FOREWORD
The urgent need for new housing, if met with undue
haste and an absence of thorough environmental appraisals, will
lead to significant and effectively irreversible environmental
damage. The Report which follows contains many specific recommendations
and conclusions, and summarises a significant amount of evidence.
Its bottom line is that Government, both local and national, and
all those engaged in planning and building new housing, have simply
got to raise their game or the environmental consequences will
be severe and long term.
The significant drop in building rates, which has
been a reality since the 1960's, is mainly a result of a dramatic
reduction in the construction of local authority housing, which
has not been compensated for by an increase in the numbers of
privately built homes. The introduction to the Sustainable Communities
Plan noted "that private housebuilding has failed to rise
to the demand for owner-occupied property, and too many large
homes are being built when the new demand is mainly for small
households. In recent years more than one in three homes built
in the South East have been larger, four bedroom houses".
Whilst we accept the real need to address the problem of housing
affordability in some parts of the country, together with the
impact of a reduced provision in social housing - and we likewise
accept that this will necessarily mean building new homes - we
are concerned about the potential environmental impacts associated
with housing growth. We are also concerned about how the increased
pressure on private house builders to meet housing demand will
affect standards, particularly environmental standards, of construction.
This concern is deepened in the light of the conclusion from the
Barker Review that the current rate of private house building
in England may need to be nearly doubled to reduce house price
inflation.
It is surely better to build sustainable housing
for sustainable communities slowly, prudently and well than to
put up poorly considered, planned, designed and constructed housing,
which may solve an immediate problem but which will only lead
to longer term difficulties in the future. Gradual, careful construction
of sustainable housing is vital if we are to operate within environmental
limits. With this in mind we have identified the issues that it
is imperative the Government address as it carries forward its
housing agenda:
- Infrastructure provision must run concurrently
with housing construction and not follow it, or fail to materialise
at all;
- There have to be minimal carbon emissions during
both the construction of new housing and during its lifetime use;
- New housing must be durable, built to last from
sustainable, recycled or recyclable, and - where possible - locally
sourced materials. Funding must be made available for the research
to ensure this becomes increasingly possible.
- New housing should be constructed to higher average
densities than at present, whilst maximising the use of available
brownfield sites;
- House builders have to be made to improve their
performance across the board, to accept innovation and more stringent
regulations for ensuring higher quality housing;
- The skills base and environmental awareness of
planners, architects, builders and all those involved in planning
and construction needs to improve;
- Local and regional planning decisions for new
housing should be made by elected bodies, answerable to
all those who live in or around the areas to be affected;
- A National Spatial Framework for England should
be drawn up to challenge the assumptions that currently favour
over-development in the east and south-east and under-development
in the north and west; and
- The environmental principles within sustainable
development must be better understood by local authorities, by
developers and the construction industry, and by national government
- and their importance taken to heart.
Environmental impacts are not always immediately
obvious and often long term in effect, whilst the immediacy of
economic, even social, benefits too often and too easily outweigh
them when they should not. To counter this, DEFRA needs to push
its own role in Government in terms of the new Sustainable Development
Strategy, and ODPM and HM Treasury both need to engage more fully
with DEFRA in terms of their own aims and priorities. This is
currently not happening, and the environment will suffer from
this failure to join up government. In the case of climate change
the threats are obvious and imminent and unless significant efforts
are made to reduce emissions from the housing sector they could
constitute over 55% of the UK's target for carbon emissions by
2050.
The environmental impacts of the proposed increase
in house building deserve much greater consideration than they
have yet received from Government. Whilst we accept the need to
improve housing supply, we believe that housing policy should
be set within the overarching context of environmental limits.
All new housing should be built to standards that minimise environmental
impacts. There is a serious risk that, as matters stand, the principal
beneficiaries of housing growth will be property development companies,
whilst the principal loser will be the environment.
Large scale house building demands prudence, properly
joined-up government, thorough environmental appraisals, a respect
of environmental limits, local engagement, and improvements in
skills, knowledge and awareness. We need sustainable communities
and new sustainable housing, but unless they are environmentally
sustainable they will never be truly sustainable at all.
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