Category: Contributions

Fast homes at scale: ‘We’ve all the tools we need to solve homelessness’

Visualisation of a new meanwhile neighbourhood, built quickly using RCKa’s prototype modular construction. Credit: RCKa

In 2023, the G15 group of London’s biggest housing associations convened an emergency summit to address the rapidly worsening temporary accommodation crisis across the city. It was dubbed ‘Project 123’ in response to the grim statistic that, at the time, one in every 23 children in London was homeless.

A year later, the name had already become an anachronism: in just 12 months, the ratio had increased to one in 21 kids.

At the time of writing, London’s councils are spending a combined £5.5 million each and every day on housing families in temporary housing – much of it in B&Bs, emergency overnight accommodation and hotel rooms – up from £4 million a day a year ago. Large numbers of families have been forced to move to homes not in their own neighbourhoods, but scattered across the country; miles from the family and social networks on which they rely.

The cost of housing families in need is becoming an existential burden on already-stretched councils. But, behind the numbers, are a hundred thousand individual tragedies: toddlers living in damp and mouldy flats; youngsters forced to share rooms with parents and siblings; teenagers entering higher education having spent their entire school careers living in hotel rooms. The lives diminished and the opportunities squandered by our inability to build safe, affordable homes is a scandal and we should be ashamed that we have allowed it to happen.

In the first quarter of 2025, London built just 347 affordable homes. Even our private-sector housebuilding was pitiful: only 2,158 homes were built in the first half of this year, just 5 per cent of the government’s target for the city. The reasons for this shortfall are myriad. Following years of extraordinary construction inflation, in much of the country it’s impossible to build homes for anything less than they’re worth. The glacial pace of the Building Safety Regulator has replaced the planning system as the principal drag on large housing regeneration schemes.

Local authorities have a statutory duty to provide accommodation to families who present themselves as homeless. Councils are already under massive financial strain, but the extraordinary costs of temporary accommodation are mind-blowing. The annual cost is now nearly £3 billion – more than we’re spending on building new affordable homes. Much of this cash is pouring into the pockets of private landlords and hotel chains, despite much of the accommodation being substandard and often dangerous. We clearly need solutions to this crisis, quickly and efficiently. But, as we can’t build permanent homes, what else can we do?

During the early days of the Covid pandemic, the government introduced emergency planning powers that allowed health authorities to build hospitals and morgues without following the conventional and convoluted planning process. The nation deemed the situation sufficiently dire that the need to quickly deploy emergency infrastructure justified avoiding the bureaucracy that such buildings would be subject to in normal times.

As it turned out, these Nightingale Hospitals were not required, but they provide a useful example of how the state can step up to combat major health emergencies when necessary. The current homelessness crisis is no less of an emergency and requires a similarly vigorous response.

What London does not lack is space. There are car parks, stalled development sites, vacant plots and redundant scraps of land in abundance across the city. Each and every one could be used to help alleviate the tragedy of the homelessness crisis. With a bit of determination and creativity we could rapidly deploy new homes, at speed and at scale, on these sites within a few months. Consider for a moment the profound impact on the lives of thousands of Londoners that would make.

Kevin Fenton Mews, by ZED PODS for London Borough of Bromley. Credit: ZED PODS

Many housing solutions already exist. In south-east London, modular specialist ZED PODS has installed 25 zero-carbon homes above a Bromley car park, retaining four out of five spaces below.

And in Cardiff, which has been for some time a pioneer of modular housing solutions, Wates and RSHP have deployed award-winning permanent houses using @Home’s timber-based, carbon-positive offsite construction system (the use of which is perversely prohibited in London, due to grant funding restrictions).

Crofts Street by RSHP for Wates and Cardiff Living, manufactured by @Home. Photo: Joas Souza

Over the past year, RCKa has been working on a prototype home that we believe could help deliver these objectives. Working with main contractor Wates and offsite specialist Rollalong, we have developed a high-quality home which can be installed anywhere in London in under two hours.

Compliant with space standards, providing a generous two- or three-bedroom apartment, this modular dwelling is entirely made in Rollalong’s Dorset factory and brought to site in three or four separate parts, which can be assembled for considerably less expense than a traditionally built home.

