Parliament Debates Urban Design

The title of this post should really be ‘Parliament debates urban design, but not for very long’.

Ths week Nick Raynsford tabled an amendment, promoted by RIBA, to the Localism Bill to require that developers, in their pre-application consultations, have regard to the views of a local design panel if there is one and if they express views on a potential application.

In response Greg Clark said ‘After the many hours that we have spent scrutinising the Bill, if there is one outcome that we would all want to see, it is that the built environment is better than it otherwise would be, and that it is beautiful and functional for people to live in.’

He went on to say ‘I want to advantage good design, and I share his view and that of others about design review panels.’

While the amendment was not accepted the minister confirmed that he was talking to RIBA and considering how best to include this objective in the national planning policy guidance.

So there is a clear cross party committment to good design but still a debate about how best to achieve it.

The planning system to date has tended to rely on using various policing approaches. Whether it is design review by organisations like CABE or local design panels, or decisions by local planning authorities or planning inspectors the evidence is clear, these approaches have not worked.

It is well understood that good design requires a good client and a good designer.

What is debated is how to achieve that. The obvious question is whether you can remove bad clients and bad designers from the design process.

The reality seems to be that there will always be better and worse designers and clients and there will always be better and worse design. It is possible to provide a cut off in quality to remove the worst but not possible to remove all except the very best.

So our objective should be to set up systems that, as the minister puts it, advantage good design. 

So what would such systems look like?

CABE, in addition to design review, tried enabling and education and, in the early days in particular, direct influencing. The latter, at least with Government, seemed to achieve some success and we have seen some well designed schools as a result.

Government has a number of tools that can be important in achieving good design. Many buildings are publicly funded and putting in place organisational processes that put design at the heart of physical infrastructure procurement appears to achieve an improvement in design. There is still the challenge though, of creating good public sector clients when it comes to design commissioning.

Similarly, the public sector can influence design while procuring developers for publicly owned land. The need here is for a capacity to select developers on their ability to be good clients for good design.

This would need to be balanced with other considerations such as the cash receipt for the land and this was also raised in the same debate although without tying the issue specifically to achieving good design. Jack Dromey tabled an amendment to remove the need for local authorities to refer sales at in excess of £2m undervalue to the Secretary of State. This seems completely in tune with the move to more localism and the minister was sympathetic and seems likely to consider a change to the General Disposal Consent to remove this requirement.

That would leave land disposals effectively to be governed by the European Land Sales Directive which allows sales to be at values that reflect conditions imposed on the sale by way of public policy requirements (like good design or sustainability).

The reality though is that most local authorities, and Government through guidance from the Office of Government Commerce, impose on themselves unthinking rules that make it hard for public bodies to specify a requirement for good design in their tenders. The somewhat dated guide to disposal of surplus assets doesn’t mention design although it does mention buildings or historic and architectural interest and in relation to land for development it says ‘Departments should be mindful of the Government’s committment to sustainable development and environmental considerations when developing land.’. Developing this and related guidance to encourage public bodies to further government policies when disposing of development land would have a significant impact on design quality.

In particular guidance which required design quality to be a significant element of the evaluation of bids would start to impact the market by making design quality a dimension of competition for public land at least. Policy approaches like these seem more attuned to the nudge approach to policy making by using markets to deliver government policy.

So while Parliament may not have debated urban design for long this week it looks like the debate will continue. Watch this space.