National Policy for the Built Environment

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, the Select Committee report is a very good one indeed. It is a comprehensive analysis of the challenges that we face as we aspire to a high-quality built environment. The Select Committee rightly castigates the Government for their lack of ambition and of political leadership and for the incoherence of policy across Whitehall. The committee has an unequivocal commitment to high-quality design and place-making, and something that I like very much about the report is the unabashed commitment to beauty in ordinary lives.

“Ideas of beauty are among the noblest which can be presented to the human mind”,


wrote John Ruskin, and noble Lords on the Select Committee have written their report in that spirit. They found opinion research showing that 81% of people think that everyone should regularly experience beauty in their lives—one is left wondering who the 3% are who disagree, but I assume they are volume housebuilders. Sadly, the B-word is not in the Government’s lexicon.

The committee, of course, recognises that planning must not obstruct growth and that we need, rather urgently, to have more houses in this country—but it says not at any price, and in this it is surely in tune with the values of the British people. I fear that the Government are not in tune with those values. I was dismayed to see the reference at paragraph 102 in the Government’s response to “UK PLC”. What a spiritually demeaning metaphor for our country. The Government make no apology for having sacrificed on the altar of productivity their policy on zero-carbon homes. Of course, good design makes for good productivity.

The committee discusses the crises of planning: both the crisis of the planning profession and the crisis of place-making capacity. The status and the numbers of planners available to local planning authorities have declined, and there are insufficient skills available. I believe that it is the case that there are now more qualified planners working for developers than working for local planning authorities—the gamekeepers have become poachers. Long gone is the era when the Buchanan report, Traffic in Towns, reissued as a Penguin book, was a bestseller and when the planning profession appealed to the idealism of the ablest in their generation.

It is fair to say that there was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when planning perhaps became too arrogant a profession, and indeed sometimes prone to megalomania. Wholesale redevelopment imposed upheaval on communities of a kind that bred great resentment. Estates were too often poorly designed and constructed and then poorly maintained. So there was public hostility to the planning profession and to planning, and it is incumbent on planners to have a little humility, as I am sure they do as they think back on those times.

We then had the cult of the free market, with the disempowerment of planners, local authorities and the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when developers more or less ran riot and when much development was anarchic and dispiriting. In places where there was money, degraded building environments were created, while the places where there was no money were left behind, with repercussions that we now feel in the life of the nation. It is one of the factors behind the Brexit vote—although let me say, in favour of Brexit, that it will allow us to have our own, rational policy on VAT where heritage is concerned.

We are entering a period of new politics with a different ethos, and I am very pleased that the leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of this country is telling us that public intervention may be benign. I hope that this is a prelude to the rehabilitation of planning. However, there is a very long way to go. The report tells us of 46% cuts to planning departments between 2010-11 and 2014-15. The government response seems to be in denial about many of the criticisms in the report. Paragraph 20 tells us that the Government consider,

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

The Government pay lip service to the duty of leadership but in the response they dump the responsibility on the chief planner. Unless I missed it, there is nothing at all about raising the qualifications and status of planners. I do not think that they responded to the excellent recommendation from the Select Committee that there should be bursaries for planners and that we should look across the channel to the ambitious policies in France to ensure that there is a strong planning profession and a strong role for planning.

Paragraph 64 of the Government’s response blandly and disingenuously evades the issues of funding for local planning authorities. It states:

“The Government acknowledges that local authorities need to give planning the priority it needs, to support and safeguard the quality of both existing and new environments. We agree with the thrust of this recommendation but while the Government are continuing to discuss the future resourcing of planning services with a range of interests, it is for local authorities to decide how to deploy their resources to deliver a quality service for their communities”.


I do not think that that is good enough. Indeed, implicit in government policy and in the response is a contempt for planning. As my noble friend Lady Andrews said, we have no planning at a national level, and we now have no regional planning. It is true that the Government introduced neighbourhood plans in the localism legislation. They seem to be an excellent thing, but those neighbourhood plans have to be part of a larger jigsaw. The National Planning Policy Framework is a vapid and vague document—a boneless wonder unstiffened by any detailed planning policy guidance.

