Eco-town developers to pay for community workers

Developers will have to employ staff to welcome new arrivals to eco-towns, produce community newsletters and form neighbourhood groups, new guidelines for the towns show.

In a series of recommendations by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) that aim to foster community involvement in the new towns, it says developers must set aside a budget to encourage community involvement at all stages of the planning process.

It recommends arrival officers be provided to help new residents meet neighbours and find facilities, neighbourhood groups are set up for consultation on planning issues and regular newsletters are sent out to residents.

A TCPA spokesperson said the group hoped the recommendations would go beyond application to eco-towns and that large-scale developers and the government would consider adopting some suggestions.

But Home Builders Federation external affairs director John Slaughter said the recommendations failed to address how the community involvement budget would be administered.

“In practice, with eco-towns you are not necessarily going to have one developer, so the mechanism for such community panels and budgets to exist need to be thought about,” he said.

“A developer may not have an ongoing involvement in all phases of the eco-town and it could be unreasonable for them to organise everything for the whole community.”

Slaughter said it would be unlikely for the wider development community to adopt the TCPA recommendations, but that individual companies should apply relevant facets of the guidelines.

“The problem for developers though is that it is another cost on top of everything else,” he said.

“These measures must be relevant to the right situations, but statistics show new housing developments are an average of 27 units and you wouldn’t apply these types of arrangements to those types of developments.”

Housing Minister Caroline Flint is expected to set out the standards for eco-towns in the coming weeks.