South East: eMoov calls on NIMBYs to stand aside on proposed Garden Villages

Russell Quirk, CEO of eMoov, one of the UK’s largest estate agency businesses, has welcome the Government’s support of the creation of 14 new Garden Villages across England which could see the building of 48,000 homes. He said it was the time for NIMBYs to stand aside and not cause problems at the local planning stage.

The locations scheduled for development in the South East are Oxfordshire Cotswold on greenfield land six miles from the centre of the city of Oxford which is set to provide around 2,200 new homes and science park development; Welborne near Fareham in Hampshire where 6,000 homes are scheduled; and Longcross across a woodland and farmland area of green belt in Surrey.

The 14 proposed Garden Towns are in addition to the four that the DCLG announced a while back. In addition, a further three new towns will be added to in Aylesbury, Taunton and Harlow.

An allocation of funding has also been pledged to help facilitate these sites and to bring about the swift implementation of 25,000 of the total 200,000 homes in the hope that they will be started as soon as 2020.

Quirk said: "While I am an ultimate democrat, when emotions and politics get in the way of common sense you have no choice but to remove the politics from the process. If that means short-cutting democracy to get the 200,000 homes built, then that is what the Government must do, even if it is against the tide of localism and all such similar political rhetoric of the past few years."