Housing and Regeneration Bill

I add my voice to those supporting these amendments—not that I have any great sympathy for the great fat toad of a quango that will sit in the middle of this, as a result of this Bill. My direction is much more to try to get planning and design decisions made as locally as we can. However, while we have this approach from this Government, let us make sure that design gets in properly. Yes, it is difficult and, yes, it is very hard to define exactly what you mean; but, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, says, you know it when you see it. It is perhaps not that easy, however. Last week, I received a pamphlet from the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, hymning the idea of high densities in the form of town squares and giving seven examples of them. Six of them were extremely ugly and had won prizes. So it comes down to the difficulties of centralising design in one person sitting on one body. If that person is not the right person, you can get a promulgation of ugliness such as, say, the South Bank, which has taken a long time to get over. I want to see variety, so I am a supporter of design-review panels, which are voluntary and diffuse—they are all over the place. We will get a variety of answers and we will get Leicestershire and Yorkshire doing different things, for example, which is entirely as it should be. But, most importantly, we will have a body of expertise available for local councillors and others who have to take decisions at local levels and will give them the courage to take design into account in a way that is difficult now, if you are being asked to pit your views against that of someone employed by the developer. It is sad. Every time I go home along the Thames I look at what has been done with those serried ranks of condominiums, which, if they had an architect did not have a very good architect. As a pleasurable experience, it ranks at about two out of 10—and all that because of the river, rather than the surrounding buildings. It is enormously important that we give a higher priority to design. The fact that we may get that wrong at some times does not matter. What matters is that we get it right more often than we do now.