Interior of RCKa and Rollalong’s modular home, showing the main living area and bedroom. Credit: Wates

Despite the speed and cost benefits, this is in no way inferior to a permanent home. With a design life of more than 60 years, in some respects these dwellings are better than much of the new housing stock that has been built across the country in recent years. How many new-build homes do you know of that feature a 2.9m ceiling, as does ours? A deep knowledge of what goes into each module allows the materials to be recovered at end of life and the steel frame can be repurposed for other uses, such as classrooms, site accommodation, or even another home.

Some compromises are necessary to achieve these homes at that pace, however. The homes lack private external amenity space, so we will need exemplary placemaking and high-quality external space and play areas to compensate. Their location is vital, too. They will need to be close to public transport and local amenities, such as shops and schools. Community space should be included and the arrangement of the homes on the site will be vital to embed a sense of belonging, security and community.

London’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development, Tom Copley, opens RCKa and Rollalong’s temporary accommodation module outside City Hall in August 2025. Credit: RCKa

The country has the technical capability to deliver these homes at scale, but the regulatory and policy environment needs to adapt. Permitted development regulations must be expanded, as they were during the pandemic, to allow us to deploy meanwhile homes without the inherent complexities of full planning permission. Inherent in this are dimensional parameters which should protect neighbouring properties, and appropriate locations will need to be identified close to social infrastructure and public transport. Councils need to adopt progressive procurement too, encouraging direct awards and comparing cost submissions not between different bidders, but rather with the amounts currently being squandered on hotels and private landlords.

The pandemic was brought to an end when the pharmaceutical industry mobilised to deliver a vaccine in a fraction of the normal time, and this subsequently led to a flurry of innovative life-changing therapies in other areas of medicine. In a similar way, a co-ordinated national strategy to industrialise housing could address the urgent need for emergency accommodation while building a robust manufacturing sector which is prepped to deliver the permanent homes the government has committed to in the coming years.

Over 130,000 households spent last night in temporary accommodation, up by 14,000 since last year. We have all the tools we need to put this right. There’s no excuse for us not to use them.

This article was published in the Architects’ Journal in December 2026.

We must encourage the building of urban one-home wonders

London’s suburbs, which Sir John Betjeman famously called “the home of the gnome” half a century ago, have become the hunting ground of the SUV. These hulking death machines dominate the streets and their presence is a blight on our neighbourhoods.

This is not something we collectively agreed to; it’s the product of personal choice, inadequate regulation and cheap finance.

In 1973 the poet laureate was conflicted in his disdain for the loss of the countryside to suburban expansion, while also celebrating the value of the commonplace to the “ordinary citizen”. Betjeman could never have anticipated the arrival of the Personal Contract Purchase.

The argument goes that car ownership is a manifestation of personal freedom, yet this liberty is desperately dull. Fully 70% of private vehicles sold in 2024 were grey, white, black or silver.

One by one, the streets become increasingly achromatic: white cars, white homes – the coral bleaching of our towns and cities

We see the same in our houses too: the depressing prevalence of house-flipping, where developers buy up characterful but shabby properties and expunge any remnants of joy by wrapping them in clinical white insulated render, and swap timber sash windows with anthracite grey aluminium. One by one, the streets become increasingly achromatic: white cars, white homes – the coral bleaching of our towns and cities.

Some of this is driven by sales conventions: grey windows shift more easily than green. Part L requires a new thermal envelope and crisp white render is an easy sell. Increasingly prescriptive space standards demand a precise number of rooms of a particular size, and build costs make it impossible to provide any more than the bare minimum. Like pebbles in the ocean, the churning of the regulatory tide softens every hard edge into vapid uniformity.

Last week a draft replacement National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) appeared, correctly diagnosing that the simple division between major and minor applications with a threshold of 10 homes was anachronous. A new category – medium – is proposed, capturing schemes with 10 or more dwellings, but fewer than 50, with an accompanying reduction in the burden on applicants and a scheme of delegation to elude incalcitrant planning committees. This is welcome, but also a missed opportunity to add a further category covering single family homes.

Since its introduction in 2012, the NPPF has included a specific allowance for single houses in rural areas that are “truly outstanding” where they would otherwise be refused. Oligarchs, hedge fund managers and wealthy actor types are well-served, all able to afford the world’s most talented designers (or the most expensive planning lawyers) to smooth the path to constructing gaudy palazzi or sleek modernist mansions in the countryside. The new NPPF retains it.

