The CEO of Bournville Village Trust has welcomed the call for 50 new Garden Villages but warns that effective management is necessary to ensure success and create sustainable new communities, rather than just offer a badge of convenience.
The CEO of the Bournville Village Trust has written a letter to the Times welcoming Lord Best’s call for 50 new garden villages, but saying that the new communities will need effective management to ensure success as without this, they ‘represent nothing more than a badge of convenience rather than creating sustainable new communities’.
In an article the previous day Lord Best, crossbench chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on housing and care for older people, is reported to have suggested that 50 garden villages on ‘the Poundbury model’ were required, to solve a shortage of homes that is forcing young people into towns and isolating older people who are left behind, despite the objections that such projects were bound to produce.
His comments coincide with the Rural Coalition warning in a letter to The Times that a lack of affordable housing risks turning parts of the countryside into ‘enclaves of the affluent’. The group, which represents 12 organisations including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the National Farmers Union and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, urges the government to set an ‘ambitious annual target’ for the number of new affordable homes built in rural areas.
Lord Best said that the only way to meet the present target of 1.5 million new homes by 2022 was with ‘some brand new garden villages’ in places where there were no existing developments.
He told a housing conference organised by the Country Land and Business Association, a landowners’ lobby group: ‘This does give us an opportunity to do it well.’
The government has identified 14 sites for garden villages, from Cornwall to Cumbria, but Lord Best said that this would not be enough. He said: ’We are going to need a lot of them. I think we should get 50 off the ground.’ He added that ‘existing villages had to accept incremental developments of eight to 12 houses, specifically for local people, which would keep vital services such as schools, shops and businesses alive’.
The Duchy of Cornwall began work on Poundbury, on the edge of Dorchester in Dorset, in 1993. The 400-acre farm is now home to 3,000 people and is expected to house 1,500 more by 2025. Although it has attracted criticism because of Prince Charles’s fondness for classical architecture, it has 210 local businesses and employs more than 2,000 people on site.
On average, homes in the countryside are 26 per cent more expensive than their urban equivalents while wages are 26 per cent lower.Original article The Times 6 July; Letter The Times 7 July
