Lord Rogers (Award-winning architect and urban planning advisor): "I think eco-towns are one of the biggest mistakes government could make. Building in green areas for 5,000 to 10,000 people has to be car-based, it will not be a walking, living community. It goes against everything we know about sustainability."

Mark Sullivan (Campaign to Protect Rural England): “Eco-towns are supposed to be new forms of development which minimise consumption of natural resources, including fuel and power, and thus carbon dioxide emissions. But they will never be self-sustaining, effective communities if they are sited in the wrong places.”

David Lock (Town and Country Planning Association): "There has never been a true zero-carbon settlement and the eco-towns will not achieve it either. They will generate much less greenhouse gas than normal but to call it zero-carbon is slack language. These phrases are like slogans on a T-shirt but if you ask civil servants and ministers what they mean, they cannot define it,"

Joey Gardiner (Housing and Regeneration Editor of Building magazine): “Developers and councils have seized on the opportunity to build on sites that have lain fallow for decades by dusting off schemes and dressing them up with low-carbon jargon and some eco-bling.”

Campaign to Protect Rural England: “[Eco-towns] should not be a smokescreen for making house-building appear more palatable. For eco-towns to succeed, they must be well integrated with existing settlements and agreed with, not imposed on, local communities.”

Gideon Amos (Town and Country Planning Association): “(Eco-towns) need to have more than just a green wash. They need to be places where people really want to live, with minimal impact on the environment in terms of waste, water use and public transport.''

Clive Aslet (Editor at Large of Country Life magazine): “While a new settlement may be fitted out with state-of-the-art composting and 15mph speed limits, it still has to be constructed. That means hauling materials from other parts of the globe, making roads, laying infrastructure and inviting more car use. Far better to develop cities, where there are more than enough sites. But they are sometimes polluted; it is easier for developers to build on green fields.”

Rynd Smith (Royal Town Planning Institute): “If carbon-neutral developments are in areas where there are no public transport links, no jobs or services and nothing to do, however eco-friendly the buildings are everyone who lives there will spend most of their time behind the wheel of a car.”

Stephanie Hilborne (Wildlife Trusts): "To be truly sustainable, (eco-towns) need to be about much more than simply building zero-carbon homes,"

Fiona Mahon (Wildlife Trusts): "If the Government has already selected and announced the proposals, and it is providing funding for them, then there will be a lot of pressure on the planners to pass them"

Carol Collins (Campaign to Protect Rural England): "The eco-towns initiative will inevitably be seen by developers as a chance to get permission for developments which have not succeeded in the past. Even supposing that the buildings were all carbon-neutral, the mere building of the necessary transport links and the lifestyle of residents who would inevitably travel to bigger centres would certainly not be."

Leo McKinstry (media commentator): "Local influence over planning has been traduced by Labour. Development in this country is now largely governed by a mix of naked commercial greed and Stalinist central control. In a climate of institutionalised bullying led by an unholy alliance of left-wing politicians, Whitehall bureaucrats, property firms and retail giants, local democracy is the loser."