It is not right that there is no equivalent provision for urban areas, precisely where we should be encouraging new homes to be built. A new category of development application is needed which enables individuals or families to buy up scraps of land and transform them into homes that respond to their individual needs and personal tastes.

Maintaining the alliterative terminology, the introduction of a new micro classification for new houses should remove all of the conventional planning requirements and impose just dimensional parameters to ensure limited impact on neighbours: no taller than the highest point of an immediate neighbour, perhaps; no closer to the road than the front face of an adjoining property; remaining outside a 45-degree angle drawn from the primary window serving an existing habitable room.

In line with the requirement to make the best use of land, this should impose a maximum site size of, say, 200sqm, but beyond that the Building Regulations would be enough to ensure that the dwelling is safe, secure, well ventilated, warm, sustainable and accessible.

As for space standards? Forget them. Japan has demonstrated how a talented architect can squeeze exquisite homes from the most preposterous of plots when freed from the constraints of a suite of housing standards that assume every family unit falls neatly into normative expectations.

Automatic permission, even within spatial constraints, would inevitably lead to some localised horrors, but the upside would be a parallel wave of surprise and joy sprinkled across the suburbs

Not everyone adheres to the conventions expected of them by government decree, nor does everyone desire to live in a standard home. Extended and non-nuclear families are poorly catered for by the NDSS, and the demographic target for a two-bed, four-person flat is surely so niche that their prevalence speaks more to our failure to build proper homes than it reflects a genuine need.

A micro planning category, freeing individual houses from the constraints of the planning system, save from the obvious safeguards needed to protect the amenity of immediate neighbours and important heritage, would – at the very least – allow families to build the homes they really need. Within conservation areas, new development must “preserve” or “enhance”. It follows that, outside of them, character should be free to evolve and adapt.

“In-keeping”, “subservient” and “sympathetic” are the last refuge of the chronically unimaginative. Let’s excise them from the lexicon.

For sure, automatic permission, even within spatial constraints, would inevitably lead to some localised horrors, but the upside would be a parallel wave of surprise and joy sprinkled across the suburbs. And, let’s be honest – can we really claim that the current planning system is effective at preventing the most egregious designs? At best, it drives us inexorably towards housing homogeneity.

It is time to loosen up. As Hannes Coudenys, founder of Ugly Belgian Houses, a website dedicated to poking gentle fun at the peculiar aesthetic choices of Flemish self-builders, said: “It’s better to be ugly than to be boring.” Who are we to argue?

This article was first published in Building Design.

Raising the Barriers

With revisions to the National Planning Policy Framework complete, and clear parameters for the strategic release of green belt now established, the government is rightly turning its attention to the plight of SME developers which have yet to benefit from planning reform but perhaps have the most significant part to play in helping to deliver the 1.5m homes promised in Labour’s manifesto.

The collapse in SME development in recent decades has been striking, with diminishing diversity and mediocre design and poor construction quality now a prevailing characteristic of the new-build housing market. According to government statistics, by 2022 a quarter of new homes were being delivered by just three plc developers, and nearly half of them by the top ten. In 2020 SME developers were providing just 10% of the nation’s homes, down from 40% in the 1980s. These figures will not have improved in more recent years.

For SME developers, and especially those operating at the small end of the market, planning remains the most significant barrier to growth. Although the risk of refusal remains a constant concern, it is more often than not the inevitable delays to decision-making that can quickly turn a marginal scheme into an unviable one. Delays cost money, as small developers are rarely flush with cash and often borrow money to acquire land at higher rates than plc housebuilders, which means interest on the debt starts accruing immediately. All of this could be planned for and factored into investment decisions were the timescales predicable, but according to research by planning consultancy Lichfields, in 2024, just 36% of major planning applications (those comprising ten or more homes) were determined in less than a year. This figure is a remarkable change from ten years earlier, when 78% of major applications were decided in this time. The statutory timescale for determination is 13 weeks.

