Housing and Regeneration Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, has revealed to the Committee my machinations and those of my noble friend Lady Whitaker. I repeat how grateful I am to him, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the Minister for their willingness to accommodate this debate today. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for my being unable to get hold of him yesterday evening, when the tactical need arose. I am hugely grateful to everyone who has spoken in this exceptionally interesting debate. I am greatly encouraged by the positive approach taken by every single noble Lord who has spoken. We all recognise how important it is, one way or another, to ensure that in this great wave of housebuilding that is going to take place—and the HCA may be responsible for the construction of some 30 per cent of homes envisaged—those homes are well designed, good homes. My noble friend the Minister spoke eloquently, again, about the importance of beautiful places and the shaping power that they can have. The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, spoke out of the depth of their long-standing concern and direct personal experience about the traumatic effect of bad design and poorly designed homes on the lives of people who are so unfortunate as to live in them. We know that we must do very much better. The noble Lord, Lord Best, opened a very interesting and exciting perspective with his suggestions that the HCA might be able to use leverage to influence the design quality of the products of the volume housebuilders and that through the operation of Section 106 and other mechanisms we might be able to ensure that the generality of homes provided outside the social sector could be somewhat better. This is a crucial problem. With the present structure of rewards and penalties, there are simply not sufficient rewards for private developers—the volume housebuilders—to invest in good design. If we can find ways, through the operation of the HCA, having required through this legislation the HCA to take the constructive and proactive approach to design that we have discussed, the whole urban landscape and the whole development of housing could be improved. I thought that that was a very important consideration. On the reservations expressed by my noble friend Lady Ford about two aspects of my proposals, I take very seriously—as the whole Committee does—the difficulties that she describes, as she is exceptionally experienced in this field. However, my amendment would not require that an architect as such should be appointed to the board; it should be someone with experience and capacity in design. She may take that as being little better than a quibble. I recognise that she makes an important point: if we should find ourselves appointing someone to a board who would, even if they were not obsessive about design, feel that that was what they were there to speak to all the time and that that was their single mission, that would not be a good way to constitute a board. I agree with what I think that she is suggesting—that every member of a board should have a universality of responsibilities and should play their full part in ensuring the good governance and management of the organisation. My noble friend Lady Ford was right, too—just as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was right—to say you have to mainstream this commitment to design as a culture. The question is how you do it. If we are to have a board of possibly 12 people, however, it is not at all unreasonable for a Secretary of State in making those appointments to ensure that one of those 12 board members has some greater knowledge and avowed commitment to promoting good design and would play a full part in that regard. But it needs to be a part of the culture and it needs to be the expectation of the whole board and the chief executive that design will be mainstreamed. My noble friend also expressed some doubts about design review, saying that it could cause delays so that we get a slower pace of development. I am not persuaded by that argument because it seems to me that if we can use pre-application discussion with design review panels, we stand a better chance of ensuring that the applications for building and development that are put to planning authorities are well considered, that right from the beginning there are high standards and aspirations in what is proposed and that the wrinkles and difficulties that there may initially be in applications are ironed out so that not only will we get better quality but we could well save time through greatly reducing the number of planning appeals.