The Town and Country Planning Association, like the Select Committee, advocated a humane and socially responsible approach in its report Planning out Poverty and in its Planning4People manifesto. It has inveighed against what it terms,

“weak, deregulated planning policy that is dominated by economics, not people’s needs”.

Where is the vision for housing? There is none that I can see on the part of the Government. The vision of the volume housebuilders is one of meanness, mediocrity and exploitation, as they hoard land to keep supply limited and prices high. However, some people have a vision and I should like to quote from Lynsey Hanley’s wonderful book Estates:

“The true test of a successfully housed population”,


will be,

“when everyone has a home that suits their circumstances, regardless of tenure: affordable, solid enough to last but fluid enough to adapt to the identities and habits of its inhabitants, easily accessible and capable of conferring feelings of security, steadiness, civic pride and self-worth”.

That is a fine statement, but the configuration of policy at the moment is very far from that. The whole thrust seems to be to build houses fast and not to mind if they are trashy. We see this impetus coming in Help to Buy, in the policy on starter homes, where any capital gain in the future will accrue to the lucky starter and not to the community, and in the obligation laid on housing associations to sell their properties.

Where can we hear the call for quality and beauty? Not in this miserable, downbeat government response. There has been a retreat from the proper ambition of government. In 2000, the Labour Government published Better Public Buildings, with a foreword by the Prime Minister. I should like to quote Tony Blair. He said:

“I have asked ministers and departments across government to work towards achieving a step change in the quality of building design in the public sector … leaving behind a legacy of high quality buildings that can match the best of what we inherited from the Victorians and other past generations. And I am determined that good design should not be confined to high profile buildings in the big cities: all of the users of public services, wherever they are, should be able to benefit from better design”.


He went on:

“Over the last few years Britain has benefited from a host of new landmark buildings, many of them funded through the lottery. Now we need to apply the same energy and imagination to improving the tens of thousands of everyday public buildings which play such a vital role in our lives”.


That point about the duty in our own time to create a heritage for the future was very powerfully made in the quotation in the Select Committee’s report from Sunand Prasad, the former president of the RIBA, who has been such an eloquent and consistent advocate for the best values in architecture. There is a barbarism about current policy. The DCMS has been cut out of any responsibility for architecture, and the Government seem to have forgotten, if they ever knew, that Sir John Soane, who created great plans for Whitehall, which were marvellous designs, even if they were not eventually carried though, said that architecture is the queen of the arts.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing, which I co-chair and of which my noble friend Lady Andrews is an invaluable member, heard a plea at a recent meeting from a distinguished planner, Andrew Simpson, who asked us to accept that planning is an art. If that proposition raises eyebrows in our time, it certainly would not have done in Renaissance Italy when, for example, Rossellino and Alberti, acting for Pope Pius II, designed the new city of Pienza, when Michelangelo replanned St Peter’s and the Capitoline Hill for Pope Paul III and when Vespasiano Gonzaga, an enlightened prince and a follower of Vitruvius, designed Sabbioneta. They were great artists and great patrons, and for them of course town planning and place-making were an art.

Pienza and Sabbioneta are now world heritage sites. They were conceived as ideal cities. We have garden cities and new towns. I am not aware that on the occasion of its 50th birthday Milton Keynes was awarded world heritage status, but perhaps it will get a statue of the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, as a consolation prize. The great thing about Milton Keynes is that the people who live and work there like it, which is perhaps the most important consideration of all. It is fashionable among some cognoscenti to sneer at Poundbury, but it is a serious, creative effort to establish a place which is good for the people who live there and will continue to be good for the people who live there in future, and it should be praised. I praise the Government for promising 14 new garden towns or villages.

I was much taken by an article in the Times on 19 January by Clive Aslet, the former editor of Country Life. He said that the great obstacle to good quality development is the cost of land, because developers then say they have no money left to spend on quality design. He suggests that private owners and charities which are going to be there for the long term should not sell their land but should develop it themselves. As they will not have to spend money on land, they will have the resources to spend on the premium—a small premium really—that good design costs, better materials, more generous space and more green in the local environment. He recommends that local authorities should set up housing charities and use compulsory purchase powers to buy retail parks and other desolate and failing developments. Since then, I have been very pleased to see that the owners of Blenheim Palace, Burghley House and Rockingham Castle have said that they want to develop on their estates housing of a quality that they and their tenants in perpetuity will find consonant with the remarkable architectural traditions of those great houses.

