Green policies 'could impose major costs on working and middle classes'

Green policies designed to counter global warming could impose "enormous costs" on working and middle-class communities in cities like London, forcing them into a future of restricted job opportunities, cramped housing and fuel poverty, a report claimed today.

Demographer Joel Kotkin argued that moves to reduce the "human footprint" on the Earth in terms of carbon emissions represented a threat to the upward mobility traditionally delivered by large cities.

His report The Broken Ladder, published today in London by the Legatum Institute thinktank, warns that the green movement's emphasis on sustainability could prove "intrinsically incompatible" with improved living standards for a broad spectrum of the urban population.

The lives of people in middle-income neighbourhoods are "often ignored" in the drive to cut emissions and develop a low-carbon economy, he said. Yet a failure to respond to their aspirations threatens to bring London's long history of social progress to an end.

While most job creation in the coming decades is likely to take place in "posh" central and west London and Canary Wharf, economic growth in other parts of the capital is predicted to be "minimal" and may fall in south London boroughs over the years to 2016, he said. Manufacturing jobs in the capital may fall by 80,000 in the next six years, said Mr Kotkin, a fellow in urban futures at the private Chapman University in California and an adjunct fellow with the Legatum Institute.

"The agenda to address anthropogenic global warming promotes policies that seem likely to depress economic growth, particularly in cities, through further declines of productive industry, unaffordable housing prices and high levels of taxation," he said.

And he warned that depressed living standards are likely to undermine public support for green initiatives, as well as fostering class and racial tensions.

"Policies that prolong poverty and depress mobility seem likely to delay the necessary social consensus needed to enact long-term environmental improvements," said the report.

"When concern for the sustenance of families grows, focus on environmental issues tends to decline, as is already clear in recent surveys in the advanced countries.

"The much overworked term 'sustainability' needs to include both economic and social components, as opposed to strictly ecological ones."

The aspirations of middle-class inhabitants of London suburbs have already come under "assault" from environmentally-driven restrictions on construction, claimed the report.

"Suburbanites are already in the crosshairs of the climate change mobilizers, who fairly well block any real chance of a rapid expansion of housing along London's periphery," it said.

"But the news for urban dwellers may not be so good either, since the new denser housing that is now proclaimed 'sustainable' tends to be very cramped indeed.

"Already, Britain has the smallest size new homes of any advanced country in the world today, and climate change logic seems to suggest that these will become smaller, not larger, over time."

Planning orthodoxy promoting ever greater density in suburban areas threatens the social and economic attractiveness of areas like Croydon and Richmond-upon-Thames in south London, said the report.

"The policy has been characterised by its critics as a direct assault on the quality of life for millions of working and middle class families," wrote Mr Kotkin. "One recent government study, for example, notes that gardens and green space have been concreted-over in some 180,000 new homes."

Meanwhile, the shift to renewable fuels demanded by environmentalists could quadruple the cost of energy in Britain, forcing a large proportion of the population into fuel poverty, claimed Mr Kotkin.

And he concluded: "Aspirational London - the entrepreneurial city - seems under siege, in danger of becoming dominated by a neofeudal structure of civil servants and the entitled and inherited wealthy, with a shrinking private sector middle class.

"Unless steps are made to address this trajectory, a remarkable long history of urban social progress could come to an end."