Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, what can I say? What can we all say to my noble friend but ““Thank you””? She is adding to the objects of the HCA an explicit object that it shall contribute to the achievement of good design in England. She accepted the essential spirit and purpose of a number of amendments that we debated in Grand Committee. It was important that there was all-party support for the spirit and purpose of those amendments. I particularly appreciate the support of my noble friend Lady Whitaker. She is, by herself, worth an army. This is a civilised and proper thing that the Government are doing, which will improve the quality of life in this country. I absolutely accept what my noble friend just said—that it is greatly preferable that this duty and the benefits that will flow from it should not be confined to housing and individual buildings, but cover development, which the HCA is able to influence more broadly, so that the spaces between and around buildings will be of better design, the infrastructure that we develop will be better designed and the whole process of regeneration will be characterised by a commitment to good design. It may be a statement of the obvious that we ought to be committed to good design, but by writing it explicitly into the legislation, we have very valuably gone beyond the relatively vague and generalised terms that were already in the Bill such as quality and well-being. That there will be a statutory duty for the HCA to promote good design will make all the difference. Amid the welter of other duties and pressures that will be on the HCA, design might have fallen by the wayside. Indeed, notwithstanding the positive commitment and substantial achievements of the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships in relation to design in recent years, there is a longer melancholy history of a failure to pay sufficient attention to good design. The HCA will now have fully to heed best practice, the best advice that it can obtain from CABE, the professional institutes, academia and the best practitioners, and from the DCLG itself. The key, as we noted in Grand Committee—the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, made this point powerfully—is that there should be an understanding of the nature of good design and a commitment to it deeply imbued in the institutional culture of the HCA. I still think that it would be no bad thing if one of the members of the board of the HCA had experience and capacity in design matters. However, what will matter infinitely more is the leadership given to the HCA by its chief executive, Sir Bob Kerslake. There is every indication that he will personally take this responsibility very seriously indeed, and I look forward to the newly appointed chair, Robert Napier, doing likewise. I have a handful of questions to ask my noble friend. If she cannot answer them today perhaps she will write to us before Third Reading. What means does the department expect the HCA actually to use to promote good design, and what will the department itself be doing alongside to support the normalisation of good design and to create a supportive context? What will the department's wider strategy be? We know and welcome very much that the Secretary of State, Hazel Blears, has told CABE that she wants people to live in beautiful homes, but I emphasise, as my noble friend just did, that design goes well beyond questions of aesthetics. We are not looking to the DCLG, and certainly not to the HCA, to be a kind of central taste police. There are many matters other than aesthetics entailed in good design. We talked just in the last debate about the importance of lifetime homes, accessibility and adaptability. There is also the requirement that new homes and new buildings should be carbon neutral in a certain space of time. There is also much experience with such familiar concepts as designing out crime and ensuring that provision of transport services and facilities does not dehumanise communities. I have some specific questions for my noble friend. Do the Government intend to introduce minimum space standards? If they themselves do not do so, will they endorse the HCA if it introduces minimum space standards in those areas that it can control? Does she expect that the Government will make building regulations more substantial and better able themselves to promote good design, and do more to ensure that building regulations are taken seriously and well enforced? Will the Government seek to generalise the use of the Building for Life standards? What is now the state of the Government's thinking on new design quality metrics which were adumbrated in the Green Paper and a possible design quality assurance scheme which would enable developments to proceed faster if they met certain criteria of design? How does my noble friend expect CABE to relate to the HCA? It is particularly important that CABE should be able to offer its expertise and judgment because, after all, we will never achieve good design by formulaic methods or bureaucratic devices. What is the Government's thinking now on housing and planning delivery grant and whether it should reward quality as well as quantity in the provision of new homes? Do the Government intend energetically to use their influence to ensure that design review facilities and pre-application discussion are available appropriately throughout the country and, at the other end of the process—this was the subject of an amendment that we debated in Committee—will the Government encourage the HCA itself to use ““post-occupancy analysis””? That rather forbidding jargon term actually means asking people who will live in these homes whether they consider that their homes are well designed. What do the Government intend to do about education and training? Will they work with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and with the Higher Education Funding Council for England as well as with those in RIBA, in the RTPI and in the Urban Design Alliance who are seeking to develop a common foundation curriculum for students who are going to become architects, surveyors, planners, highway engineers and landscape designers, so that all of them should be educated in good design and should at least speak a common language and understand each other? I remind the House of my declaration of interest as an honorary fellow of RIBA. My noble friend spoke very helpfully just now about the Academy for Sustainable Communities and the work that it is expected to do to remedy the deficiencies of skills. She has told us, in one of the helpful pieces of correspondence which she sent to Members of the Committee, about the funding that will be available for the Academy for Sustainable Communities from 2008-09 to 2010-11. It would certainly be helpful if she could say rather more about the expectations that the Government have of the academy. Does my noble friend expect the Homes and Communities Agency to report in its annual report on what it has done in the previous year and what it plans to do in the following year in fulfilment of its statutory object to contribute to the achievement of good design in England? How will the DCLG monitor the overall performance of the HCA in regard to its design responsibilities, in a sensible relationship of course, without breathing down its neck and second guessing it all the time? How will it satisfy itself that the HCA will fulfil our best hopes for design? We can shortly return to some of these themes and issues in the Planning Bill. Meanwhile, I welcome the amendment. It will lead to better design, directly in social housing and more indirectly through the HCA’s influence on the volume housebuilders, where it is assembling land and is a key player in regeneration. Not only homes but all sorts of buildings will be better designed on land that the HCA makes available. The amendment means that the lives of many people will be improved in the years ahead.