Planning Bill

I declare an interest as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. My noble friend Lady Whitaker and I tabled the amendments in this group because we believe that it is profoundly important that planning policy explicitly requires conscious and continuous commitment by developers and planners alike to high-quality design. We have sought through the amendments to reinforce at every stage in the planning process, whether it is the new process for major infrastructure projects or the reformed town and country planning regime, a drive to ensure good design. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, whose standing in the fields of housing and local government gives him a special authority in these matters, for adding his name to the amendments. My noble friend has explained the purport of our amendments. A number of them lay duties on the Secretary of State, or create powers for her, in relation to design, in her oversight of national policy statements and the Infrastructure Planning Commission. Others lay corresponding duties on the IPC. Other amendments lay a duty on applicants for an order by the IPC to demonstrate full regard for good design. Then there are amendments that bear on local authorities. Amendment No. 429 would introduce a new clause amending the town and country planning regime. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 would be amended to create a duty on planning authorities to exercise their function with the objective of contributing to the achievement not only of sustainable development, which is already in that legislation, but also of high-quality design in the built environment. The new clause goes on, therefore, to require the Secretary of State to promote the availability of design review panels in every region and, on appeal, to give weight to any recommendations in respect of the application made by a design review panel. The Barker and Callcutt reports made strong cases for design review, and the amendment goes with the grain of their advice. Of course, the amendments may not be technically perfect. No doubt they are not sufficiently systematic and comprehensive, either. We can remedy that on Report. I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will wish to take the lead in doing so. None of us has any desire to write into the Bill unworkable or excessive provisions. What we need is provisions on the face of the Bill that convincingly secure the commitment of the system to promoting good design. We would all prefer, I take it, that the Government should come forward with their own amendments to achieve this in an effective and sensible way. Meanwhile, the thrust of these amendments is clear and they will at least serve illustratively. I know that they reflect the serious concern on all sides of your Lordships’ House, demonstrated earlier in the year in our debates on architecture and on the Housing and Regeneration Bill, that the Government should take an appropriate lead in promoting high-quality design in the built environment. I know, too, that my noble friend the Minister, who of course genuinely appreciates the importance of good design, will want to be responsive to the feeling of the Committee. Let me deal with some of the objections that I can anticipate and that my noble friend may feel she has to put to the Committee at this stage. It may be objected that the amendments are unnecessary, as the Government’s requirement for good design has already been expressed in planning policy statements 1 and 3 and these PPSs will provide a context for the formulation by the Government of their national policy statements as well as for the IPC and practitioners within the wider planning system. That is what my noble friend was saying on Monday in her response to our debate on Amendment No. 17. She said: "““The keystone planning document overarching everything that we do in planning is policy statement 1. In policy statement 1 there is a very clear recognition of the importance of design and sustainability. That is the principal driver””.—[Official Report, 6/10/08; col. 69.]" If my noble friend were again today to make the case that because of PPS1 we do not need anything in the Bill, I would not, I am afraid, draw sufficient comfort. Welcome as is her affirmation of the Government’s view of the importance of design, and admirable as are the principles set forth in PPS1, a planning policy statement is only guidance. Planning policy statements are expressed in highly generalised terms. They read as aspirations. Aspirations need underpinning. Yesterday, at the briefing that the Minister so helpfully organised for us, we heard a person from the British Wind Energy Association say that planning policy statement 22 is ““blatantly disregarded””. We also heard the representative of the Royal Town Planning Institute, an experienced planning inspector, plead for ““clear ground rules””. He said that when you have them, a planning system works well; when you do not, you are in the sort of difficulties that are all too familiar and that this legislation needs to get us out of. We have had planning guidance for many years, but in practice guidance has allowed too much that has been poorly designed to receive planning permission and to be built. We need to go beyond guidance and aspiration to explicit duties, laid precisely and unevadably on Ministers, infrastructure planning commissioners, developers, planning officers, planning committee members and inspectors, as they perform specific functions within the planning process. I believe that the Committee will take the view that the requirement for good design must be explicitly articulated in the Bill. If it is, all concerned in the planning process will know for sure that they have to go beyond lip service and genuinely take design seriously. They will know that it is not only the non-statutory desire of the Government but the will of Parliament written inescapably into the law. Local planning authorities will have a new certainty that it is their duty to insist on good design, using design review, using the Building for Life standards, strengthening their own design skills, appointing design champions and rejecting substandard design. Local planning authorities have made it clear in their responses to surveys that they want to do better in matters of design. If they have clear legislative endorsement, they will set about doing so. It may then be objected that it is unaffordably expensive to insist on good design, perhaps particularly for local authorities. If my noble friend were to make that suggestion, I would have to respond that, with great respect, she