National Policy for the Built Environment

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I was very pleased to be invited to serve on this ad hoc Select Committee. Its scope tied in with my activity as a property professional and my involvement with the APPG for Excellence in the Built Environment, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I also declare my vice-presidencies of the LGA and the NALC, and I am an owner of several historic buildings.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for her introduction to the debate, and to her and to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for conceiving of the committee. I too pay tribute to our excellent chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, who kept us in order, despite some strongly held, persistent and vocal views. I echo the appreciation from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for our special adviser and our excellent clerical team. They were absolutely first class.

One thing one learns quickly in this House is that, however knowledgeable one may be as a practitioner in matters to do with the built environment, there are always others from other backgrounds who can effortlessly surpass one’s own knowledge and experience. So it has been for me in this very highly qualified group. Indeed, I suspect that I learned more on occasions than I contributed, and I am very grateful to my fellow committee members for that indulgence. I echo the noble Baroness’s comments that, for all the expertise and devotion to task, it feels as if the effort has rather sunk like a stone, almost without trace. I will address only a selection of what is a very broad canvas indeed.

We all aspire to successful built environments. They are the backbone to our sense of place, our feelings of inclusion and safety and the public-spiritedness of our nation. Old and historic or brand new and flashy, they underpin our work/life balance, quality of life, productivity, individual and family financial security, and human aspiration. Our national residential real estate inventory depends on this success, and with it our banking and finance systems. The quality of the built environment is, in short, a key economic driver, even if its definition escapes accurate codification.

The Government’s response disappointed me. Paragraph 20 claims that there is,

“strong policy co-ordination on matters that affect the built environment”.

I have not really noticed that. Paragraph 23 goes on to state:

“The planning system supports good design and place making”.


Really? I acknowledge that it does not militate against them, but to suggest any proactivity is a trifle far-fetched, given the dearth of resources available to local authorities and the overwhelming pressures to build more houses. One cannot help feeling that, just as it was on the last occasion we were under such housing pressure, pursuit of numbers may well come at the expense of quality, as has been mentioned by others.

I remind the Committee that the Built Environment All-Party Parliamentary Group, of which I am a vice-chair, also reported, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, noted, on build quality last year. In the last two years, I have had to advise, on a professional basis, on solutions for excessively poor acoustic insulation in one new residential construction and woefully inadequate thermal insulation in another. I do not believe either was a one-off situation, even if it cannot necessarily be described as systemic. The recommendation that there should be a chief built environment adviser to government should have been an easy one for the Government to accept.

We risk causing damage in a number of respects. One has only to look at the dynamic of government insistence on more houses as compared with many communities’ natural wish to ensure that they do not get lumbered with more than their fair share, or more than they are capable of absorbing without destroying their own essential sense of place. It is not difficult to see that outcomes here can be capricious. As someone who advises on development land, I can safely affirm that the process remains the preserve more of the bully than of the conciliator.

I have always regarded successful built environments as much as a social condition subsequent as a design construct. The new towns of the 1950s, devised on the then innovative “neighbourhood concept”, often took decades to bed in socially and become settled communities. Meanwhile, care for the surroundings suffered. Some locations never came good: bleak post-war tower blocks with a rat run of galleries, passages and landings wrote their own social and environmental epitaphs nearly from day one. Yet some other, low-rise developments that might have been likened to rabbit warrens—I have come across a few—very often were highly successful and well regarded by occupants. Success levered in occupier commitment, care for appearance and maintenance, and regular reinvestment. Not all successes continued to be so, but the failures seldom, if ever, recovered, and it is these failures that affected the health and well-being of occupants.

Critically, this depends on, and is underpinned by, the people who make the community, and their willingness to be helpful, considerate, good neighbours, and so on. Insert one problem occupier, and it is easy to see how that can unravel and the cohesion being lost through such things as loutish behaviour, noise, antisocial activity and perhaps crime. I declare an interest in that I am married to a community mediator, so I hear some of this across the kitchen table. Just as there are, and should be, incentives to invest, renew and better one’s home and its environment, so there should be incentives for others, who may not be quite so inclined, to at least tolerate and accord with that basic instinct and aspiration of the community. There probably needs to be a better process for mediating out some of these problems. It is not about deprivation: I have come across plenty of wealthy, well-educated but undeniably loutish and antisocial types in high-value locations. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York said, there is social capital at stake here, and that has economic worth.

On the physical scale, the first question that seldom seems to be asked is where it would be most convenient for people to live, work and transact their daily lives. This is not the same as municipalities and communities deciding where the least worst place is to put housing development. The entire concept has to have a human scale, be inherently convenient and function well. Just as medieval settlements were based on strategic locations with access to materials, transportation, alternative means of getting about, trade, communications and perhaps defensive qualities, so we need multiple advantage as a backcloth to planning built environments, not just to assume that advantage can be created on the drawing board.

