Legal battle looms over development of eco towns

21 May 2008
 
The Government is facing the prospect of a legal challenge against its controversial process of deciding on the location for 10 eco towns in England.

Legal firm, SJ Berwin, representing campaigners against a proposal for a 6,000-home new town at Long Marston, Warwickshire, said the consultation was ‘inadequate’. Residents and councils lack information on the impacts of the towns, and are ‘unable to make comments about the fundamental strategy’.

The Government has invited comments on a shortlist of 15 eco town proposals, accompanied by a broad-brush analysis of the benefits and disadvantages. The Department for Communities and Local Government recognises in the document that there would be ‘challenges’ in accommodating the additional transport demand the new towns would create (Surveyor, 10 April).

But Simon Ricketts, head of planning at SJ Berwin, said that despite this acknowledgement, the consultation was not framed to allow comments on the eco towns idea, only on the shortlisted locations.

‘The consultation does not invite comments on whether the strategy of building free-standing eco towns, as opposed to eco urban extensions, is the best one. It doesn’t allow alternatives in terms of the scale or location of development.

‘The shortlist is presented as if ministers have already made their minds up that the eco towns concept is a good idea.’

This contrasted sharply with the plan-led approach to determining whether major new residential developments were justified, and to robustly consider their potential impacts on infrastructure and the environment, claimed Ricketts.

BARD, the Warwickshire campaign against the town close to Stratford-upon-Avon, had requested more information on the detailed impacts of the eco town proposal, and demanded a longer consultation to consider this. Otherwise, it would consider launching a judicial review against the process.

‘The courts haven’t hesitated to intervene in flawed consultation processes,’ said Ricketts, pointing to the consultations on the aviation White Paper and the energy White Paper. Several local highway authorities opposing the shortlisted towns as an unsuitable vehicle for increasing housing provision have raised concerns about the consultation.

Oxfordshire said the consultation over a 10-15,000 eco town at Weston Otmoor contained factual errors, asserting that it was not in the green belt, when 25% of it was, and that it was on brownfield land, when the vast majority was farmland. Only 16% was ‘a grassed over airfield’.

Cambridgeshire, referring to the proposal for an 8,000-home eco town near Hinxton in the south of the county, said ‘all the advice we had previously given about the unsuitability of the location for housing has been ignored’.

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