Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 7: 7: Clause 2, page 2, line 5, after ““development”” insert ““and good design”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am delighted to bring forward this amendment. We have spoken about design during the passage of the Bill; we had excellent debates on it on Second Reading and in Committee. This amendment is in response to the argument that has commanded support across the House. It is a small but significant amendment which puts good design at the heart of what the agency will be seeking to achieve and firmly in the right context. There were some other suggestions from noble Lords about how design should best be addressed in the Bill. We resisted having a design champion on the board for some of the reasons I set out in Committee concerning the potential risks of placing responsibility in a single pair of hands or in cutting across the work of other bodies such as CABE. Nor have I taken the route suggested in Committee by my noble friend Lord Howarth to relate the concept of design to the design quality of housing. There is no problem with that approach in itself, but the effect would be to restrict references to design in the Bill to housing. In addition, the HCA may well be delivering various forms of infrastructure, community facilities, open spaces, or many other types of development, in all of which I hope design will be very important. There were other proposals before us in Committee, and I have considered each of them. We have come to the conclusion that design is best addressed in the objects of the agency and in the context of sustainable development. That approach places design firmly at the heart of the agency’s approach, and deals with it in terms of sustainable development, which is the correct approach. By doing that, especially putting it in the objects of the agency, we recognise its importance. It also means that the powers available to the agency can be used for the purposes of good design or for purposes incidental to it. I am delighted to have heard that our design stakeholders, such as RIBA, have warmly welcomed this amendment. Placing design in the context of sustainable development links the topic to planning policy statement 1, Delivering Sustainable Development, which already states that: "““Good design ensures attractive, usable, durable and adaptable places and is a key in achieving sustainable development””." Surely, in that context, we want to capture design in this Bill and those are the principles that will underpin the development of sustainable communities where people want to live. The amendment puts design in a central role in the Bill for the agency, and will stress its importance in all aspects of the agency’s work, not just housing. I hope noble Lords will feel that this will have achieved all that they wanted to achieve in the debates that we had, and I beg to move.