Losing the plot
Ross Clark says that John Prescott’s housing policy is wasteful and dangerous
There is a rather fetching neovernacular housing estate down my way whose builders have gone out of their way to tick all the right boxes in John Prescott’s planning edicts on ‘sustainable development’. The houses are piled on top of one another, easily fulfilling the requirement that all new homes are built at densities of between 30 and 50 homes per hectare. There are no more than one and a half parking spaces per house, encouraging the buyers, naturally, to take to bicycles instead — for which a new 200-yard cycle path has helpfully been provided. Moreover, the entire development is built on the site of an old cardboard box factory, helping to fulfil the government’s demand that at least 60 per cent of new homes be built on ‘brownfield’ land.
The houses have hardly any gardens, but then who needs a garden now that we have 24-hour drinking and the government has promised four new runways for the SouthEast, so that we can all jet off to the sun every other weekend? And perhaps we can overlook the fact that, with no room to park their 4x4s on their driveways, the buyers have taken to blocking the cycle path with the vehicles. But there is one matter which does seem somewhat to undermine Mr Prescott’s drive towards environmen tally friendly development: the cardboard box factory which used to stand on the site has been reborn, complete with a large car-park, on a sprawling site three miles away — on greenfield land.
Look around and it is happening everywhere: homes are being shoehorned into the sites of old gasworks and petrol stations, while low-density shops, office parks and factories are springing up in formerly lush meadows. Mr Prescott boasts of meeting his target for building 60 per cent of new homes on brownfield sites. But in truth he has only managed it by displacing commercial development — for which there is no corresponding target — on to virgin sites. In many cases, the commercial interests don’t even want to move, but are bullied into it by local authorities which need their sites for housing in order to fulfil their targets.
Take Marshall, an aerospace company which for decades has been operating out of an airfield on the edge of Cambridge. The company doesn’t want to move, and is having a job finding any site where the locals are happy about having large planes land on their doorstep, but it is being pushed out against its will because the city council has earmarked its present site for new housing. There is no shortage of nearby turnip fields where the houses could be built, and which the landowners would be happy to sell. But only the airfield (in spite of the fact that it is 90 per cent grass) officially counts as a ‘brownfield’ site and so helps the city council to fulfil Mr Prescott’s targets.
The government’s targets on ‘sustainable’ housing development aren’t just a scam; they are a positive threat to the environment. Bizarrely, suburban gardens now count as brownfield land, their redevelopment being encouraged by the government. All over the country elegant streets of Victorian and Edwardian villas set in large gardens are being bulldozed to make way for apartment blocks. Besides damaging the character of the British suburb, the result is a serious loss of habitat for birds and small mammals, for which suburban gardens provide an oasis from the grim monoculture that is arable farmland. Moreover, the extra asphalt cover is speed ing the discharge of rainwater from urban streets, increasing the risk of flooding.
While new homes are being built at what in the recent past would have been considered slum densities, there seems nothing to stop wasteful land use by commercial development. Some of the great Oxford Street department stores are seven or eight storeys high, and highly efficient with space; yet these kinds of shops are increasingly being replaced with the likes of PC World: vast, single-storey tin sheds surrounded by acres of car-parking. Canary Wharf and the City of London aside, the typical modern office development consists of oneor two-storey steel and glass pavilions set in generously landscaped grounds. We used to work in high-rise buildings in city centres and then go home to relax in pleasant suburbs. Now, housing policy is forcing many people to do the opposite: live in tall apartment blocks in inner cities and go to work in leafy suburban office parks. Maybe I have been slow to pick up on the attractions of city-centre living, but it seems to me to be the wrong way round.
Needless to say, the present planning rules suit industry just fine. With housebuilders forced to look for brownfield land, companies can take the opportunity to rid themselves of heavily polluted sites, which may harbour a heritage of poisons from the Victorian age and before. Once sold, the responsibility for ancient pollution is transferred to the homeowner. I know of one couple whose move to a new house in Bedford was somewhat marred when their dog keeled over after digging in the garden; it transpired that he had burrowed beneath the clay cap with which the developers had covered the site and poisoned himself with heavy metals. A builder from Hull was ordered to demolish his bungalow after he discovered black sludge while digging footings for an extension: it was waste left over from the gasworks which once stood on the site. Such stories, unfortunately, are going to become a lot more commonplace given the number of homes now being built on old industrial sites.
If the government were to limit the size of our cars or ration our food, there would be outrage. Oil refineries would be blockaded, supermarkets sacked. Yet for some reason the British consumer becomes astonishingly supine when it comes to the planning rules which prevent millions of Britons from owning a decent home with a reasonable garden. Why don’t we riot on the Wimpey estates? Why don’t we seize tracts of subsidised turnip fields to set up home? If I hadn’t managed to buy myself a decent home before the great house price inflation put one beyond reach, I wouldn’t settle for one of Mr Prescott’s little rabbit hutches on an old gasworks; I would buy myself a field and plant a caravan upon it. Far from the menace which many middleclass homeowners see in them, I am begin ning to view the travellers who are camped outside my village as a brave resistance against Mr Prescott’s housing policy.
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