Instead of investing in building new "ecotowns", Leo Hickman suggests it would be better to improve the efficiency of the homes we already have. Photograph: Bedzed/Peabody Trust
The "eco" tag seems to be fast losing its lustre. There was a time when you could slap the "eco" prefix on to just about anything and the buying public would unthinkingly lap it up.
But one area when the term now seems to have been sullied beyond practical use is housing. Most of us have watched an episode of Grand Designs in which we follow the construction of an "eco house" only to watch as the owner ends up using tonnes of concrete because an "eco" construction material would require them taking out a third mortgage, let alone a second.
Another example of the corruption of the term "eco" is with the government's current promotion of its "ecotowns" policy. Within just a couple of weeks it is set to announce the location of 10 new ecotowns around the country. But what exactly is an "ecotown"?
Is it like Masdar City, Abu Dhabi's £11bn show-off attempt to create the world's first "zero-carbon" city, which begins construction this week? Or is just somewhere with an above-average number of cycle lanes which offers little more than the odd sighting of a solar panel? The trouble is we don't know as no one has really spelled out in detail what an "ecotown" entails.
What probably started off as an idea with the right intentions now has the strong possibility of becoming a target of ire for environmentalists, principally because local campaigners fighting against these new ecotowns say they fear they will be built on so-called greenbelt land, despite the then chancellor Gordon Brown saying last May that he wanted to see 100,000 new homes in "carbon neutral" communities being built on brownfield sites to help ease the country's housing crisis. Again, no one really knows because the plans have been shrouded in secrecy in order, so we are told, to protect "commercial confidentiality".
But we can't afford to get this wrong: how we go about building new housing stock is just about the most important decision we can make if we are to meet our emissions reductions target for the simple reason that, along with transportation and heavy industry, housing accounts for the bulk of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.
My own preference would be that, rather than expending all our effort on building poorly defined "ecotowns", we instead concentrate on making sure that building and planning regulations are made ever more exacting with regard to a building's thermal performance. This way we can make sure all new housing - not just that built within the boundaries of a so-called ecotown - can justifiably lay claim to the much-abused "eco" tag.
But perhaps more importantly, we should follow Germany's lead and give far more attention to improving the efficiency of our current housing stock, much of which was built before the last world war. Building new eco homes is, by comparison, easy and far less urgent in terms of reducing emissions.
