*Source:   DETR Housing Investment Programme Returns. Each year the Government's Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, collects statistics on the number of empty homes from each local authority across England.

**Source:   Letter from Nick Raynsford MP to SERPLAN, 27th March 2000, accompanying Governments  new draft Regional Planning Guidance.

***Source:   Based on an average of 2.4 persons per dwelling.

NEW HOMES

What's all the fuss about building new homes?

In his announcement a few weeks ago, John Prescott said there should be 860,000 new homes built in the south east over the next 20 years.

And everyone agrees with this?

Far from it. Serplan, which represents councils in the region, said there should only be 718,000 two years ago.

OK, so there should be less?

Not so fast - an independent panel set up to review Serplan, chaired by Professor Stephen Crow, which said 1.1 million were needed to meet population growth and the trend towards single people living by themselves.

And that stirred up a fuss?

You bet. Many people thought that Crow's figure would cut swathes through the green belt. Hence, John Prescott's compromise figure.

So how does he propose to protect the green belt?

Mr Prescott also said in his latest guidance (PPG3 in the jargon), that 60% of new homes in England should be built on brownfield land - that's land that has already been built on.

And what do councils think?

The Local Governments Association (LGA) supports the target, but says more work is needed on the detail. For instance, PPG3 glosses over the fact that in many cities, home ownership is an expensive option and more rental housing is needed.                              LGAnet www.lga.gov.uk

On Saturday 18 March Regional FOE organised a seminar at Chatham to update us on the latest facts and figures in the Government's plans for housing in Kent, and to take soundings for support for National FOE's strategy to cope with them. Tony Bosworth, FOE Atmosphere and Transport Campaigner, and Ron Saunders of the Council for the Protection of Rural England guided us through the concrete jungle with some pretty smart mapwork.

Tony reviewed the problems faced by Kent as a result of the projections for new households required over the next decade. The shock of the numbers proposed in the infamous Crow Report in October 1999 - 1.1million new homes in the South East region, including 150,000 in Kent - had been slightly mitigated by John Prescott's more recent predicted estimate of 200,000 new homes in the South East in the next five years, of which Kent's share had yet to be announced. Two major new centres of population were proposed, at Ashford and the Thames Gateway. The inevitable results of such major building proposals would be:

• the loss of many areas of green belt, some areas currently protected by nature conservation designations and agricultural land.
• increased traffic - people living in rural areas travel 2/3 more by car than people living in towns.
• climatic effects - more energy is used in detached rural houses than in town terraces (this on top of the effect of traffic).
• water problems - shortages, pressure on sewage disposal facilities and the risk of flooding in developing low-lying areas.
• the wasted opportunity for regenerating our existing Kent towns, leading to further decline. The hard lesson from National FOE was that there would be little point in challenging the figures at this stage - that battle has happened and FOE has given Prescott's announcement a "cautious welcome" (!!!) The aim now is to ensure that in every district the new households are provided in the most sustainable way. The emphasis should be:
• to ensure that new houses are built first of all on "brownfield" or previously developed land - although Shepway FOE member Peter Nuttall tells us that Ashford has only one hectare of such land still available!
• the encouragement of conversion of existing buildings to residential use, the refurbishment of derelict homes, and schemes such as Living over the Shop (LOTS).
• an increase in the target for use of brownfield land from John Prescott's 60% to 75%, where this is available for use - obviously no use in Ashford.
• planning for higher density development without losing high quality design - fewer "Brooksides," more upmarket "Coronation Streets."
• resolving the situation whereby schemes for refurbishment of properties require higher VAT payments than new housing schemes - (this was addressed very soon after the meeting by a government announcement.)
• monitoring the use of brownfield land to ensure that it is thoroughly decontaminated where necessary.

Where to from here? Everyone was adamant that the proposal for development at Ashford should be opposed, most obviously on the grounds of inadequate water supplies, but also because without adequate local employment for the occupants of the new houses, they would inevitably be commuters adding to the pressure on the roads and railways of Kent and bringing little commitment to the community of the town. Bosworth suggested that local authorities had earmarked brownfield land for employment use in the future without much prospect of fulfilling that aim - perhaps the time has come to reallocate such areas for mixed development, including some high density housing.

We drew back briefly to look at the broader picture. The South East is heavily populated and acts as a magnet to draw in people from the Midlands and the North, while creating its own rising demand for housing its children as they leave home. One suggestion was to forge links with FOE groups in the North and work with CPRE to campaign for more government support for economic development away from the South East. We were reminded, however, that although the central core of the South East is extremely prosperous, the coastal towns from Gravesend round as far as Brighton contain large areas of extreme need and economic stagnation.