The cost of acquiring land is usually, by some margin, the largest financial outlay. Nevertheless, professional services, surveys and application fees can quickly add up. The number of reports and surveys required to accompany planning applications (“validation requirements”) have increased dramatically over time. This has two effects: firstly, the cost of commissioning these documents is significant. Even for a relatively modest application, the cost can run into tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Secondly, by making the validation process more complex and uncertain, the risk of delays between submission and the case officer even looking at an application can be significant. The slightest error in documentation, or omission of a report, can result in additional cost as the statutory eight- or thirteen-week determination period cannot commence until an application has been made “valid” and assigned to a case officer.

The number and type of reports required to accompany a planning application are the responsibility of the local planning authority, although there is a mandatory national requirement which comprises just the application form, Design and Access Statement, location plan, ownership certificates and fee. The LPA can use a “local list” to add a plethora of additional requirements depending on the type of development. For a recent scheme for 21 flats in south London, we were asked to provide an aviation impact assessment, TV and radio reception impact assessment, construction logistics management plan, microclimate wind assessment, agent of change assessment and a public art strategy, among the more than 40 items required to accompany our submission. Each one of these requires a separate consultant to be engaged, managed, and paid.

This is a preposterous amount of work to undertake at pre-planning stage when even the principle of development might remain undetermined. Many of these things should not be required at all – energy performance and safety requirements are set out in the Building Regulations, for example – but even those that could reasonably be the concern of planners should be attached to a planning consent as conditions, rather than required upfront.

The front-loading of the validation checklist might be an unintended consequence of the 2016 Neighbourhood Planning Bill which placed restrictions on the number of conditions that could be attached to a planning consent. To forestall development, too many LPAs have instead shifted these requirements to the beginning of the process, rather than scrapping them altogether.

Fire safety is dealt with Part B of the Building Regulations, compliance with which is mandatory for all development. A building which does not meet these regulations cannot be occupied, so why require a fire statement in addition to this as part of the planning process when it falls outside the scope of the Building Safety Act? While the intention might seem sound, the reality is that a completed building will rarely be assessed by planning compliance officers to ensure that it meets with the approved drawings.

Likewise, environmental performance. Requiring enhancements above the level described within the national Building Regulations is unnecessary. This isn’t to diminish the importance of sustainability initiatives, but their inclusion within a planning application should be up to the applicant to determine and form part of the “on balance” decision made by planning authorities, having weighed up the relative merits of the scheme. 

There is no reason why all planning validation requirements should not be set at national level. Radio waves do not behave differently between Bromley and Barnet; the good people of Havering have no less of an appreciation of public art than they do in Hammersmith.

The government’s recognition that the demands on SME developers are far different from those of the volume housebuilders, and that these entities operate within entirely different constraints, is welcome. This presents the opportunity to align validation requirements with these categories of development. Consistent with the alliterative naming convention, a new “micro” development category for sites with an area of less than 100sqm or providing a single dwelling should be introduced, with nationally determined validation list and design parameters and nothing else. This would unleash a wave of creativity and innovation, providing self-builders and small-scale developers with the certainty to bring forward new infill homes in sustainable locations.

Minor applications (those between two and nine dwellings) need not be accompanied by much more than this: plans, elevations, sections, a Design & Access Statement and daylight and sunlight report should be enough to determine whether an application meets the requirements of local policy. A prohibition on locally set affordable housing “levies” should be part of this reform, as these undermines the national threshold intended to encourage small site development. As with proposed changes to Biodiversity Net Gain requirements, statements of community engagement, open space assessments and the like are unnecessary at this scale and place an unreasonable burden on prospective development. In all but exceptional circumstances the provision of new homes far outweighs any negative impact of development.

There is no reason why validation requirements should not be set entirely at national level, and at a level commensurate with the size of the development being proposed. SME developers are desperate to help the government deliver on its housing ambitions. Raising the barriers will help them do it.

This article was published in the Pocket Living publication “The Road to a Proportionate System” in September 2025.

Getting the UK building will need bold thinking

Since taking power last summer, the government’s barrage of announcements around tackling Britain’s sclerotic planning system, and how it intends to ‘back the builders, not the blockers’, has been head-spinning to say the least. 

