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Planning Bill

As my noble friend Lord Howarth said, Amendments Nos. 7 and 14 would ensure that the nationally important work of the Infrastructure Planning Commission is always design-aware. Amendment No. 17 would ensure that the IPC is accountable for its exercise of that awareness. Design is not an add-on. It should not be consigned to ““design experts””. Our contention is that a sense of good design must inform all the commission’s decisions and that there needs to be sufficient design capacity in the commission to do that. The statutory duties in these amendments would give a clear signal from Parliament that the planning system encourages a well designed built environment. They would give local planning authorities confidence to refuse poorly designed planning applications. They would also encourage local authorities to entrench good design quality into their own decision-making processes. The reasons we need such explicit obligations can be seen all around us, in poor design that does not work well. But we have high-quality practitioners and there is plenty of authoritative advice, from CABE and from DCLG, to help in the objective evaluation of design. We just need the obligation.