End in sight to Long Marston eco-town soap opera

AGENDA
Birmingham Post

Huge cash sums, leaks, spin, delay, mismanagement, policy U-turns, embarrassment, angry accusations and vehement rebuttals with a little legal intervention added to the mix – a normal day in Westminster.

But the effects inevitably reverberate closer to home. The controversy over the proposed eco-town at Long Marston has been raging for more than a year now.

Many Birmingham Post readers, if concerned at all, are probably quite bemused by the fuss. Could it all just be a storm-in-a-teacup created by a few Nimby protesters who do not want a development on a little site in Warwickshire/Worcestershire bordered by Gloucestershire?

Well the truth is rather more prosaic. Anyone who knows the former Royal Engineers’ Camp at Long Marston recognises that it needs some development. It is a blot on the landscape of an otherwise beautiful part of the country.

But the Government’s ‘eco’-town programme inviting developers to enter a lottery for vast development schemes resulted in the ‘Middle Quinton’ proposal for Long Marston of 6,000 homes plus offices and retail park. This would represent the biggest freestanding new settlement ever built in Warwickshire. This town would be two-thirds the size of Stratford-upon-Avon, its nearest sizeable neighbour. No wonder it is controversial.

The idea of a new town, looming over the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with a manufactured population explosion putting a huge strain on local facilities and infrastructure, seemed more of an illusory nightmare than a serious proposal. Few had paid attention to the passage of an innocuous-sounding Government policy proposal called the Housing Green Paper.

But for some reason, the somewhat ironically-named Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) included ‘Middle Quinton’ on its eco-town shortlist in April last year.

A group of foresighted and dedicated local people formed the BARD Campaign (Better Accessible Responsible Development). They began to investigate the ‘Middle Quinton eco-town’ proposal and the Government policy programme that lay behind it. That the programme and proposals were utterly ill-conceived did not take long to uncover.

Of course new developments should be environmentally-driven, and ‘affordable’ housing is needed. But providing a few new houses and flats in each of the villages is a far cry from a gargantuan new town taking 15 years to build and which requires the migration of thousands from other towns and cities to fill it. All in the name of eco-experimentation, paying lip-service to what the community says it needs.

While the BARD Campaign called for sensible intervention, the eco-towns programme descended into soap opera, with the most recent last-minute story-twist passing the decision on ‘Middle Quinton’ to the panel reviewing the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy.

In keeping with the programme’s history, this announcement came at short notice and in isolation.

The Government jumped ship and left the RSS panel, with two weeks’ notice, to plough through a huge volume of conflicting information on what might constitute an eco-town and whether one should feature in the West Midlands planning strategy.

The panel’s decision is now to be made without the benefit of a nationally-agreed defined planning policy.

Our sympathy for the panel is considerable. After all we have pored over the details of the programme and proposal as they have emerged over the last year and we are still confused.

We are confused that the Government wants to divert huge amounts of funds from allocated growth areas in the West Midlands and spend it all in a relatively prosperous corner of Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

We are confused as to how a town, whose developers’ own figures show will generate 14,000 extra car journeys per day on the surrounding rural roads, can be ‘eco’.

What if the proposer, St Modwen, says midway through development that it cannot fund the mass-transit system it promised, linking the new town to Stratford-upon-Avon and the national rail link at Honeybourne?

After all, it has recently done that at Longbridge, cutting its promised funding by about 50 per cent.

Above all we are confused that the biggest freestanding settlement ever created in the area is to be built in an area of natural, cultural and historical significance, but with no economic need.

A new town needs not only houses but roads, trains, buses, schools, health facilities, places of worship and emergency services, and these all require public funding. It would be a travesty to divert such funding on a whimsical eco-town experiment when Coventry, Warwick, Rugby and Leamington, the region’s identified growth areas, are crying out for this level of investment.

Overall, we consider the Government’s latest off-loading of the decision as good news. It is now in the hands of people who will fairly consider the impact that this town would have on the local community and countryside as well as the interests of the wider region.

We are confident the RSS panel inspectors will note the fact that every local authority in the area has voted to oppose ‘Middle Quinton’ and we anticipate that the inspectors will agree with the joint authorities’ conclusion: “the remote rural location of the Middle Quinton site ... is such that it cannot be considered to be a sustainable location for the development of an eco-town.”

The Government has now said it will not make a final decision on ‘Middle Quinton’ until the RSS report is published later this year.

In the meantime, St Modwen is considering an alternative path to the eco-town show. It submitted a planning application to Stratford District Council for a ‘leisure park’ at Long Marston earlier this month.

This is not quite what it appears. The application proposes more houses than are sustainable and needed in the area but once the proposal is brought in line with local policy, we are hopeful that the responsible development we have been campaigning for will become a reality.