The Government's flagship eco-town initiative to provide environmentally friendly housing was yesterday branded a "farce" by Tories.
Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps claimed the project would only deliver a tiny fraction of the homes needed to meet the national shortage and the dwellings would be built to lower environmental standards than other developments.
He said more p
roperties would be built by working with communities rather than through a "Soviet-style" Whitehall project.
The Government is considering 15 proposals for the new towns, which will aim to tackle both the country's housing shortage and the problem of climate change.
But Mr Shapps said: "The problem is that there's almost nothing green left about these plans whatsoever."
The scheme had "descended into the sort of farce" seen with the introduction of the home information packs, he claimed.
He said the proposed new towns would only provide around 75,000 homes by 2016 and would only be built at the Government's Sustainability Code 3 – when all other properties built in 2016 would be at Code 6.
Mr Shapps told MPs: "The simple fact is more homes can be produced when you work with communities rather than coming up with large, centrally-driven, Whitehall-driven, top-down, Soviet-style planning from the centre."
Opening a Commons debate, Housing Minister Caroline Flint said the "exciting" proposals would create sustainable communities rather than simply green homes.
She said: "Eco-towns offer us a unique opportunity not only to address the housing shortage and to tackle climate change but also to seek to trigger economic growth across a whole area."
Later, Ms Flint dismissed Mr Shapps's claims on sustainability codes as "complete nonsense".
She said in a statement: "The Government is working with industry to deliver zero-carbon new homes from 2016.
"Eco-towns will go much further and sooner – they must be zero-carbon across the whole development, not just homes but also shops, schools and workspaces too.
"The scale afforded by the eco-town programme provides the opportunity for green innovation which will have wider benefits for the existing community and future new building."
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