Architecture and the Built Environment

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I warmly endorse the case made by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and share her enthusiasm for this review. I am so supportive of the general thrust of the analysis and recommendations that I fear that I may be thought unduly critical in expressing a very sincere warning about one conclusion and the associated recommendations.

Conclusion 1B3 says that decision-makers should receive training in design literacy. What follows is full of good intentions but we all know what happens to good intentions. From my experience in the 1960s and 1970s, as the vice-chair of a planning committee, and when I was working for and with architects, and especially as a senior member of the RIBA staff, I am filled with alarm by this recommendation.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Who is to undertake this training? It is an oddity that councillors, faced with the subjective advice of a fire safety officer or a highway engineer, will invariably bow to the superior judgment. Given careful guidance by an architect, drawing on long training, expertise and experience of three-dimensional design, that same committee will treat it as if it is the subjective result of personal taste.

We are all amateur architects. At an individual level we would never trust our teeth to a farrier or our appendix to a barber; but individual buildings and their impact on the built environment are daily left to the tender mercies of the unqualified. I simply do not understand how this recommendation can be made to work to the benefit of the environment and the wider community. Given that about 50% of the top-tier local authorities in the country do not even employ a chief officer architect today, what quality of training can we expect and what notice will the trainees take of it anyway?

In those circumstances we must look carefully at the pattern of employment of qualified architects. Since the 1980s the proportion of architects in the public sector has dropped from 63% to 11%. I am glad to say that unitary authorities have managed to reintegrate some of the skills that are necessary, but all too often, where there are two tiers, the planning profession is split and there are no architect-planners left. I return to my original warning and question. What training in design literacy will take place? That is surely no substitute for appropriately qualified architectural advice.

I am very strongly in support of this review, not least because it makes congratulatory reference to the “long life, loose fit, low energy” project that I headed at the RIBA all those years ago. I am bound to be in support. Yet I wonder whether it has touched on a really important issue and shied away from an appropriate response. While I am wholly supportive of the localism agenda, I must question whether local authorities which have no such architectural expertise at a senior officer level in house and not even a department on permanent call should continue to be allowed to exercise the full range of plan-making and development-control responsibilities.