National Policy for the Built Environment

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend Lady O’Cathain for her excellent chairing of the Select Committee. It was a great pleasure to serve on it under her leadership. I, too, thank the superb committee staff for all their help throughout, and all the witnesses. I found the government response to the Select Committee report mixed. This is a pressing, controversial issue, reinforced by steady press coverage. It is therefore a shame that the report was not treated with more urgency. I will cover just three points today.

The first is Nigel Atkins’s written evidence covering the French approach, which had ideas that took the debate outside the United Kingdom, and some positive suggestions. I recommend that anyone interested read his evidence. His main conclusion is that the French co-ordinate public expenditure to allow local government to administer local neighbourhood plans. They have a well-oiled social housing sector, essentially financed by deposits from the national savings bank, but the finance is not released until 40% to 50% of the project is presold off-plan. We could also take a look at the Grand Paris project. I applaud our Prime Minister’s public wish to solve the housing crisis in this country.

Secondly, the committee concluded—I reiterate the thoughts of my noble friend Lord Inglewood—that the places we create have a profound effect on the quality of life, behaviours, health and experiences of the people who live and work in them. This includes mental health and stress, especially when the infrastructure does not work. I would like the Government to take this into account. I stress the important role played by historic buildings, townscapes and landscapes, too. The Government should publish a proactive, long-term national strategy for managing the historic environment, which should be considered an asset rather than an obstacle to successful future developments.

The Government did not explicitly accept or reject the recommendation for a national strategy. Instead, their response detailed the work being undertaken by the Government, Historic England and the Heritage Lottery Fund to promote the historic environment. The committee also recommended that the Government should review the rates of VAT charged on repairs to listed buildings and examine the economic rationale for reducing the rate.

Thirdly and finally, I suggest to your Lordships a few relevant ideas put forward by Sir Roger Scruton in a broadcast from which I quote freely. He reminded us that the UK is the most densely populated country in Europe after Malta, surpassing even Holland. Take a trip through the Dutch countryside, however, and then a trip through the countryside of England, and it would seem to be quite the other way round.

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[Baroness Rawlings]

Before we stopped I was talking about density. Holland is chock-a-block with houses, roads, businesses and unsightly business parks. At night, the whole sky is ablaze with light pollution, and you always feel in range of traffic noise. England, by contrast, offers green trees and woodland, country lanes between quiet villages, landscapes in which the dominant feature is a church steeple or a country house, and a night sky in which you can still see the stars. For miles on end, the place seems inhabited only because the fields and hedgerows, gates, walls and copses remind you that there must be people looking after and caring for it.

Ours is a country whose inhabitants have loved it not merely as a means for their economic purposes, but for its beauty and as an end in itself—not entirely, of course, but sufficiently to impede the worst of the destruction that might have come from the Industrial Revolution and the successive population explosions, through one of which we are living now. When the Industrial Revolution threw the future of the countryside into doubt, people began to combine in order to protect it. The Lake Poets agitated against such industrialisation. Octavia Hill was instrumental in founding the National Trust in the 1890s, so setting the pattern for popular movements, trusts and societies devoted to the cause of England’s built environment and beauty, which is so important. I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, when he talked about beauty and quality.

Then emerged a political force with the Town and Country Planning Association in 1899, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and 100 smaller civic initiatives encouraging people to lie down in front of the bulldozers. The green belt principle followed and the end of ribbon development. Now, we have the dynamic Historic England. I am pleased that at paragraph 115 of their response the Government reiterate their commitment and support for Historic England, which is so important to us today. The English countryside and our built environment are icons of our national inheritance—a symbol of what we are. They were a source of inspiration in the art and literature of the two world wars, they have been at the heart of our children’s stories, and they form the background to everyone’s dream of retirement.

The committee was concerned about the application of quality design, quality architecture and beauty. As Sir Roger Scruton says, post-war development in our cities has been a disaster. Thanks in part to modernist building types and their advocacy by the architectural profession and in part to socialist dogma, whole areas of our cities were torn down, cut in half by dual carriageways and replaced by tower blocks, without streets or shops or meeting places. The result was the loss of communities. The policy was justified by arguing that by building high you increased the density of the population. That argument is provably false. Research carried out by the organisation Create Streets has established beyond doubt that the traditional terraced street laid out in the familiar way achieves greater population density than the normal high-rise estate, while opening the way to shops, theatres, schools and places of worship, so forming the hub of a settled community. We came to this conclusion many times in our meetings.

As for London, the most beautiful parts of which are now mutilated with clunky gadgets designed by modernist nerds for faceless multinational predators, we can only hope that our new mayor will appoint some architectural advisers who are better than the last ones before it is too late. As we know, every proposal for development will be greeted by protests from existing residents who lose the amenity of a quiet neighbourhood or a beautiful view, and the developers and planners will be quick to dismiss the protesters with the nimby label—“Not in my back yard”. However, people do not, as a rule, want to stop development. They want to make certain that development, if it occurs, looks right—not nimby but bimby, or, “Beauty in my back yard”, which is known as the marriage council for the built heritage. Time and again, we heard from experts that public consultation begins when the land has already been chosen, the density of housing has been settled by the accountants and just a few weeks remain before permission is granted. The community is asked for its opinion only when it is too late.

That is the root cause of many protests. The solution is to make certain that the community is involved from the outset. Existing residents have a greater investment in the character of the place where they live than any developer possibly could have. All the real choices—the aesthetic choices—should be theirs. Luckily, this is now feasible. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ Prince’s Foundation has developed a toolkit devoted to promoting “beauty in my back yard”. This lays out a step-by-step process, whereby communities, planners and developers can work together for a result acceptable to all.

The foundation has discovered, not surprisingly, that people choose styles, details and street plans that are fitting and harmonious extensions of what they already have. They come up with just the kind of scheme for rural housing that Create Streets now advocates for towns. Sadly, the committee never managed to visit Poundbury, a highly successful building project. I see in the newspaper today that the Duke of Marlborough and other large landowners are to develop similar projects.

The advice from Sir Roger, which marries easily with our recommendations for a solution to our housing problem, is to demolish the high-rise estates, create streets in place of them and provide all planners and local communities with bimby toolkits.