Architecture and the Built Environment

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Whitaker on securing this important debate. I want to put on record our thanks to her for her tireless commitment to design in the United Kingdom. I thank all speakers who helped to flesh out the report we are discussing today, and to reflect on some of the points made.

I am not sure what the Minister of State at the DCMS thought he was going to get when he commissioned Sir Terry Farrell for his review. As has been mentioned, it was done very quickly—in just under a year. It had a fantastic advisory group. The names of people who joined it are extensive and important. It had a very public and important engagement process with stakeholders, and with 60 recommendations it has brought together a huge number of issues that we need to seriously consider if we are to make progress in the areas that it touches. The results are very comprehensive and they will need some working through and thought before they are implemented, as I hope they will be. There is no doubt at all that this is an important report.

Another aspect that noble Lords have mentioned, and which is important to record, is that people have read the report and liked what they have read—so much so that there is quite a lot of enthusiasm across the trade press about it, and a lot of anticipation about where it might be taken. As the Minister said, he doubts whether a more thorough and wide-ranging exercise to seek out views and ideas has taken place in the sector for several generations. Having said that, it is a bit of pity that more has not been made of the preceding work done between the last Government, and in particular, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Chesterton, the excellent report Towards an Urban Renaissance, written by the urban taskforce, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, which was published in 1999 but still bears reading today.

The report has five cross-cutting themes, which people have mentioned. They are important in the sense that they form a new appreciation of the training information required among the population as a whole, in the profession of architecture and planning and among those who have responsibilities for developing buildings, places and spaces. These recommendations, which take up a large proportion of what is there, are important. However, as others have mentioned, too, so is a commitment to making the ordinary better and improving the everyday built environment—an important theme, which we must not lose sight of—plus the requirement, as we must all have these days, to have a sustainable and low-carbon future.

Having said that those are the five main strands of it, it is important that the 60 recommendations, which are more detailed and specific in the traditional sense, are also looked at. Several noble Lords picked out some of them and I do not want to go through them in any detail but, importantly, the strong accent on heritage and the way in which it can truly be a part of the sustainability of modern development was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. My noble friend Lord Sawyer talked about the need to think creatively about the place discussions—a sense of trying to bring people together in new configurations so that we can look at places and spaces. That was picked up by my noble friend Lady Andrews and it is also very important. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, brought up an interesting point about the way in which experience of architecture and its skills have leached out of our public departments. If what he says about the numbers is true, that is really quite shocking. Design literacy will be important but it will not substitute for the professional skills and training that go into architecture, even though the report says that that training might need to be done in a different way.

I was also struck by what my noble friend Lord Sawyer said about implementation; others also touched on this point. At the time the review was launched, the Minister said:

“Good design builds communities, creates quality of life, and makes places better for people to live, work and play in. I want to make sure we’re doing all we can to recognise the importance of architecture and reap the benefits of good design”.

You cannot throw out phrases such as:

“I want to make sure we’re doing all we can”,

without having a suggestion that you might have to follow through on that. It is the fate of many politicians to will the end but not the means. I hope that is not going to be the problem with this report. When he comes to reply, can the Minister confirm whether those aspirations still remain the Government’s intentions here? I say this because in the note accompanying the report, Mr Vaizey says:

“I hope this report is the beginning of a dialogue within the industry about how we can build on our successes and recognise the critical importance of architecture and design in all aspects of our lives”.

That sounds like damning with faint praise. Simply consigning a report to further industry debate is not going to deliver the promised future. This report deserves better than that and I hope that the Minister can reassure us.