Bold changes to the National Planning Policy Framework were adopted, as promised, in December; there has been no let-up during the post-festive fug. Since the beginning of 2025, we have witnessed a flurry of striking reforms, including changes to planning committees, reforms to judicial reviews, brownfield passports, development around stations, and a slew of individual approvals for data centres, solar farms and power lines.

There can be no doubt that, when it comes to critical national infrastructure, the current way of doing things doesn’t really work. We have failed to complete a single new reservoir in more than 30 years, yet water scarcity is often a justification for refusing new homes. 

Planning is not solely responsible, but doubtless the delay and uncertainty of Britain’s discretionary system is a contributing factor: the cost of the Lower Thames Crossing application alone has exceeded £300 million; you could build a mile-long tunnel for roughly the same amount.

Change is necessary: we need renewable energy, and we need pylons to move it around. We need water piped to where people live. This will involve negotiations and compromises – but finally it’s a matter of how, not if, it happens.

Despite this, things aren’t so straightforward when it comes to housing. New towns, with the best will in the world, are 10 to 15 years away. Green belt will be tangled up for the next half-decade. 

The immediate opportunity is the rapid intensification of our towns and cities, but we’ll need an equally ambitious approach. Perhaps pre-approved design codes for suburban corners? Minimum building heights close to stations? A national policy that recognises character is not immutable, and change is both inevitable and necessary? Such bold thinking is required. After all, housing is infrastructure too.

The next parliament is not that far away. It’s time to get building.

This article was originally published in the RIBA Journal in March 2025.

Building Hope: A Crisis Response to Homelessness

At the end of 2024 London boroughs were spending £4m each and every day on housing families in temporary accommodation—nearly £1.5bn every year. One in 23 of London’s children are growing up homeless, many in substandard converted offices, mouldy privately-rented flats, or overcrowded hotel rooms without private kitchens. Many young adults have spent their entire primary and secondary education living in precarious circumstances, their student rooms now providing the most stable accommodation they can remember.

Aside from the extraordinary financial implications of the worsening housing crisis, the human cost is profound. At a time when public finances are under a greater strain than they have been in generations, scandalous sums of money are cascading into the pockets of private landlords and hoteliers. Inadequate and unsafe housing leads to poor health outcomes, putting a strain on an already overstretched NHS—but the real tragedy is the lives that are diminished, the opportunities thwarted, and the potential of future generations squandered. The homelessness crisis is a national emergency and a stain on our country. We must take bold steps to confront it.

During the COVID 19 pandemic, the country mobilised to build a series of temporary hospitals at speed. The government adopted emergency measures that allowed the bypassing of conventional planning processes so that health needs could be prioritised. The public and private sector came together to quickly design, install and operate the so-called Nightingale Hospitals under emergency amendments to the Town & Country Planning Act which granted specified healthcare bodies permitted development powers to construct or convert buildings for a range of uses including hospitals, mortuaries and testing units, whilst avoiding the need for expensive, time-consuming planning applications. It was a remarkable response.

A similarly ambitious approach is now required to address the housing crisis. The public emergency of substandard temporary accommodation deserves to be treated with the same urgency as the pandemic. In the end the Nightingale Hospitals were not required—the housing emergency is real and present, and has similarly profound long-term implications.

Permitted development rights should be extended to allow the installation of temporary accommodation on vacant plots of land in appropriate locations, with a time limit of no more than five years before permanent development or its return to a pristine state. Naturally, safeguards must be included to ensure that the homes are of a sufficient standard: compliance with Building Regulations to ensure thermal comfort, accessibility and safety; and broad compliance with Nationally Described Space Standards, although perhaps a concession should be made to allow dwellings 85% of the total required area to optimise the use of land.

Homes delivered under this method should have easy access to the public transport network, and so located no more than 800m from a station; also close to local amenities such as high streets and social infrastructure. To avoid large numbers of people in need being placed in areas already suffering from high levels of deprivation, an impact assessment should be carried out to understand how these temporary homes might affect the wellbeing of existing residents. These powers could also include an upper limit on the number of bed spaces within a single location: 250 would seem reasonable. Dimensional parameters should also be established: a similar Class TA Permitted Development Right already allows the Crown to erect certain structures within closed defence sites provided that they are below a height threshold and a sufficient distance from neighbouring homes.

