BUILDING TOWARDS DISASTER

Charles Clover says that if nothing is done, by

2016 our countryside will be destroyed by the construction of 35 new cities the size of York

A FAMILIAR fear stalks Berks and Bucks, Herts and Hants, and even those parts of Devon and Cheshire which have yet to feel the tentacles of suburbia. It is the fear of thousands of anonymous, com- puter-designed homes, set in cul-de-sacs and connected by roads with kerbstones, roundabouts and orange sodium lights. The protests will be about the ruination of the view, but this is often a smokescreen for worries about the effect on the crime rate, the time it takes to get to work, and house prices.

Building in the countryside over the next 20 years is predicted to outstrip that of the 1980s. Around 4.4 million new households will come into existence in Britain between now and 2016. That is the equiva- lent of 35 cities the size of York, or increasing the size of every village in the country by a fifth.

Where to put all these homes (80 per cent of which will be single-person households) is to be the subject of a dis- cussion document published next week by the Environment Secretary — it will be one of the last political time-bombs before the next election. The Govern- ment will be hoping earnestly that it will not go off. Mr Gummer is expected to offer a series of options, such as building new towns and new villages, popping more than 50 per cent of these homes in towns and and on already used 'brown' land. He intends to hold 'a national debate' — one that is unlikely to reach any conclusion on unpleasant details, such as where the houses actually go, until after the election.

The source of all this alarm is a book of dry statistics by the Department of the Environment that caused hardly a mur- mur when it was published last year. The household projections are based on the way we live now, or rather the way we lived in 1991 when the last census was compiled. What the census showed, among other things, were migrations from the north to the south-east, and from the south-east to the West Country. Result: greater demand for housing in those places in 20 years' time when the next generation grows up. The census also showed that there are areas people are still leaving, such as Liverpool and the north-east, but nobody seems to mention this, though it is relevant.

The real fun starts when the statisti- cians begin to extrapolate the conse- quences of present lifestyles. The forecasts assume an increase in single- parent households brought about by a higher divorce rate than 15 years ago and much higher levels of single parenthood. They seize on a trend for children to live on their own earlier and for elderly peo- ple to live longer but for their children to be less happy to live with granny. The statistics also show (though the Depart- ment of the Environment is coy about this) rising immigration, largely from the European Union. They show, too, that first-generation minorities from the Third World have more children than everyone else — a factor in Britain's slowing population rise. All these trends are financed by state safety-nets.

We should take the forecasts seriously, because they hold up a mirror to modern Britain. Our fragmenting households are the result of the greater affluence in the 1980s and the selfishness and social frag- mentation which took hold as that afflu- ence increased. These statistics represent the best crystal ball for predicting where building will be needed. We may well need to build all 4.4 million new homes: after all the DoE's forecasts have an unbroken record of being on the low side. But I believe it is possible, and even desirable, not to build some of them and to avoid building most of the rest in the countryside.

It is not just that forecasts ignore the fact that household formation can be held in check by supply and price — as Michael lieseltine pointed out in his years outside the Cabinet in the 1980s when he advocat- ed not building in the south-east as a way of encouraging people to recolonise the industrial north.

Where the use of statistical forecasts is always wrong is in assuming that the future will look like the past. There is the same Miss Mawby.....MisS Peake —My office, immediately!

Take a letter, Miss Mawby..., objection to building houses to meet statis- tical projections as there is to building roads to meet projections of traffic growth. Both assume we have no power to influ- ence future behaviour, or to decide what kind of world we would like to live in other than the one that present trends will foist on us. Just as we would probably all be happier without the extra cars and the pol- lution and damage to the countryside they will cause, we would probably all be happi- er without the homes, too. But to stop them we will need to influence people's behaviour and the moral climate as well as the planning system.

There will always be a need to house young couples with children and (pace Peter Lilley) single mothers with babies. But some of the forecast housing 'needs' are arguably more due to increased expec- tations of space and reduced expectations of responsibility for other people, and that is where morality and new ideas of the importance of the family come in. Intrigu- ingly, morality plays an opposite role in the house-building argument to what it did in the 1980s. Then the country was still ruled by a generation which vividly remembered the war and for whom housing was for heroes, a social good. It was the Nimbys, such as Nicholas Ridley when he opposed the building of houses in his Gloucester- shire village, who were seen as selfish. Now that household formation appears to be substantially the result of family break- down and selfishness, the Nimbys look like the moral majority.

So it is curious that the Nimbys' club, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, has taken a pragmatic rather than a finger-waggingly moral line on the household forecasts. They invented the argument that we do not have to build to meet the projections. But they do not take the logical extra step and say that it is new freedoms and selfishness, backed by fiscal incentives and the social security system, that are damaging the countryside. Their reticence may be the result of a depressing political correctness — the unwillingness to advocate creating a climate of opinion in favour of the family or looking after granny at home. More charitably, the CPRE may not want to distract attention from a productive debate with Mr Gum- mer on the amount of extra homes that can be shoe-horned into the cities (they say 70 per cent, which the Town and Country Planning Association disputes). Their silence about our selfishness, howev- er, is unhelpful when addressing the real problem.

The CPRE's opponents, the House- builders' Federation, have no such shame about invoking the family when pressing the obligation on politicians to provide the housing the public wants. For instance, Roger Humber, its director, argues that it is a matter of choice where people live and what families want is to live in, or near, the country, which they perceive as a safer, bet- ter place. The polls always show that fami- lies want houses with large gardens — not flats. The English, in particular, are tradi- tionally used to living at lower densities than other nations. Can a Conservative Party, the party of choice, really make them live at the densities that, say, the urban Scots or French do?

Not without a fight. You cannot stop families who can afford it from choosing the countryside, or the new suburbs to live in. It is a valid criticism of a lot of the 'fam- ily' housing that is being built that besides the houses being ugly the gardens are too small. The environmentalists are in favour of something called the 'compact city', but cities cannot be too compact without becoming slums. There is a danger, thanks to the CPRE and the planners, that the new homes that are built in the next 20 years will be miserable little boxes with no gardens stuck between the roundabout and the railway tracks.

There is a strong case for building fewer, better homes in the next 20 years, while cracking down on the driving forces behind the growth in households. The needs of the countryside appear to be very close to those of the family, which everyone now seems to accept needs to be shored up. First, it is important to make the cities worth living in, to persuade people who live there not to move. That won't be cheap. Regenerating derelict sites, reviving the northern cities and tackling crime and deprivation which make for bad neighbours are a huge agenda, but one that will affect the countryside as well as the city. Some say there is actually enough land to accom- modate all the 4.4 million households on derelict land but this process is costly and the land — much of it in the north west is not necessarily where the jobs are. Sec- ond, the way to prevent the formation of new households is to provide greater sup- port for the family, and for those who sup- port old people, through the tax system, and less overt encouragement for people to set up on their own. Reinforcing the family is a familiar theme as the realisation of the lack of family values in modern Britain sweeps both Tories and New Labour, but no one had thought of it as a way of pro- tecting the countryside. It is time to make that connection.

Charles Clover is environment editor of the Daily Telegraph.

`I see you're into bondage.'