Beyond Eco-towns: applying the lessons from Europe

Today's current economic crisis provides the impetus to re-evaluate and identify new and better procurement methods essential for restarting the UK's struggling house building market.

This is a key conclusion drawn by PRP, URBED and Design for Homes at the launch of their research paper, Beyond Eco-towns, Applying the Lessons from Europe on 10 October. The research was sponsored by three major organisations involved in building better homes (Grainger Plc, Guinness Partnership and Scott Wilson).

Collectively, we were keen to contribute to the debate around Eco-towns and were aware of a number of successful exemplar developments of similar scale in Europe, with similar aims and ambition. We found that little work had been done to explore the process behind these schemes, how they came about, who led them and how they were procured.

The credit crunch has caused excitement around Eco-towns to dampen significantly whilst companies focus on survival. Yet the findings of the report have become even more relevant than ever before. Our findings are actually applicable to the wider future of housing in the UK, which will inevitably be more about regeneration and urban extensions than 'stand alone' new towns, but in the current downturn, they may also provide some answers in keeping delivery moving, buildquality high and putting low carbon strategies in place.

We conducted a number of study tours to schemes in Holland, Germany and Sweden and, wherever possible, we took members of the sponsor team plus a group of stakeholders from a wide cross section of the industry.

Key findings from the research can be summarised as follows:

Vision and Leadership – Stronger local authority control in the European case studies helped balance the commercial pressures of delivering much needed housing with the social needs to establish a thriving and harmonious community. All but one of the schemes was a publicly led initiative. A Delivery Agency was in place which streamlined communication between local authority departments and ensured joined up thinking at the masterplanning stage.

In the UK, a disconnection of the planning process and the means of delivery often hinders this.

In 1998, the Egan report on rethinking construction identified the skills that would be required to meet such goals. However, we have generally continued to rely on the private market to drive development.

Integrated planning – the case studies were all extensions to existing communities where a link to places of work and existing shops, public transport networks, energy infrastructure and other social amenities were all made easier. Additionally, a high degree of permeability enabled internal connectivity within the sites for pedestrian and safe cycle ways possible, all of which is essential to reduce dependency on the car.

For energy provision, district CHP was a universally adopted technology and was planned from the outset. Savings of up to 28% on CO2 emissions were achieved through on-site generation alone. Most schemes also began with enhanced fabric performance which achieved further energy reduction and some schemes offered renewables on top to achieve further carbon reductions.

Landscape and treatment of water was also given highest priority at masterplanning stage, both as valued amenity and for the ecological and environmental benefits. Efficient building footprints allowed higher percentages of land to be allocated to green open space.

New ways of Development Finance - successful new communities need up front investment in social amenities, public transport links and public realm. In the countries studied, this was found to come from publicly funded models, largely geared to the house sales on low cost, publicly owned land but loans working over much longer time spans than the developers normally work in.

Integrated energy and waste infrastructure was also front-financed through the utility companies and secured long term interest in the project. It was found that social housing for rent should generally not account for more than 20% of the total, with other forms of intermediate housing accounting for the balance of affordable homes.

The Development agency, which was in some cases a public / private joint venture company, manages all of the above upfront investment, it controls the masterplanning process and ensures delivery of key infrastructure (schools, transport, public space) to coincide with the first phases of housing.

This left the housebuilders to deliver good housing on serviced plots, with lower risks. It also encouraged the involvement of many smaller developers and builders. The diversity of tenure models, with co-operative housing, private landlords or 'self build' and the involvement of institutional investors for a large private rental market – all of whom will retain long term interests in the community – meant there was more choice, more quality and often more affordable housing - all of which appealed to a more mobile residential market and thus helped increase build out rates which were often found to be 10 times higher than in the UK.

Ultimately, we believe there are now opportunities to rethink procurement and design of large scale settlements in the UK to deliver more vision, and better places for people to live. House building in the UK has stalled due to the credit crunch and it will not recover adequately unless there is a rapid rethinking of how procurement works here.

Chris Wilford is associate director at PRP Architects.