Importantly, the homes should be demountable and capable of being relocated elsewhere with ease. This will ensure that a five-year lifespan is achievable and that the homes are designed and manufactured with appropriate quality and robustness. This would provide a boost to the UK’s beleaguered modular manufacturing industry too.

Consideration should also be given to the siting of new accommodation, with the provision of external amenity space and play equipment ensuring that these temporary developments meet the needs of the children and young people who will live there.

There is no reason whatsoever that the quality of these homes should be in any way compromised: there would be little sense in moving families from precarious lodgings to overcrowded and substandard accommodation elsewhere.

There are thousands of hectares of vacant land that could be temporarily repurposed for this use: surface car parks next to suburban train stations, disused golf courses, council estates awaiting regeneration and brownfield land awaiting permanent development which is delayed due to uncertainty over viability or forming part of a later phase of regeneration.

In the case of the homelessness crisis, it is likely that councils will be the ones applying to themselves for permission, but given the nature of the emergency it cannot be allowed that unnecessary interference from external interests can delay or otherwise frustrate the construction of these dwellings, provided that they meet the pre-determined criteria sketched out above. Limited and specific permitted development rules would help achieve this.

Work already undertaken in this area has demonstrated that it is possible to install temporary homes at between half and two-thirds of the cost of conventional affordable housing, and the relocatable nature of the modules enables the homes to be either repurposed elsewhere as permanent homes or to continue their life providing emergency accommodation for those in need. Councils across the country have already demonstrated how, with the appropriate supply chain and procurement processes in place, public sector temporary housing can be comfortable, safe and cost-effective. We should learn from these lessons and apply them at scale. The potential cost savings to the public purse are also vast: the typical payback for a temporary dwelling can be as little as a year.

We owe it to our fellow citizens who are not adequately housed to provide them with a safe and secure home in which to raise their children. Their needs should take precedence over those who already benefit from a place to live. Time-limited permitted development powers could provide a way.

This article was featured as part of a Homes for Britain policy pamphlet “Brownfield Planning Passports: Fast-Track to Growth” published on 10 February 2025.

Far too many councillors are on the side of the nimbys

The planning system is a curious thing. On one hand, it’s a highly technocratic enterprise. Impenetrable reports, documents and surveys are interrogated by under-resourced and overworked planning officers with the solemn responsibility for weighing up thousands of pages of jargon against vague and frequently antediluvian policy.

On the other, there’s ‘planning by vibes’ – the approach adopted by those with limited interest or understanding of how the planning system works or what it’s actually for; those who navigate their way through this complex landscape by intuition and blind faith. Planning by vibes rejects procedure, policy and convention and instead defers to personal preference and peer pressure.

Planning committees tend to fall into one of these categories. While there are thousands of dedicated and knowledgeable councillors up and down the country who discharge their duties with gravity and grace, there are far too many who see their role as the last line of resistance against rapacious developers determined to lay waste to local character.

Since last year’s general election, there has been a flurry of policy announcements as the new government attempts to make good on its ambitious promise to build 1.5 million homes before the end of this parliament. A revision to the National Planning Policy Framework was published quickly in July and formally just before Christmas.Accompanying this announcement was a declaration of war on troublesome planning committees via a new Planning and Infrastructure Bill due out in the coming weeks.

Transparency in decision-making and, more critically, in the consequences of those verdicts, is a key part of the proposals. The consultation paper describes several examples of where refusals contrary to officers’ advice have cost taxpayers vast sums of money – and that’s leaving aside the emotional and economic burden of a nationwide shortage of homes. Were opponents of development aware of the financial impact of erroneous decisions, they might not be quite so keen to delegate their responsibilities to the Planning Inspectorate. Anything we can do to shine a light on this profligacy should be welcomed.

Mandatory training for planning committees seems like an obvious improvement. One wonders why individuals in positions of such influence shouldn’t already possess a rudimentary understanding of the nature of their responsibilities, and this will only impact those elected members who have not taken the time to acquaint themselves with the Town & Country Planning Act or, at the very least, the local policy they’re supposed to be assessing applications against.

Reforms to the mechanism through which officers decide some planning decisions (‘schemes of delegation’) are also long overdue. Currently, the number of objections an application receives (and the system is almost always tilted toward objection) determines whether it gets decided by the case officer or at planning committee. This threshold can be as little as just two or three.