FOE South East Region in collaboration with CPRE organised Empty Homes Week on 10 - 14 April, putting the spotlight on empty properties and asking how much greenfield land could be saved if they were brought back into use. We propose to set up a similar campaign for the Ecofair on 8 July, by photographing empty properties in Shepway. Please let us know if there are any empty properties in your area which we might have missed. Or perhaps you could keep an eye on the planning applications locally to watch for the "Brookside" detached house estates and campaign for more carefully designed sustainable developments. Please let us know.

DUNGENESS B CARBON DIOXIDE LEAK

Following the Site Emergency at Dungeness B Nuclear power Station on April 10^th we contacted the public relations officer for full details and were faxed the following copy of the letter sent to all members of the Local Community Liaison Council (LCLC).

April 10, 2000

Dear LCLC member,

I thought that I would write to you to explain why it was necessary for us to declare a site incident yesterday morning.

Detectors in the basement of reactor 21 alerted the control room of the presence of higher than normal carbon dioxide gas. In such situations, despite the fact that there may be no immediate risk to staff, it is prudent to gather everyone together to ensure that we know where everybody is. This is achieved in our procedures by declaring what we call a ‘site incident’ and we did so at 11:36am. All staff at the station were accounted for as the procedure requires.

The action of declaring a site incident has two immediate results: Firstly, all our staff are assembled and accounted for, this was particularly important in this case as carbon dioxide gas in a closed environment can be harmful to health (It can kill you!!! - Ed) and so we needed to be sure that nobody at the station was in the area. Secondly, a site incident covers all sorts of eventualities, including the situation we were experiencing and so sets up our emergency arrangements of our support centre at our Gloucester office. It also alerts the emergency services of an incident at the station.

There will obviously be a thorough investigation to determine why the carbon dioxide level increased slightly in the basement but I can confirm that the gas was nothing to do with the reactor and was our normal ‘process’ gas. At no time was there any risk to anybody off site and there was no question of radiation being involved. At this stage it looks as though a routine venting test of carbon dioxide, together with the wind direction on the day enabled some gas to enter the basement where it was detected by our normal instrumentation. I will report the full outcome of the investigation to the LCLC.

This incident has been provisionally rated at zero on the International Nuclear Event Scale an event with no safety significance.

I would like to apologise if you were disturbed by the arrival of the emergency services and I will of course be happy to discuss this matter further at our next meeting in June.

Yours faithfully

Dr Andy Spurr   
Station Director

KEEPING UP THE GOOD WORK

There is, as most of us know, no local FOE campaign running at present. But this is no reason for any of us to rest on our laurels - a welcome break between local campaigns is an excellent opportunity to look at other aspects of our commitment to the organisation.

Let me suggest a few:

Review our own daily activities

Regular reviews of our domestic operations are just as useful and rewarding, in the economic sense, as they are in a business, particularly with regard to reduction in acquisition, and waste management - Reduce, Reuse, Repair and Recycle. It is worth taking a fresh look at our regular activities to check on whether we are still achieving optimum targets. The 'water buffalo' does not suit all loo cisterns, but I have found that a variety of half-litre plastic shampoo bottles work well in an already smaller 'water waste preventer' as they are known in the trade. Dripping tap? Tap washers are very cheap, and a doddle to change.

1. Most modern kettles have a fill level indicator on one or both sides, and it should not take long to remember the levels for one, two, three or four cups - thus saving both water and energy. Is it a household rule to switch off lights when not in use? Appropriate for tungsten bulbs, but usually not for fluorescent tubes and low energy bulbs. Unfortunately, the heavier types of the latter tend to be too heavy for the lampholders in uplighters, since the springs of the pins are designed for tungsten lamps.
2. An old large saucepan (with its lid) makes a good temporary receptacle outside the back door for vegetable and fruit peelings, reducing the trips to the compost heap - or in late autumn and winter, to shallow (10 - 12cm) trenches for next year's vegetables (almost all annual plants are shallow-rooted). Finally, most local authorities provide lists of recycling points, and addresses for collection of repairable/reusable items.

Two often people will say 'Oh, I haven't the time to mess about like that", but also too often this is an excuse for reluctance to change old habits for better new ones, which can sometimes save time, money or both. Many businesses have already found this to be true!

Join National FOE

There are many national campaigns, such as the Real Food Campaign (against GM food) and various anti-pollution campaigns, which have national scope and are best organised and run nationally. Lobbying MPs and Industrialists must also be done centrally; this is supported by the national members who are supplied with information enabling them to send torrents of letters to ministers and MPs, which have enormous influence and frequent success. Please commit to a regular giving if you can, join Friends of the Earth Trust, and covenant this to increase its value by 23% if you are a taxpayer.

