Young Couples ‘Trapped in Car Dependency’

Young people who have saved for a newly-built home will now too often be trapped in a metal box with wheels. They will be forced to spend extra hours in traffic ferrying themselves and their children around because their lovely house on the new estate has no shops, no pub, no doctor, no school, no jobs.

A new report from the research by the green group ‘Transport for New Homes’ says that this is the buttock-numbing fate of numerous young couples – and they are backed by a motoring group, the RAC Foundation.

Concerns arises because in recent years planners have increasingly allowed edge-of-town housing estates where car travel is residents’ only option. In Southport, similar concerns were voiced during consideration of the Sefton Local Plan but sizable new developments such as those proposed for low-lying land North and East of Southport in Crossens and Churchtown are being permitted and pushed through.

Researchers visited more than 20 new housing developments across England, in what they say is the first piece of research of its kind. and found that the scramble to build new homes is producing houses which are too far out of town to walk or cycle, and which lack good local buses. Jenny Raggett, researcher at Transport for New Homes, said:

“We were appalled to find so many new housing developments built around the car with residents driving for almost every journey. As those cars head for our towns and cities they clog up existing roads. Commuter times get longer and longer. Car-based living of this kind is not good for our health or quality of life.”

Steve Gooding, director of the motorists’ RAC Foundation, supported the research. He says:

“We need new housing developments with a genuine mix of transport options, which may include the private car but not exclude other ways of getting around. It’s not much fun in one of these new estates where there’s nowhere to park out front, so there are cars all over the pavements. You have to ferry your kids everywhere, and then you drive straight into a traffic jam.

“The government has got to think about this properly – we don’t just need new homes anywhere we can put them – we need quality homes. Places like Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, show it is possible to get this balance right.”

Ms Raggett says that planners need to change priorities to reproduce the success of Poundbury elsewhere

“The problem is that planners are measured by whether they hit their targets for new housing,” she said. “At the moment they just approach developers who are sitting on greenfield sites and end up peppering housing round towns without any regard to whether the land is accessible or not.”

In response, an anonymous government spokesperson said that its revised planning rulebook tells developers to create high quality areas which promote walking, cycling and use of public transport and claimed that these rules “also make sure that councils put plans in place for the infrastructure needed to support new developments.”

However, local Lib Dem Councillor Tony Dawson claims that the government ‘rules’ might as well be written on tissue paper for all the good they do. Councillor Dawson attended the Planning Inquiry concerning Sefton Council’s Local Plan and provded detailed figure concerning the lack of access to important infrastructuresuch as schools and shops from these new large housing sites.  Unfortunately, he says, the Planning Inspector showed no interest at all in these issues and effectively rubber-stamped Sefton Labour group’s push for more and more houses on badly-drained green belt in areas at the edges of town totally reliant upon the car. Cllr Dawson says:

“For over 40 years now, lip service has been paid to the need to reduce dependence on the car to cut pollution and reduce carbon use. But when it comes to specifics, government, local and national, either comes up with an excuse for letting a particular project go against this official policy or just ignores the issue altogether.”

Cllr Dawson singles out Sefton Council’s proposal to build hundreds of new houses at the end of Moss Lane as an example of this. At the Local Plan Inquiry held at the Royal Clifton Hotel, he produced detailed figures showing that anyone living in these proposed new houses would have no decent access to shops, doctors and other facilities, that there was no public transport and that residents would therfore need to be totally car-reliant. Of the growing Kew housing development, he says:

“This really useful development is on reclaimed land, not green belt, and the residents are lucky in a way that these new houses are close to the present hospital if they need it.  They also have a pub, a post office and a considerable number of walkable retail options due to the close proximity of out-of-town supermarkets etc if they can risk crossing the Kew roundabout on foot and, unlike Moss Lane, they also have a primary school nearby. There is a limited bus service, which is possibly really only still there because of the hospital, and this hopefully might be improved once the development grows a bit bigger. What is scary, though, is that even if these facilities had not been nearby, the planners would have still permitted this major development to go ahead without any facilities, thus massively-increasing car dependency.”