Quality in the Built Environment

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I offer my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) on securing the debate. She covered in great detail and with great aplomb the snagging problems that arise with individual homes.

I want to take us back a stage in the process. I do not want to see the built environment characterised by little boxes or rabbit hutches, nor do I want to see it characterised by little boxes and rabbit hutches that are badly built. In around 2011, I was one of those here who was responsible for introducing neighbourhood planning as a means of dealing with that. Neighbourhood planning has become very well known for giving communities a say over where housing should go, but it is less well known that they have the right also to comment on what those buildings should look like.

The reason we have a large number of rabbit hutches and little boxes is that house builders largely go about the building of their houses on their own, with no influence from the communities in which they operate. A great deal of influence from communities would be of great advantage to the people who will live in those houses and to the communities, because of the overall impression they create, as well as to the house builders, who would produce exactly what someone wants.

That deals a bit with the big picture stuff. I completely agree that there is still a need to get the details of the housing right, but I want to continue on that in my role as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary design and innovation group. That is particularly relevant to the points I made about the use of neighbourhood planning for people to decide what sort of houses they want to get involved with.

I was very pleased to see that the Design Council has produced a guide to neighbourhood planning. When a body such as the Design Council gets involved in neighbourhood planning, it represents a significant shift in the attitude of communities to taking advantage of the principles we set out in neighbourhood planning, to talk about and have influence over the design aspects of what they are trying to include in their neighbourhood plan. Having some influence on design and being able to participate in the design process is fundamental to the success of the neighbourhood planning process.

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is right to bring up the issue of design. Does he share my concern at how often new houses and new settlements are designed without any thought for disabled people who might live in those settlements? At the moment, an office block is being converted into a new community in my constituency. The local authority is not able to insist on disabled access in that office block because it is a conversion, which means the rules on disabled access do not apply.

[John Howell]

My right hon. Friend raises an interesting point. The conversion of buildings is largely permitted development, and therefore the community has no ability to get into that. I go back to my fundamental point, which is that the community’s involvement in the process at the beginning should take account of what will be required for disabled people. That should feed into the design parameters that should be being discussed with the house builders, to get the design of the house right.

I echo the Design Council’s comment that embedding good design in a neighbourhood plan is crucial. The sad thing is that very few neighbourhood plans include design. They are mostly concerned with where the housing should go, and they do not look at design. Even within my constituency, there is a community that forgot to look at design criteria when producing its neighbourhood plan. Later, when it tried to object to a particular design format being used for an area, it did not have anything to rely on to make that change. It is of no consequence to that community now that it missed the boat, but that serves as a good lesson for communities looking at producing a neighbourhood plan that they should include some design features.

Overall, I completely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds in her concentration on problems with individual houses, but I urge communities to go back one stage in the process. They need to include design in their neighbourhood plan and ensure they have really got to grips with what they want to see, so that they can influence the type and design of buildings from the outset.