

Witness, for example, the talk of “clean coal” that comes back like a nasty bout of syphilis each time oil prices reach a new peak. It has no real grounding in fact. Short of the hopelessly impractical suggestion of sucking up all the smoke made when burning coal, sticking it in a bottle and burying in a deep hole in the ground (people are seriously proposing that, although they call it “carbon capture and sequestration” to make it sound less implausible), there is no way coal can be made clean. Coal is solid carbon – with traces of acid rain producing sulphur thrown in. Where even gas and oil emissions are largely made up of harmless steam, every ounce of smoke that comes from a coal power station contributes to the greenhouse effect.

While the Government’s supposedly pro-environmental policies aren’t all as odd as the concept of clean coal, they still fuel the suspicion that the environment is nothing more than an afterthought, a pretence used to push through policies that have little to do with saving the planet and a lot to do with tarting up unpalatable solutions to other pressing problems. This is particularly evident in the Government’s plans to build “eco-towns” across the country in years to come. But while these are presented as part of the solution to two massive issues – the housing shortage and the environmental situation we face – they are an inadequate solution to both.

The Government makes all sorts of grand claims about these new towns’ environmental impact. Some of the proposals are welcome. Proper insulation, water-saving measures, solar heating, and combined heat and power all make sense and should ensure these developments have a smaller footprint than older housing stock. But the eco-friendly measures are tacked onto what are basically environmentally unsound plans. It’s hard to take eco-towns seriously as an green policy, no matter how well designed their buildings are, when the housing will be in car-reliant commuter developments, far from jobs and services in the cities.

These are just the sort of problems facing the sprawling suburbs that already surround British cities. While it’s welcome that the Government is finally tackling badly-built and inefficient housing, it’s a missed opportunity not to re-think where we build houses, as well as how. A few David Cameron-style windmills won’t solve the flaws in a policy that depends on extending urban sprawl into the green belt.

The Government, of course, claims that the green belt is not really at risk, that these eco-towns will be built on brownfield land, rather than open countryside. But the truth is perhaps a little more nuanced. These houses aren’t going to take the place of derelict factories and commercial sites, land that’s already scarred and next to roads. They will be built in areas such as RAF airfields – not rolling countryside, perhaps, but a long way from the heavily built-up land that the word “brownfield” implies. And even if these sites aren’t green belt, the infrastructure they need will inevitably place a burden on surrounding rural areas which are.

A better solution to the housing shortage – albeit one that would challenge Britain’s strange infatuation with the semi-detached house – might be to do more to encourage further (and denser) construction within Britain’s notoriously low-rise cities, reducing the need for cars and ensuring that new accommodation is actually built near to existing jobs, services and public transport. It also happens to be true that blocks of flats are far more energy efficient than the bland little boxes we’re going to get in the eco-towns – and that’s regardless of whether there’s a windmill on the roof or not.