CPRE has now produced a formidable rebuttal of Policy Exchange’s arguments. Our own document, which is published today, shows that many of PE’s claims are founded on unsubstantiated assertions, and sometimes upon false or misleading statistics. This is especially true of comparisons between housing in Britain and other nations. For instance, PE made the bizarre claim that Britain, and even southern Britain, is not really overdeveloped. Yet in reality, only Belgium and Holland have more of their land area covered in towns and cities. CPRE rejects PE’s grim portrait of life in Britain’s cities. Of course we need to keep working relentlessly to improve the quality of urban life, as CPRE has been urging for many years. But PE’s notion that the secret of the British people’s future happiness is to get many more people out of cities and into new homes in the countryside seems fanciful, to put it politely. PE seems to welcome ‘urban sprawl’, the progressive march of development into the countryside around our cities. CPRE has campaigned for decades against this, because random development blights countryside for miles around it. We believe that Policy Exchange is simply wrong about this.
PE claims that the new houses Britain is building are too small. Yet given the desperate lack of space in this country, together with the fact that so many households today consist of only one person or at most two, an emphasis on small units seems absolutely sensible. Our vision of the future seems much closer to that of David Cameron, with his passionate commitment to all things green, than to that of Policy Exchange. We are still hopeful that the longer Conservative shadow ministers look at these issues, the more they will come to understand that they should be fighting the battle alongside us, to sustain Britain’s planning system, which has served this country so well for so long. It is simply not true that planning is the great obstacle in the way of meeting Britain’s housing needs. Annual housing output is today at its highest for fifteen years, much of this on brownfield sites. What planning has done with enormous success for much of the past century is to save us from collective cannibalism, from destroying in our own society, or allowing the house building industry to do so, all the things which the British people claim most to love about this country. There is a great opportunity here for the Opposition, to distance itself from the philistinism of present government policy. It will be a tragedy for the countryside, if an undeclared cross-party coalition of politicians espouses policies which will do such harm to the landscape future generations will know.
The theme which runs through all government policy on housing and development is that no environmental or aesthetic consideration must be allowed to stand in the way of the great god of economic growth. Now, every reasonable person knows that we must have better airports, better and sometimes bigger roads, and more houses for a growing population. Our argument, however, is that when making the commitments and decisions, proper weight be given to their real cost to our society at large: the huge pollution costs of cheap flights and increased car use; the blighting of beauty by unplanned development. Above all, perhaps, there is the issue of water. CPRE has argued for years that ministers were reckless to mandate huge towns and suburban expansions, without seriously addressing their infrastructure needs, of which water represent the foremost and often most intractable problem.
Today, southern Britain is facing a water crisis of unprecedented proportions. Most of us know that this is not just a passing matter of a dry summer, or poor winter rainfall. It is an ongoing, very serious issue, founded in the fact that we are all using much more water than our overtaxed resources can provide. It is not merely that reservoirs are low, it is that underground aquifers are also at alarming levels. We manage water incredibly badly, and are going to have to learn how to do much better- to waste less water at home, to compel water companies to steward their supplies more responsibly, to harvest much more rainwater. This will almost certainly mean more reservoirs in the south of England, which we should welcome. Even if we improve dramatically our performance as providers and users of water, it seems evident that an historic change is coming about. We are being driven to recognise that resources of all kind, whose plenty we have taken for granted for generations, must in future be husbanded, and recognised as precious. Against this background, it would be recklessly irresponsible to embark upon large scale housing development in southern England without clear and credible plans for how water supplies will be found for each project, in each area. CPRE has already expressed special concern about the government’s housing plans for the Milton Keynes/South Midlands Growth Area, where there is a serious water shortage. The Thames Gateway area is in other respects a highly suitable area for development, posessing many brownfield sites. But since it also has the lowest rainfall in Britain, very high standards of water efficiency will be needed, to sustain supplies to new housing there.