1.  We are pleased to respond to this invitation to make a submission to the Committee and apologise to the Committee for the brevity of and lack of references in this submission. This is due to pressure of work. Should the Committee want to see more detail in the next few weeks we will try very hard to comply with the request.

  2.  Eco-Logica has been involved for 10 years in projects which sit at the interface of planning, housing, transport and sustainable development. We were part of the team that won the commission to develop Allerton Bywater millennium village and have been involved in similar schemes eg Norris Green in Liverpool. All our work has been informed by the importance of creating healthy, viable, varied communities with a large range of activities and services within easy reach and with a preference for reduced levels of car ownership and use. We are mindful of the wide ranging damage done to communities by vehicular traffic especially to health (Whitelegg, 1993) and to the preconditions for public use of public space and high levels of walking and cycling which in their turn have a positive impact on health. Equally we wish to see the highest possible levels of accessibility so that all sections of the community can gain access to schools, local shops, youth and community facilities, play space, green space and local jobs.

  3.  The global evidence on the impact of a "spread-out" society is overwhelming in its conclusions that such a spatial, land use arrangement is not conducive to high levels of social interaction and lively, diverse communities. The US evidence on the costs of servicing huge swathes of low density housing shows that this is an expensive solution and many US commentators now advocate "Smart Growth" which is similar to the Australian approach to "transit corridor" development (eg Perth, Western Australia from the CBD to Jundaloop). Low density developments generate extra traffic and build into the land use planning system a structural bias towards high levels of car use. This structural bias may well be very difficult to shift through measures advocating higher levels of use of buses, cycling and walking.

  4.  It is possible to plan for a better arrangement of housing, transport services and community vitality. This has already been done in the Netherlands though not in Britain where the preference is still for large housing estates (preferably on greenfield sites) that then function as car dependent suburbs with no identifiable community life. This has been well known for many years and is well documented in John Robert's comparison of Milton Keynes and Almere (The Netherlands). Both were new developments established in the early 1970s, both have similar populations and similar socio-economic structure. That is where the similarity ends:

"the most obvious finding and an important one, was the much higher percentage of trips made by car and the much lower level of bicycle use in Milton Keynes when compared to Almere (65.7 per cent of trips by car compared to 43.1 per cent, 5.8 per cent of trips by bicycle compared to 27.5 per cent respectively)".

  5.  Evidence presented by Lancashire County Council at the public inquiry into the Lancaster Local Plan showed that new homes built on greenfield sites on the edge of existing urban areas would generate seven new car trips per day. This extra loading on the highway system will contribute to increased congestion, pollution, noise, road traffic accidents and community severance. It will also add to greenhouse emissions cancelling out all the gains made by more energy efficient vehicles and vehicles manufacture to EC emission standards. Extra traffic damages local businesses through time lost in congestion and impacts disproportionately on the poor, those with mobility problems and those without access to a car. Existing communities are damaged by high traffic levels (often through relatively poor neighbourhoods as is the case with commuter flows into Liverpool). Government attention to new millenium communities may well be a case of "fiddling while Rome burns" as thousands of existing communities are ravaged by high traffic flows, noisy lorries and dangerous roads which cannot easily be crossed by the elderly and children. Under these circumstances communities wither on the vine and once lost will be very difficult to recover.

  6.  High quality walking, cycling and public transport and the existence of high quality safe public spaces are essential to the development of communities. Chance meetings, social interaction, lively clubs and societies and the safety and security generated by populated spaces are the life blood of communities. The general conditions for walking and cycling in the UK are so bad that communities are under attack. UK pedestrian and cycling facilities are much inferior to those in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and this adds to the pressure on car use and puts more children in cars for the journey to school. This in its turn reduces social interaction and damages communities.

  7.  The debate around housing provision and housing numbers in Britain is heavily influenced by the failure of UK regional policy and regional development over the last 20-30 years. Germany has a very balanced regional system with at least 10 large metropolitan regions playing different but equally important roles in German life. In England there is just London. The pressures on SE England are too high to be resolved by any transport or housing policy. We are trying to do too much in too small a space. Worse, we add to the problem by permitting/encouraging the expansion of SE airports (eg Terminal 5) and approving large housing allocations in Surrey, Kent and Hertfordshire. Meanwhile in Lancaster and Morecambe there are 2000 empty homes and five bedroom houses in Morecambe are on sale at £30,000 (with few takers). Liverpool is very well connected into national and international transport systems, has a splendid natural environment in its coastal and estuarine setting, has one of the finest collections of listed buildings in the UK, has one quarter of its area derelict and is losing population. This means large costs at both ends of the spectrum. It is costly to provide services (health, education) in Morecambe and Liverpool because of falling population and it is costly in SE England because of over-heating, land prices, house prices and congestion. Only a radical new look at regional re-balancing can solve this problem.

  8.  At the more local level there are untapped opportunities for developing high quality, high density, transit related housing in existing urban areas. We do not make very effective use of space above shops in city/district centres. We could build thousands of homes on the wasteland occupied by urban car parking. Reallocating car park space to housing space would in one go deliver both housing and transport policies and make many of our cities far more beautiful, well populated and better able to support local shops and services. The continued allocation of very valuable space for car parking is a major mis allocation of resources and distortion of economics. It deprives urban areas of land for housing and it works against government policy which seeks to reduce car use

  9.  Housing should always be planned and built as part of a total mobility strategy or "intelligent transport strategy". We need to think how people will travel and then build in the answer. New homes should have spaces for bikes inside the home, new homes could bring with them a travel pass/commuter card for the public transport system in that area, new homes could bring with them a car share scheme along the lines of the Bremen scheme in Germany which has seen a six million kilometre reduction in driving since its introduction. One new car share car in Germany replaces 10 individually owned cars. Car-reduced developments are cheaper than developments with lots of land allocated for parking and garages and they are better for children. Much of the environmental gain from building new energy efficient housing is squandered by locating them in low density, car-dependent developments and by impoverished thinking and planning about accessibility, the number and location of public services and clearly inadequate public transport services.

  10.  The best possible approach to planning for sustainable housing and communities is to hang on to the ones we already have. Existing communities are under attack from a rising tide of badly behaved traffic. 60 per cent of those who drive around our urban areas break the speed limit and with very small probabilities of detection and prosecution. Very few of our communities and residential areas are protected from traffic. The State of North Rhine Westphalia in Germany where one of us (John Whitelegg) worked for three years has over 10,000 20mph areas; we have less than 500 in the UK. Our communities are under attack from the loss of small shops and now post offices. Communities are fragile things and they will disappear under an incoming tide of traffic and an outgoing tide of buses, post offices and shops.