Of course, we can build fast if we are clever, but we must always seek to build well and to build for the long term. The additional cost of investment in the near term is abundantly rewarded by better value for money over the medium and longer term. I wonder whether the Government could not have a role in developing new accounting conventions which would better incentivise and encourage all concerned to build for the longer term and not simply to seek immediate reward. When Jane Duncan, the current president of the RIBA, spoke to the all-party parliamentary group, she reiterated the RIBA’s call for post-occupancy evaluation. She suggested that architectural prizes should not be given until a building has been up and in use for at least five years, and that prize juries must get away from their obsession with the image of buildings and the iconic building and preoccupy themselves more with the reality of buildings—how they work for the people who live and work in them. I was surprised that in their response the Government said nothing about their Better Public Building Award, which is a great lever for good and has been used as such. It is strange that in their discussion of prizes they said nothing about that.

The committee deplores the destruction of CABE. I declare an interest as the Minister who established CABE and I still grieve for what has been done to it. The Government rather jauntily want us to think that CABE, as a subsidiary of the Design Council, is still doing a splendid job but, as I understand it, all the witnesses to the Select Committee said that it had been a very bad mistake to downgrade CABE. I see it as an act of political vandalism—a tribute offering to the Treasury, with its institutional philistinism. The Treasury is a curious case of group psychology. I do not doubt that Treasury officials, as individuals in their private lives, are members of conservation societies, where they live in Stoke Poges or Hassocks, but when they turn up to work at Great George Street a dark night embraces them. When I was Minister, I did not have any difficulties with what was then the DETR, now the DCLG; my difficulties were with the Office of Government Commerce in the Treasury, whose values were exclusively economic and commercial.

The report describes very well the achievements of CABE. I would add that it was remarkable value for money and did not leach taxpayers’ money, as the government response suggests. I pay my tribute of praise to the leaders of CABE: two chairs, Sir Stuart Lipton and Paul Finch; and two chief executives, Jon Rouse and Richard Simmons. The series of guidance publications issued by CABE—and, I believe, drafted by Richard Simmons—were of remarkably high quality, and the training programmes that CABE initiated were so valuable. It brought design review to almost all parts of the country, and at almost no cost, because CABE persuaded architects to give their services to design review more or less pro bono as a matter of civic responsibility.

I very much support the committee’s view that CABE should be reincarnated, and I strongly endorse its endorsement of the recommendation from the RIBA that there should be a new office of chief built environment adviser created in government; a unit, which would be the new CABE, based in the Cabinet Office; and an annual report on the built environment to be presented to Parliament. The Government are willing to look at this but suggest that it can all be done by the chief planner. The chief planner has very great personal merits and is much committed to good design but you need an architect, I think, with that imaginative and expert range—whether it is a new Sir John Soane, Rick Mather or Sir Terry Farrell.

Finally, I am very pleased that stress is laid by the Select Committee on the essential link between the built environment and health and well-being. That was well understood by the post-war Labour Government, when Aneurin Bevan was Minister for Health and also responsible for housing. The APPG that I co-chair will draw strongly on what the report has said on this matter. I support its view that there needs to be closer integration between planning policies and health policies, and more use of health impact assessments and health indicators as evidence. I very much endorse what it says about green infrastructure, as my noble friend Lady Whitaker has just insisted. I would add that we want to see much greater use of natural materials in construction. Of course, part M of the building regulations should not fall below the lifetime homes standard.

The Government recognise the case for seeing an important connection between the quality of the built environment and health and well-being—for example, in the context of obesity—but I stress that it is in the field of mental health that this can yield so much. We need environments that support health and help to heal not only the individual but society. When the sun shines, it lifts our spirits. When we are in a beautiful built environment, we feel better. We are happier, saner and more secure—we are more optimistic, and our lives are better.