The next question is about optimising space. An environment must, to some degree, uplift, inspire and be durable, and not compromise lifestyles through inadequate living space, poor external spatial attributes or disregard of relationships to on-site or off-site amenities. The green space and trees mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, would certainly correspond with that. Constructing a block with minimal-sized accommodation for, perhaps, first-time buyers risks building in a societal monoculture. We have seen what excessive uniformity does from examples in the past. I seem to recall them being called,

“little boxes made of ticky tacky”,

in the 1960s. Now, one of my children refers to much modem urban flat development as “white boxes”. Are we building the modern versions of an overnight bivouac or are we creating homes to which people relate emotionally and about which they have a feeling of contentment beyond designer-box ticking? Does development cater for future lifestyles, for singles, couples, families, extended families, those with disabilities and those in old age? Some claims for lifetime status are more than a country mile from the facilities and infrastructure necessary to make it a reality. The lifetime homes approach will be built only at a rate that hugely underestimates the core importance of this concept to the well-being of society, besides which it appears at the moment to be a planning optional extra.

Do our developments have durability at their heart, or do bits fall off? Is maintenance made difficult through inaccessibility? Are repairs rendered troublesome because the designers did not think hard enough about what could go wrong? What about repairing parts of the structure if things do go wrong? Look at basic service components— electrical controls, tap washers, locks, draught seals and extractors—that cannot be replaced because there is no maintenance built into the design and no obligation on anybody to provide matching spare parts for the normally expected life of the component. Repairing them or retrofitting becomes expensive and disruptive. It is a poor reflection on the corporate social responsibility of providers and specifiers.

What about the wider environment in respect of the protection that communities need for the longer-term putting down of roots? Do open spaces get built over and low-rise dwellings become overshadowed by tower blocks or other environmental degradation? In short, does accommodation provide comfort, convenience in use and reassurance in terms of its effect on the human psyche, or does it confuse and unsettle, become threatening or even risky? Such failings may not be a cost that falls on the public purse, but it falls on the nation none the less. In other words, it is a cost that occurs somewhere. Often residents in older parts of larger town and cities are literally miles from the nearest green space. Not very long ago, planning departments in my part of the country were saying that it was okay to build on urban playing fields and green space and to provide a replacement on the urban fringe.

I do not believe that there is adequate co-ordination of many of these factors between government departments, between them and local government or between either of them and local communities, let alone with residents. I do not believe there is anywhere near adequate spatial planning at neighbourhood level or post-construction evaluation by government. Most of the Government’s response to our report seems to be explaining how they have enabled others to do various things without any notion of their own role in making sure that it is actually delivered. This approach is much too diffuse, fragmented and unco-ordinated; it lacks an insistence on minimum standards, as other noble Lords have said, and this matters. The Government aimed to provide 1 million new homes between 2015 and 2020; they are well behind target. They also said that the population will grow by 4.3 million in the next 10 years, which must mean in excess of 200,000 homes a year, every year for the next 10 years. Our report is entitled Building Better Places. Even at this build rate, it is a very small proportion per annum compared to the necessary maintenance, management and upgrading of the existing housing stock, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, of perhaps 24 million homes. A good proportion of them have poor thermal insulation, expensive or obsolete heating systems, wasteful combined drainage arrangements and environmental challenges due to traffic and air pollution, yet they are rich in the embedded energy of what is already there, and a good deal of them have considerable character and charm.

I move on to one other recommendation that we made about new construction methods—namely, modular or offsite construction. I have seen some of this in action, mainly around lightweight steel-framed construction, and it is very impressive. I also have professional experience of timber-panel and timber-frame construction. It can clearly provide a partial answer to a yawning skills gap, is less weather sensitive and has the potential for better quality control, in the sense it is not being done in outside conditions. The argument against it seems to be that it is currently much more expensive than comparable traditional build, but I am certain the cost will come down with volume as it rolls out. The second problem is that the market apparently likes traditional build. For “market”, one might read mortgage lenders. Although I cannot be certain, I suspect that it is their concerns that fuel this sentiment. European neighbours with harsher climates have no such concerns, so I think we are missing a trick here in not rolling this out more. But I suspect it is never going to be the major component of housing.

I have learned one thing about modern, and particularly very energy-efficient, construction with intricate installations, which is that it is extremely demanding of design performance and build quality. It matters if the potential for the occasional peril—the leaking roof, the burst pipe, flood, fire or tempest—is not factored into the equation at the design stage. All buildings should have a degree of flood resilience. It does not matter whether they are in a particular flood area or not, because it can happen for other reasons than conventional flooding. They should be relatively incombustible and not designed so that a dead pigeon in the rainwater outlet can cause tens of thousands of pounds of damage. There should be space around for maintenance and repair, as well as of course for visual and other amenities. I despair that after four years, some of the buildings with so-called maintenance-free cladding go green with algae, which has to be expensively washed off with biocides. That does not match my idea of sustainability criteria, even if the solar panels on the roof of the building mean that they are net contributors to the electricity grid.

The fact that these things are still going on reinforces me in the belief that the Government need to take the recommendations of this Select Committee rather more seriously than currently appears to be the case and to understand that a strong economic rationale sits behind this.