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Architecture

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on devising this debate, which could not be more timely, for the reasons he gives in the broad sweep of his powerful speech. I, too, want to speak about housing. The buildings where we live are our first and constant cultural environment. We are all profoundly influenced by the design of our immediate surroundings, probably in ways that we are unconscious of and only realise when we stay in different architectures. There is no non-cultural building, but there are homes whose building style, whose architecture, is a life-enhancing culture and there are those which are not. In the past we have put up a lot of those that are not life-enhancing. As my noble friend said, Lynsey Hanley delineates acutely the bleakness, corrosive social segregation and the resulting poverty of aspiration and easy move into crime—estate-linked identities which sink with the estate, created by the architecture of successive governments’ housing policies. We need to remedy those estates and prevent their reappearance in Dalston, as elsewhere. We need to rehabilitate the attractive homes of earlier times, and we need to build new one in very large numbers which lift the spirits and make wholesome communities easy to grow. And all must be done sustainably without unnecessary stress on the vulnerable atmosphere of our planet. This cannot be achieved without design and high-quality architecture. But it can be done. Lynsey Hanley describes the rescue of Broadwater Farm. A few weeks ago I saw in Angell Town in Brixton the rehabilitation of exactly one of those estates, accompanied by new building, which created attractive, safe and affordable homes within a strong community, steered by residents’ own wishes. Nearly three-quarters of them said that they now felt safe, that they were satisfied with their new homes and that Angell Town was now a pleasant, friendly and attractive place to live. A few years ago, half knew a victim of crime and it was a deeply unpopular place to live. However, this sort of thing is not yet the norm. For that we need a cultural lead—political leadership—to promote as widely as can be done that it is reasonable, natural and feasible for everyone to have a good built environment. To make this a norm, it must be mainstreamed. But design is invisible in many national policies. Why does the Audit Commission, jointly with the Housing Corporation, in last February’s report, Better Buys, on improving housing association procurement, make so little, in 54 pages, of design or architecture other than a nod to sustainability? The joint consultation by the Audit Commission and the services for social care, health, police, prisons, probation and education on how to assess service provision ignores design. Yet physical design can make all the difference about accessibility and about social integration. What happens in schools? RIBA and CABE do good work on how to teach design and architecture as living subjects, but how widespread is the teaching that good design matters, that it can be chosen and that it must be available to the ordinary citizen? Where is the cultural champion in Whitehall whose task it is to promote attention to design? In the admirable plans for pensioner-friendly homes set out in Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods, developed by my noble friend the Minister, good design is implicit; but it could be made much more explicit. If all areas for regeneration have a holistic design focus like Sir Terry Farrell’s magnificent new plans for the Thames Gateway, developers will want to build in previously abandoned areas. The private-sector review prudently set up by the Government last January does have it in its remit to look at ““the quality of homes”” converted and maintained by private landlords. Such quality standards would have to be monitored by local authorities. This brings us the role of the planning authorities and their support. One of their best supports is the CABE system of design champions; but fewer than 70 per cent of local authorities have them. As many noble Lords have said, there is an acknowledged lack of design capacity in planning authorities and they do not even have to consider design quality. This is perhaps the biggest area for structural change that the Government could look at. We have a good national framework with Planning Policy Statement 3, but you normally find people with design skills on the bodies which choose plans for affordable housing in other European countries. This is not a requirement here. There are widely respected regional design review panels under CABE’s auspices, as we have heard, but they are only for major schemes, so it is hardly surprising that one-third of housing applications in the past five years was found to be substandard. The Barker Review of Land Use Planning and the Calcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery recommended the systematic use of design review within the planning process. A national network of local panels, as described by the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Low, active from the beginning of the process, could make what are now wonderful exceptions, like the developments created by the social entrepreneur Presentation’s design guide, part of the ordinary course of events. Everyone has a right to the well-being which can be induced by good design and architecture. We could do it once, with our pioneering garden cities and social housing copied all over the world. We have done it here and there since. We can do it again, for the many, not only the few, with our brilliant architects. Derek Walker, the architect of Milton Keynes, said: "““we can only start with a contemporary vision of the immediate future””." We must own the design of that future now. Our new towns will be the gift of a better future, but first, design must be the Government’s big idea.