Housing

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I would add “acceptability” to the key words “quality” and “affordability” in the title of the noble Baroness’s important Question—I listened with particular care because I live not so far away from her in Somerset and understand exactly the issues to which she referred, strongly supporting as I do the Government’s housing policies—because, at a time of unparalleled demand for both homes to rent, whether in the public or private sector, and to buy, an equally key inhibitor to the pace of new building is local resistance to plans for new build, much less generally on brownfield sites than on greenfield land, from those who live nearby.

I do not believe that such feelings can be dismissed as mere nimbyism—that is to be arrogant towards those people who care about their local neighbourhoods and landscapes, even though I strongly believe that we must build more—for, too often, the design of many new homes in privately built areas is poor, if not sometimes downright crummy and ugly. The homes are tiny—the smallest in Europe. Try putting a broom in a cupboard in some newly constructed homes in both the public and private sector and you will find you need the skills of a contortionist to make this possible.

The landscaping at the edges of so much new housing is equally sketchy if not non-existent—the kind of hard edges to a building development which do not help the landscape at all. The pollution of the night sky by over-lighting is often damaging in the extreme, both to the people who live around and those who move into those housing estates. These are not just the despairing cries of architectural or landscape aesthetes. If local authorities and mass housebuilders deal with these issues, they will not necessarily make such new building, particularly on greenfield or edge-of-village sites, welcomed with open arms, but they will make it much more easily accepted in the long term, mitigating in the interim years of protest and probably delay in construction, which neither the Government nor those who want new homes wish.

Local authorities have fewer resources, so they have fewer architects, whether for the built environment or for landscapes. Some big housebuilders seem to have no architects at all. They are staffed mostly by people who turn over the concepts for the houses or flats they wish to build to simple so-called designers, whose job is to cram as much as possible on as little as possible, rather than using architects to raise the quality of the built environment and design and thus to improve not only the acceptability of those new homes I wish to see, but their speed of construction and, in the end, their profitability for companies and shareholders alike. Good design is not expensive; it is just thoughtful design and it is vital in our housing drive. I hope that that is a totally bipartisan or tripartisan—or indeed involving the Bishops—point of view, or whatever other link we have in the Chamber this evening. There is nothing party political about this.

The laying of roads and building of homes is an irreversible step. There is no turning back—land built on is never returned to the plough or woodland—so it is the bounden duty of housebuilders in the public and private sectors to do all they can to improve the sometimes shoddy and gimcrack designs of what they run up, and of the architectural profession to help break down the sometimes iron curtain between them and the mass housebuilders and fulfil the Government’s excellent plans. However, if these issues are not dealt with—I do not wish to see some government gauleiter or design overlord coming in to say that something has to be designed this way or that way—I am fearful that, in the hundreds of thousands of new houses and flats we need to see built in the next five years or so, we may be presiding over the kind of poor and destructive blots on the landscape that none of us wishes to see. I hope that the Government will take these concerns seriously.