Elevating this number significantly might help. Thousands of angry letters might raise eyebrows and get a mention in the local press, but when considered as a percentage of the total population of a district, these rarely translate into an overwhelming mandate for refusal.

There’s no limit on geography either, and anyone who has submitted an application in recent years will be familiar with objections submitted by those many kilometres – or even continents – away. Letters of support should have equal weight to those in opposition, too. In most cases, they don’t. Those in favour of building new homes need to be heard as clearly as those who are not.

Opponents of centralised planning reform will doubtless consider these suggestions as an affront to democracy, but they are nothing of the sort. There are few other areas of decision-making that are subject to local referendums with such nebulous protocols. The number of objections received in response to a planning application is no indication of its quality; nor, for that matter, compliance with policy. Once an application comes before a planning committee its fate should already have been decided and the decision should be a matter of procedure rather than determination.

This is why the government wants to return more power to officers to decide applications that already comply with the local plan or are on sites allocated for development within the local plan. Nobody is helped by a system which is often little more than a roll of the dice.

This isn’t to diminish the agency that communities should enjoy in setting the parameters for new development, be that housing, railways or solar farms. It is right that housing targets – as those for all infrastructure – are set at national level. Where they go and, to a degree, what they look like should indeed be in the hands of local people. But the time to engage with this is during the plan-making process, not every time an individual application comes forward.

Perhaps an understanding of the basics of planning should not be limited to just those sitting on committees, but form part of the national curriculum too. That way we might finally call time on ‘planning by vibes’ and instead focus our efforts on delivering the homes and infrastructure the country so desperately needs.

This article was published in the Architects’ Journal on 9 January 2025.

The Grenfell inquiry missed the elephant in the room: design and build

‘The horrific fire at Grenfell Tower … may emerge as the latest, and most tragic, manifestation of decreasing oversight that architects have been warning about for so long … Design and build [produced] a transfer of risk, with the balance of power shifting from the contract administrator (a role most often fulfilled by the architect) to the builder.’

I wrote these words just a few months after the inferno at Grenfell Tower took 72 lives. This quote and the article it was taken from were submitted in evidence by the Bereaved, Survivors and Residents (BSR) group to the public inquiry, which last week published its long-awaited final phase 2 report.

There’s a lot to digest in the more than 1,700 pages, and they make for a sobering read. It’s difficult to feel proud of being part of an industry that allowed this to happen.

The inclusion of my article in the evidence demonstrates that the BSR group understood from early on that a pervading culture of negligence, ambiguity and obfuscation enabled the Grenfell tragedy to happen. Yet, working through the final report, it seems there’s little acknowledgement of this fact. While the public inquiry has diligently diagnosed the symptoms, it has ignored the disease. And that malady is design and build.

There are just 19 mentions of design and build in the 326 pages of Part 6 of the report, which covers the refurbishment of the tower itself. The inquiry did not look closely at design and build because industry procurement somehow fell outside the scope of its investigations as defined by the terms of reference chosen by then prime minister Theresa May in 2017.

But the inquiry was tasked with examining the decisions relating to the tower’s ‘modification, refurbishment and management’ and, to me, it’s an inescapable fact that poor procurement and the diminishment of quality are inextricably intertwined with the decisions at the heart of what went wrong. Design and build doesn’t just allow a culture of dereliction of responsibility to perpetuate; it positively encourages it.

Consider for a moment one striking scenario outlined in the findings, when the Celotex RS5000 insulation was suddenly switched for Kingspan K15 without approval by anyone in a position of authority or oversight. The report describes how photographs ‘indicate that [Kingspan K15] was certainly used on the west side of the tower, but the precise locations where it was used are not known and cannot be established given that much of the insulation was consumed in the fire.’

The report goes on to describe how nobody from main contractor Rydon ‘consulted the TMO [tenant management organisation] or informed building control that a substitution was going to be, or had in fact been, made’.

So, a unilateral decision was at some point made to switch one product for another, without this being approved prior, or recorded afterward. As it happens, neither product was suitable for use in this application so the outcome was the same. But what if they’d decided to replace a non-combustible product with an inflammable one? And how many other changes were made that weren’t recorded?

