Context 160 - July 2019

C O N T E X T 1 6 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 9 45 said all that was needed, as openly as anyone could want. Craig McWilliam of Grosvenor had a different take on the root of the problem and its solution. For him, weak design, including in planning, was due to the lack of government leadership – local as well as national. As local authorities had been understaffed and deskilled in a wider process that reduced control and regulation, so poor design and conflict prevailed. Having Grosvenor say this, from its exalted place at the uppermost end of the spectrum of commercial development, highlighted just how much more freedom more workaday speculative builders had in their roles, pushed more directly by officers and shareholders trying to maximise their benefits from a short-termist industry both pump-primed and underwritten by government. Matthew Carmona reckoned that solutions did not lie in a revised, continental-style, public- led planning system (one delegate’s proposal to reduce planning confrontation) but in the correct execution of the existing model. The legacy of great places in the UK confirmed to Carmona that good design could still be achieved within current models, if only the will was there. For many in the IHBC, however, working at the coalface between communities and construction, the apparent mysteries of our confrontational planning system and its attendant design deficiencies are not news, even if the precise details are nuanced across our constituent national and local branches. New-build benefits from a 20 per cent VAT- free bung, regardless; already minimal regulation is aggravated by disempowered regulators often stung further by enhanced permitted development rights; direct government grants, evidence apparently shows, lift the house prices about the same as the public monies on offer; and lording it over all other political considerations is new-build’s key role in the all-important national economic data on gross domestic product (GDP), where repair and maintenance and attendant low- carbon, low-cost, people-focused practices such as conservation care and renewal are largely ignored. Housing is the last thing planning confrontation is about, because it is all about money. None of this is new in detail. But when the nub of the problem raised by public leaders in so civic a political forum as an APPG is so resolutely disregarded (which is reinforced by the determined refusal to look at the real world and how it works), there is little wonder that the political class is so poorly regarded. Faced with the inherent conflicts of political indecision, and with a level of dissembling and dissimulation that makes Brexit look like a model of clarity, it is hardly surprising that local communities in some parts of the country reel at the very thought of new-build, while others, no less desperate for help and, more important, jobs, feel resolutely ignored. Although these problems are not caused by politicians, any answers must lie within the political arena, one from which the IHBC has, historically, veered away. Perhaps, however, not for much longer. The IHBC’s board, advised by the national office, recently clarified the terms that would allow it to engage on the political stage without compromising our charitable status. So now the IHBC is looking to advance our charitable agenda in political circles, in the hope that we can bring more clarity to the confusion that allows such free reign to the problems cited above. We may not succeed: the legacy of APPGs and their Scottish counterparts, cross-party groups, is not especially impressive, and has too often been shaped more by self-interest than public good, as the IHBC has seen at first hand. But we can at least try to do better. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk