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Planning Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as an honorary fellow of the RIBA. I am happy to acknowledge the technical advice and enthusiastic support that staff of the RIBA have given my noble friend Lady Whitaker and myself in the preparation of the new clause. We have tabled the new clause so as to assist your Lordships to complete a legislative task which the House has undertaken in recent months. We amended the Housing and Regeneration Bill in this House to lay a duty on the Homes and Communities Agency to contribute to the achievement of good design. We have amended this Bill to lay a similar duty on the Secretary of State and the IPC in the development consent regime. But what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. It remains now to provide plainly on the face of the Planning Bill a parallel duty in the town and country planning regime. This new clause would make it clear beyond doubt that everyone exercising planning functions within the general planning system must do so with a view to promoting a high standard of design quality in the built environment. The Minister may argue that the new clause is inappropriate or unnecessary, because planning policy statements 1, 3 and 6 already provide the requirement for good design. Of course the planning policy statements have legal standing, and PPS 1 does indeed declare eloquently the duty to promote good design. If the duty would not, then, be a new one, there can be no objection that local authorities have not been consulted. Planners should already know in principle what they are supposed to do. The problem is that the planning policy statements are not generally perceived as creating a legal obligation for real. They are widely seen as guidance, as policy wallpaper and limp-wristed legislative gesture at most. We need to energise and make much more effective the policy in the planning policy statements. Too many planners lack the will to meet the standards set in the planning policy statements. Powerful developers, such as sections of the volume house-building industry, conform minimally in practice to the PPSs. CABE continues to pour forth justified lucubrations about the inadequacy of too much design. The Government may say that the notion of ““high standards of design quality”” is too imprecise to be written into statute. High quality design is no more or less vague a term than sustainable development, which we spatchcock into legislation at every turn. We need to insist on both. If the Government argue that sustainability includes high quality design, I have to disagree. The term ““sustainability””, in its present usage as a cure-all, risks being so stretched and twisted as to lose useful meaning. It may be suggested that a more fruitful approach will be to develop existing initiatives on design review, design champions, improvement of skills, the recently updated building-for-life criteria, CABE’s new national network of assessors, design quality indicators and so on. All of those will be useful. So, no doubt, also will be new efforts to mobilise the RDAs in the cause of good design, and the Homes and Communities Agency, too, will surely give important impetus and practical help. But all these efforts will be far more effective in the context of this amendment. Then it will be understood that a commitment to high quality design will not be an option for enthusiasts but a statutory duty on everyone. It will not just be the policy of the Government for the time being, but the established will of parliament. Perhaps the Government will pray in aid the impending report of the Killian-Pretty review as a reason for rejecting this amendment. Unless Killian-Pretty is going to say that high quality design does not matter after all and planners should wave through anything, however tacky, the new clause cannot be in conflict with a more rational and coherent approach in planning. It would be too cynical if the Government were to say that a duty to promote high quality design would be observed merely mechanistically, as a box-ticking exercise. That would be to disparage the good people in local government who want the best design for their communities. Alternatively, it may be suggested that the duty in the new clause would be a distraction for planning authorities, causing them to spend disproportionate amounts of time thinking about design. That will be the day! The quality of design in the built environment is, in truth, among the most important responsibilities of a local authority. I quote one of the greatest of local government leaders, Joseph Chamberlain, who said that, "““the city which is a city must have its parks as well as its prisons, its art gallery as well as its asylum, its books and its libraries as well as its baths and washhouses, its schools as well as its sewers ... it must think of beauty and of dignity no less than of order and of health””." Perhaps we will be told that this duty would simply be too expensive. We may be offered horrified visions of local authority resources being thrown at armies of design consultants. I remind the House that design review costs effectively nothing, thanks to the public-spiritedness of architects who are willing to provide design review services for no payment. Planning officers ought in any case, as the Government have often said, to be competent in design matters. If the duty is already there in the PPSs, unless indeed they are being ignored wholesale, in which case the amendment is undoubtedly needed, it cannot add to costs to reiterate the duty in statute. It is a commonplace that the extra upfront costs of a well designed building, which are a very small proportion in any case, pay for themselves handsomely over the lifetime of the building. CABE has compellingly demonstrated the cost of bad design in its publication of that title. Equally the benefits of good design have been demonstrated in numerous studies, notably in Alice Coleman’s work. Good design quickly pays for itself in reduced crime, improved educational performance, better health and reduced staff turnover in hospitals. It is much cheaper not to have to rebuild after a Ronan Point collapses or an Aylesbury Estate proves to be a community disaster. I have rehearsed all the excuses I can imagine for the Government rejecting this amendment. None of them washes. I cannot believe that my noble friend, who is serious about good design, will advance any of them. So surely she will agree with us. If we do not state this duty in the Bill, all our other efforts will be undermined. We will drift on as we are, with occasional good and very good design amid a mass of mediocrity and ugliness which is an affront to civic values and decent aspiration for our communities. I do not of course suppose that good design can be brought about simply by legislation. The amendment would make it vastly more likely that people engaged in development and planning will think responsibly and imaginatively about the quality of what they bring into being. It will become normal for more people to think seriously about design and to make a conscious effort over it. There will never be unanimity about what is good design; there will always be battles of the styles. The modernists and the traditionalists will still go at each other. There will still be antagonistic dogmas and silly fads. One person’s carbuncle will still be another person’s masterpiece. But what could transform the general standard of design for the better would be precisely an energy of debate released by a newly emphatic requirement in law that good design must be sought. More and more people would be drawn into discussion. People would no longer be resigned to enduring whatever the system and the current orthodoxy impose on them. They would demand better. Politicians in Britain since the Second World War have largely been embarrassed to talk about architecture and design. It was not always so. On 8 July 1861, the House of Commons debated the design of a new Foreign Office building. Lord John Manners made the case for the Gothic style. The Prime Minister himself, Lord Palmerston, made the case for the Palladian style. He opened his speech by observing that: "““the battle of the books, the battle of the Big and Little Endeans, and the battle of the Green Ribands and the Blue Ribands at Constantinople were all as nothing compared to this battle of the Gothic and Palladian styles””.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/7/1861; col. 535.]" It was an unpompous but passionate debate. Like the debates about the Great Exhibition 10 years’ previously and debates in every Victorian city about appropriate architectural styles for libraries and town halls, it was a debate about the soul of the country. Architecture, it was believed, surely rightly, should express and advance civic purpose and idealism. There is a similar spirit of debate today in Holland. The Dutch care deeply about how every square metre of their land is used. So should we. The Secretary of State, Hazel Blears, has made inspired statements in recent months about the necessity of good design. Now is the chance to give that rhetoric substance for the planning system as a whole. My noble friend has already shown her leadership in amending legislation elsewhere. If she will now accept this amendment to Part 9 of this Bill, she will take her place in history as the Minister who, with a sensitivity to the mood of the nation and with the courage of her convictions, seized the opportunity to elevate our national ambition. She will have opened the way to a new and better era of architecture and design in Britain.