FOE - phone: 0171 490 1555

E-mail: info@foe.co.uk   FoE National Web site:    http://www.foe.co.uk

Join other local organisations committed to sustainability

Probably the most effective of these at present is LA21. The Rio Summit recognised that the groundwork activities of promoting and operating sustainable activities and lifestyles had to be done at local level, with local authorities acting as the enabling organisations. An FOE member on each of the consultative 'Round Tables' can do much to maintain balanced views and remind other members of the true meaning of sustainability.

More frequently now FOE's national campaigns are being run jointly with one or more other national organisations having broadly similar or complementary aims. Greenpeace, RSPB, CPRE and Transport 2000 are good examples. If you have some interests in any of these, why not ask to attend a few of their meetings, and discover how they operate at grass roots level.

Onlooker

Reacting to the company's response to damning criticism in February by the Health and Safety Executive, Mark Johnston, Nuclear Campaigner at National Friends of the Earth said:

"BNFL cannot move forward safely if it is going in the wrong direction. Its traditional markets are in decline irrespective of the current round of scandals. New procedures and moving staff around is no more than rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. It will not head off big job losses in future years, leading to more embarrassment for DTI and the Government. BNFL will go to the wall if it does not look ahead. Only by switching to clean up contracts and managing the nuclear legacy, both in the UK and around the world, will the company have a profitable future to speak of."

Dear Editor,
A thought on Bridget Woodman's article (Winter '99 Newsletter) on nuclear green, an intensely radiating colour. It is well worth pushing the long-term energy balance of nuclear production in terms of carbon dioxide production. Has anyone assessed the carbon costs of building, maintaining and decommissioning a nuclear power station? This is especially relevant to Dungeness where the CO² production from gravel lorries moving tens of thousand cubic metres or so of gravel each year to keep the power station in place must be immense. I base my comment on an ancient New Scientist article. I assume the Spit is still moving eastward at around a metre or so each year. Perhaps one of your less ancient members would like to research it.* The structural position of the station is on a knife-edge. The reactors may well be above spring high tides and rising tide levels may not be a great threat, but the threat of erosion from more violent storm action and increased wave currents.

* The Dungeness Headland is still moving eastward and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

EDITORIAL

A joint campaign with local people in Cricklewood in North London, FOE, CND and Greenpeace against British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has ended in success. BNFL planned to re-route their spent nuclear flasks, leaving them overnight in sidings in Cricklewood. They wanted to open up a new train route through London (with marshalling yards for trains carrying nuclear flasks at Cricklewood). Local residents, Golders Green FOE and others opposed this. FOE, CND and Greenpeace used the opportunity to open up the entire issue of nuclear trains and the 'need' for reprocessing. BNFL have now said that they will not proceed with their plans for the new route.

Still on the subject of BNFL, Friday 18 February saw the publication of three damning reports by the Health and Safety Executive's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII). Publication of the reports, coincided with BNFL executives' last ditch attempts to patch up the company's relationship with its Japanese customers over falsification of quality assurance records for MOX (mixed oxide fuel) pellet measurements. Investigations revealed that data had been falsified since 1996. The NII considered three possible types of data falsification, the majority of them concerning the copying of a whole spreadsheet and replacing some data entries. This related to a secondary manual check carried out by workers on a randomly selected 200 pellets from each lot of 4000.

BNFL's poor management of the MOX Demonstration Facility (MDF) and their dishonesty about data falsification has been roundly condemned by the UK Government, which has already sent a high level team of Department of Trade and Industry officials to Japan to apologise to their counterparts. BNFL has responded to the NII reports with a safety and management shake-up and has had a clear out of all non-executive directors and half its executive board. It is now desperately trying to re-invent itself to the world as a safe and trustworthy company.

This year's ECO FAIR* is on Saturday 8^th July. We are teaming up with Shepway District Council's Environmental Education Officer, Fiona Jarrett to support her 'Litter Campaign', which will include a litter picking competition aimed at children throughout the Shepway area, with prizes for the most successful pickers. Neptune Radio's Road Show will be there all day, and will present the prizes at 1 pm.

We have a full programme of street theatre and music throughout the day. We will have out usual 'Blackspots' campaign, which this year is being extended to include 'Empty Homes'. This is to highlight the number of empty properties in the area which could be renovated and utilised to help prevent some of the unnecessary building on greenfield sites in our area.

Anyone wishing to help set up or run any of our stalls on the day,
please contact Barrie Botley on 01303 257046.             

ECO FAIR 2000 TIMETABLE & FULL DETAILS                                                      Moira Stuart