Labour Housing
Following the appointment of a new Labour government, the production of housing has once again been placed at the forefront. The intent and ambition are welcome. Compulsory housing targets have been reinstated, with promises to reform the planning system and build 1.5million homes over the next four years.
Like many practices founded around the turn of the millennium, DSDHA benefitted from the previous Labour Government’s major capital investment in education and childcare. Projects, such as Hoyle Early Years Centre, the Foundation Unit for Canon Popham Church of England Primary & Nursery School, and William Bellamy’s Children’s Centre helped us to establish, sustain and grow our practice – but they were also symbolic of a time when the government was seen to be supporting architects and actively invested in UK’s communities.
The issues concerning the new Labour government are different but architecture and the built environment are once again at the top of the agenda. The government has pledged to reinstate housing targets, reform the planning system and oversee the building of 1.5 million new homes across the next five years.
This ambition equates to building 370,000 houses a year, significantly more than the 300,000 homes a year promised by the mid-2020s by the 2019 Tory Government. The government plans to address these issues through a revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and while the proposed steps are welcome - they alone will not be enough to reach the target.
Further clarity is needed to define some of the basic delivery mechanisms. How can ‘grey belt sites’, sites within the greenbelt suitable for development, be identified and promoted? If residents don’t agree with the designation, the equal importance given in the NPPF, engagement and co-design will immediately challenge the potential of delivery, unless more emphatic powers are given to local planning authorities to approve proposals. Similarly, while ‘beauty’ has been replaced by ‘good design’, there is still no precise definition of what this means. Finally, while the new NPPF aims to favour sustainable and affordable development proposals, with an emphasis on the importance of location, it doesn’t say how much weight these should be given compared to other parameters.
Architects will inevitably become caught in the middle of this. If Local Plans prepared by strategic planners carried more weight on designating suitable locations, the local engagement between architects and the public could be fully devoted to a debate about the design quality of the built solution, rather than the appropriateness of the development. In our view, this would give developers and design teams the confidence and opportunity to engage constructively to build more, and better homes. But there is nothing in the new legislation that suggests this momentum of change.
Aside from these concerns, which could be addressed by the NPPF, we miss an honest discussion about building and living at higher densities, which the majority of British society is seemingly averse to. Perhaps this is because we have not been able to deliver the type of mixed-use high-density environments that appear to be more economically viable in other European cities such as Antwerp or Paris, which provide more cultural and social facilities from bars to creches to retail embedded within genuinely mixed-use neighbourhoods.
What we see in the UK is high-rise residential development with not much more than a functional mini-supermarket at the base. This again highlights the need to match the ambition for housing delivery with much clearer guidance on design quality and the necessary upskilling of planning authorities to work collaboratively with developers.
My proposal would be for a more radical shift in design ambition for what makes a successful high-density neighbourhood – empower the planners to facilitate it and allow designers to spend their energy designing good quality sustainable buildings and engaging with residents to inform the mixed-use elements, which will successfully integrate with and support the wider neighbourhood – there is no one size fits all when considering these communal facilities.
Then we need to fundamentally shift preconceptions about building in the countryside. These developments need to offer new models of living that move away from exclusively private ownership and encourage medium-density communities, embracing the benefits of shared resources, facilities and access to good transport links along with employment opportunities in a regionally specific response. This highlights the importance of strategic planning, referred to but not articulated in the current NPPF review.
This is where change needs to go beyond review of the NPPF and where government support would be so valuable to initiate new design competitions – which were so successful in transforming education two and a half decades ago. Further steps, such as raising tax on second homes and scrapping the VAT on the refurbishment of existing buildings would create revenue for local communities, making retrofit an attractive proposition economically as well as in the name of sustainability.
These steps could radically change the face of housing in the UK and embrace the increased demand from younger generations to live outside of cities, retaining the stimulation and excitement found in urban life, whilst offering all the benefits nature and access to open space can provide.
This article was written by David Hills, Founding Director at DSDHA.