cannot have it both ways. If the duty is already there in the planning policy statements, it will be no more expensive to reiterate that duty and to remind and clarify in this legislation, as indeed the Government did a few months ago in the Housing and Regeneration Act. In any case, good design need not cost more than mediocre design. Imagination and the exercise of skill are not intrinsically expensive. We all know, of course, that improved professional skills, notably in design, are widely needed. CABE has produced dismal statistics for the lack of adequate skills in planning authorities. Reform of the curriculum leading to professional qualification, so as to give greater prominence to design and to a common element of training in design, is needed, so that we have more planners, surveyors, transport engineers and, indeed, architects who understand and value good design. However, that is a matter of educating differently, not of spending more. The RTPI, RIBA and other professional and academic institutions are working on that and I hope that the Academy for Sustainable Communities, housed within the Homes and Communities Agency, and Ministers themselves will give vigorous leadership here. Meanwhile, with the deficiencies in design skills across the country, it is the more important that we write the requirement for good design into this legislation. Even if there is a marginal extra cost up front in ensuring that the design is really good, that cost will start to be offset by the public’s more ready acceptance of well designed projects, leading to fewer objections. With design review, planning decisions will be speeded up, there will be fewer appeals and there will be faster progress in the realisation of projects. More significantly, there is abundant evidence—as the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, reminded us on Monday—that extra investment in design at the outset is recouped many times over in savings on the lifetime costs of the building or installation. If anyone doubts that, I refer them to CABE’s publication, The Cost of Bad Design. The Government want a great deal of new infrastructure to be built rapidly; that is what the legislation is intended to enable. At the same time, scarcity of capital and weakened financial confidence will make it harder to finance big construction programmes. The more pressures there are on time and finance, the more important it is for DCLG to build into legislation safeguards against cutting corners on design quality. If other departments working on national policy statements—DBERR, Defra, DECC—are impatient and anxious not to have their proceedings complicated by what they may take to be fancy requirements about design, the more it is DCLG’s responsibility to carry the flag for the civilised values that the public want. I hope that the Secretary of State will, if necessary, remind colleagues in other departments of what she said in her speech to CABE, that it is, "““absolutely vital for our planning system to support high-quality design””." More of such leadership may be needed. It may be objected that good design is too woolly a concept to be subject to legislation or that aesthetics are not a proper matter for legislation. In fact, the principles of good design have been expounded in numerous documents issued by DCLG and CABE. DCLG energetically and rightly promulgates the Building for Life design standards. Good design is explained and demonstrated in the practice of the design review panels that already exist. If it was appropriate for the Government to insist that the national agency responsible for promoting new social housing and regeneration should have a specific duty to promote high-quality design, it should follow that the national agency responsible for approving proposals for major infrastructure should equally have regard for high-quality design. Major infrastructure projects—roads, railways, docks, waste disposal installations, gas terminals, power stations and airports—will be visually conspicuous. It is essential that they should be not only functional and sustainable but also visually pleasing. Functionality, sustainability and aesthetic appearance are three indispensable elements of good design. They should be understood as an indissoluble trinity: they are complementary and all three are equally necessary. Functionality is taken for granted and the Government are happy to write a requirement for sustainability into the Bill, but it will be no good if we legislate for a two-legged stool. Functionality and sustainability are part of good design, but they are not the whole story. The Bill must make it clear that all three aspects of good design are needed. We are talking here of values, of the character of our nation. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. We should do as well as the best in other countries. If public policy in France secures the stunning aesthetic quality of the Millau viaduct, designed by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and Spain achieves the design quality of the Madrid airport terminal by my noble friend Lord Rogers, we should leave nothing to chance in our commitment to achieve comparable design quality in Britain. We can do it. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, designed the Stansted terminal. However, infrastructure design of that quality should be neither exceptional in Britain nor a matter of luck. It would be defeatist and barbaric to set out, consciously and deliberately in this legislation, to tolerate the mediocre, let alone the downright ugly. In her wonderful biography of Pugin, whose spirit we should always respect in this place, Rosemary Hill wrote: "““In the debates that dominated the early months of 1851 design and politics, religious freedom, architecture and the modern city were all intermingled, for all were expressions of England’s growing self-consciousness on the world stage””." Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who created the Victorian sewer system, declared that it, "““should be one of the Seven Wonders of London””," and it was. Think of London’s pre-war power stations. One became Tate Modern and epitomises contemporary London. Battersea Power Station was an inspirational design; its image has appeared on album covers and film sets, and it deserves a better future than we have managed to offer it in our own time. What self-respect will we have in our generation, and what judgment will we suffer by successor generations, if we leave a legacy of shoddy, dull, demeaning building? Our determination should be to match and surpass the vision and achievement of our forebears.