Context 160 - July 2019

44 C O N T E X T 1 6 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 9 Director’s cut The politics of place: beauty and the beast In the Jubilee Room of the Houses of Parliament,Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Civic Societies recently hosted presentations by, among others, Kit Malthouse MP, minister for housing; Craig McWilliam, chief executive of Grosvenor UK and Ireland; and Matthew Carmona, lead ambassador for England’s Place Alliance (the design-leaning link body, akin to the Heritage Alliance or, even more, Built Environment Forum Scotland, but without the core funding). All were there to discuss beauty in the built environment, joining in the latest stage in the work of England’s civic society link body, Civic Voice – as the secretariat of the APPG – to respond to the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission (BBBBC), specifically here to focus on ‘Building Better: the community perspective’. Civic Voice shared findings from its members survey. These reinforced the original objectives of the commission: to move on from the confrontational nature of the UK’s planning system. The commission’s three original aims were to promote better design of homes… [and] reflect what communities want...; explore… greater community consent; and ...support better design and style. Clearly these chimed with the collaborative agenda tested in Civic Voice’s survey. The aims also highlighted wider calls for better quality in modern design, even if the focus on beauty might be too populist a tag for many. The BBBBC’s potential to lift design standards was no less clear to the Place Alliance. The alliance’s most recent congress – its Big Meet 9 – examined design in the context of creating ‘real places and communities rather than isolated and unsustainable estates’. That such a principle resonated both with Civic Voice and the alliance was also clear from the fact that Matthew Carmona was the only figure to speak formally at both events. Even more significantly, as far as I could tell, the IHBC was the only organisation with senior officers (including our president and our vice chair elect, as well as myself as director) in the audiences at both events, despite obvious synergies in content and aims. Despite the locus, even on the surface the scale of the challenge for the BBBBC was substantial. As a creature entirely of political construction but without any significant resources to reflect its ambitions – to push high-quality design and planning in the face of the narrowest government agenda, of building new homes – the commission might even seem pointless. For many, indeed, its political origination may well have been its greatest weakness. Some of our NewsBlog readers will have noticed how the commission had raised eyebrows even at the appointment, by communities secretary James Brokenshire, of its first chair (Professor Sir) Roger Scruton, the politically leaning, pre-populist philosopher. That reflex was soon confirmed following comments apparently considered by the government to be inappropriate, even if they might not be surprising for Scruton. He was then sacked from his post in such an offhand manner that Brokenshire had to apologise. If that was the big picture of how politics could so resoundingly fail on the simple agenda of promoting better places, the small setting of the APPG also highlighted the problems of the political forum. At the APPG, Kit Malthouse explained that the government had a massive ambition to deliver the housing that England, he argued, needed: some 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s. He highlighted the scale of government leadership, and his own admiration for modern methods of construction (from off-site prefabrication to craned in construction); for new- build subsidies and structural investment, to encourage the building programme; and of course England’s so-styled garden communities strategy. He also identified key problems, in the eyes of the government anyway: that ‘people feel like they are victims of the planning system’, and that the confrontational nature of the planning system could be part of the problem. Answering his own rhetorical challenges, Malthouse suggested that local communities should take development’s central stage through the neighbourhood planning process. He observed that the only way to bulletproof a neighbourhood plan against the planning system was through a generous land supply: ‘go for 10, 15 [years], because then you run the tape about where it goes and what type it is, what it looks like.’ As the political response to the call for a collaborative planning system, and its answer to the problems of high-quality new housing today, the bulletproofing metaphor for community planning, tied to housing acquiescence,