My Lords, I am very happy indeed to add my name to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness. This is partly because I have long had an admiration for the persistence with which over many years she has pursued this objective of achieving better design for our buildings and structures in this country. She deserves our support.
I referred briefly in my previous intervention to the time when I was Environment Secretary, and as such found on my desk a number of very major projects. Not all of them would have been described as infrastructure, but nevertheless one was very conscious indeed of the enormous importance of design as a criterion for desirability and for making sure that something was going to last. Indeed, there was a view in the department at the time that if a building was really bad, it would not last more than 50 years. However, 50 years is more than half a lifetime—perhaps it is less than that now, but it was then. One needs to do one’s best to avoid those bad buildings.
One particular decision with which I have always been rather pleased—which was not infrastructure except in the broadest sense of that word—concerned what is now the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. That decision turned entirely on the design that had originally been proposed, which was so memorably castigated by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in a remarkable speech. I must say that it made me very angry at the time, because this planning decision was sitting on my desk and yet I received no advance warning at all that he was going to say anything about it.
When I then had to deal with it, I tried to see whether he was right. I came to the conclusion that, yes, of course he was right. That design was deplorable, as the recent account published by the National Gallery itself has indicated. As a result, we got an entirely new initiative from the Sainsbury brothers, and the Sainsbury Wing is now a very considerable adornment to that part of Trafalgar Square and to the National Gallery itself, based entirely on design. I therefore attach very great importance to this.
One of the important points made by the noble Baroness in her speech concerned the very limited extent to which the criterion of design has been imported into the national planning policy statements. She said that some of them gave the impression of having been cut and pasted, because they simply took the same words. If one looks, for instance, at the National Policy Statement for Ports about this, it really does not add anything to what has been said before about other forms of development. There is nothing specifically regarding ports. From time to time, I have found myself sailing past the Felixstowe dock, which is a tremendous container port. It is actually rather a fine structure when seen from the River Orwell. Then you go further up the River Orwell and there is a perfectly lovely bridge, the Orwell Bridge. We are perfectly capable of choosing first-class designs, but it needs to be at the centre. Sharpening up the obligation to put design at the heart of the planning system and planning criteria, which the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, would achieve, seems to me a very valuable thing to do. I support her amendment and I hope that she will continue to bang away at this issue. She has made great progress in other quarters and she needs to do it in this one as well.