Debate on the Address

My Lords, the commitment to build 3 million homes by 2020 is an opportunity unparalleled since the 1960s, and I congratulate our new Government on the foresight and vision to give housing that much needed priority. In the 1960s and 1970s, some deeply damaging mistakes were made: estates whose consequences in fostering crime and sheer lack of amenity are still with us. Long before that, though, this country pioneered innovative housing for ordinary people, with Robert Owen's model housing and then the garden cities, admired all over the world. We would not want to replicate them now, but we can harness that same innovative capacity to the needs of our time. Some good housing has been built over the past decade. We have the benign influence of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), for whose briefing I am grateful, set up in 1999 by my noble friend Lord Smith and Geoff Mulgan. Post 2004, we have a strong regulatory framework. Planning policy statement 3 is a huge advance. Provisions for design quality need to be robust enough to be measured. I hope that we shall hear what monitoring is in place for quality, not just speed and numbers, and how the new housing and planning delivery grant will operate to assure quality. The reality so far is that CABE found that nearly one-third of housing schemes in the past five years was so poor that it should not have received planning permission. According to the Royal Town Planning Institute, two-thirds of applications for building schemes still do not involve a qualified architect. Urban design is not yet, or not again, firmly in the planning system, authorities do not all use design review panels, and planning authorities may not all be resourced to employ urban designers. Local partnerships need more than representatives from health, education, police and transport. They need a strong design presence to turn meeting these social needs into beautiful places to live—into, as my right honourable friend Hazel Blears said in response to the gracious Speech in another place, "““well designed houses that people are proud to call home””.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/11/07; col. 265.]" I hope there will be strong voices on the new Planning Commission to assure architecture and design quality. Should CABE, with its wide regional presence, be consulted on all large housing planning schemes, private or public? What about design champions for every region, as RIBA and the Barker report proposed? They could make widespread use of the CABE Building for Life criteria. What about architects themselves? As my noble friend Lady Andrews said, we now have many good architects and some outstandingly beautiful new civic and commercial buildings. But as far as ordinary homes are concerned, there are still architecture schools that focus on just the house, ignoring its setting in a community and the deep impact of design, or the lack of it, on the way we go about our lives. I hope that RIBA can be active here. Perhaps the Prime Minister’s better buildings awards could focus more on homes. I hope that the DCMS will celebrate and showcase our best housing architects. I hope that developers will come on board, too. Before today, there has been almost nothing on these matters in debates in this and another place, apart from what my right honourable friend Hazel Blears has said. The excellent Green Paper on housing hardly mentions architecture. The Select Committee on the DCLG’s recent questions to my honourable friend Yvette Cooper did not touch on it. It is time to change that, and I hope my noble friend can say something about how we can make it clear that design is as important as numbers and that, indeed, it will enable the numbers of homes that we need to be sustainably built. I congratulate my noble friend on the promise of security of tenure for Gypsies and Travellers in the Housing and Regeneration Bill. I hope that my noble friend can confirm that the most welcome proposed Homes and Communities Agency will include the needs of Gypsies and Travellers for affordable and socially rented accommodation in its remit. Fair treatment for Gypsies and Travellers, our oldest indigenous minority, can still be astonishingly bypassed. The inhabitants of Clays Lane, an issue which I raised last July, are now, they say, living on, "““the biggest building site in Europe. Only feet from our homes there is demolition, noise, heavy traffic and dust, and the impact is unbearable””." Families with young children are living in these conditions. What pressure can be brought to bear on the Olympic Delivery Authority with regard to this terrible situation?