More importantly, this poses serious questions about our knowledge of what else is out there. We are already too aware of the thousands of buildings that have been covered in combustible cladding, but how many more are there that we assume are safe but have in fact been wrapped in flammable materials, hidden away behind innocuous façades? And what other perilous changes have been made to details or material selections in buildings that have yet to come to light? I know of at least one building where flammable cladding was removed to reveal a previously unknown problem with the concrete frame that rendered the entire building structurally unsound. Make no mistake: this is design and build in action.

Design and build became the default form of contracting for large projects in the late 90s and early 2000s when clients realised that they could offload much of their risk on to builders willing to accept it. Yet all that happened was contractors passed that risk down their supply chains; on to subcontractors and consultants – those least able to accommodate it. Architects had their fees slashed and their authority diminished, and were incapable of understanding their place within the increasingly entangled web of responsibilities.

The inquiry found that ‘Rydon was responsible for inspecting the work done by [façade contractor] Harley and other subcontractors at Grenfell Tower’, but failed to acknowledge that it is nonsensical for one company to be responsible for checking what’s happening on site, and a different consultant, Studio E in this case, to be recording this information.

‘As built’ drawings, according to the inquiry, ‘are part of the information that should be handed over to the building owner as part of the health and safety file and are clearly an important record of the construction for future users of the building’. Yet this is a source of never-ending dispute. Building contracts and CDM Regulations demand this information is produced at the conclusion of every project, but it is a foolish architect who takes blind responsibility for others’ work. Instead, we’ll usually settle on insurer-approved phasing: ‘final design’ or ‘as instructed’ or something similarly non-committal, but this hardly gives confidence to the facilities management team when they need to replace a broken window or a concealed pipe.

That Studio E appears to have stamped drawings ‘as approved’ speaks more to their naivety than their negligence. How can any architect in their right mind claim to know what’s been installed on a building when others routinely change specification without regard to the documentation setting out what needs to be done?

There are also limits to what a reasonably competent architect can be expected to understand, and we are increasingly reliant on the specialist expertise of others to fill the gaps in our knowledge. The conductor of an orchestra knows how a symphony should sound, yet she might not know how to play each and every instrument. Design and build not only deprives the architect of the baton, it demotes us to somewhere in the second violins, leaving the podium vacant. And while we might all be looking at the same sheets of music, even the most capable musicians will struggle to make much more than an unlistenable cacophony.

None of this is to let Studio E off the hook. It was neither qualified nor capable of taking on a project of this complexity, and fully deserved the condemnation it received for its lack of professionalism and cavalier attitude to risk. Its acceptance of a fee of around half what it should have charged for a project of this size is a lesson for public sector clients everywhere. But every decent architect out there will know the familiar feeling of being undercut to a level where we know it’s impossible to carry out the most basic of services. There must surely come a point when rock-bottom fees should be considered professionally negligent: there’s no miraculous way to design a building for half the cost; you just end up making 50 per cent of the effort.

Fundamentally, the inquiry has misunderstood the nature of the relationships between different parties within modern contracting. It demands that the architect take responsibility for approving the work of others, as if some unwritten hierarchy exists that empowers them to instruct changes, order the redoing of unsatisfactory work, and keep the client informed when things go awry. Yet we jettisoned these powers when we allowed our appointments to be transferred to builders.

Instead of serving society, our obligations are now to the interests of shareholders. Post-planning, Studio E was novated to Rydon, with any contractual bond with the original client, and its tenants severed. Any temptation (or moral obligation) to report derogations from the employer’s requirements would have constituted a breach of contract. Why did the inquiry not question this?

The report concludes that ‘such a casual approach to contractual relations is a recipe for disaster if events take an unexpected turn. All those involved in whatever capacity in a complex project need to understand clearly what they have agreed to do and what they are responsible for.’

This may be true, and we can introduce all of the legislative reforms and corrective regulations we like. But until we fundamentally transform the culture of construction in the UK, I can’t see that we’ll have learned very much from the Grenfell tragedy at all.

This article originally appeared in the Architects’ Journal on 13 September 2024.

How suburban intensification could hold the key to delivering Labour’s 1.5m homes target

In recent weeks the Labour party has reaffirmed its commitment to building 1.5m homes in its first term of government. What is not yet clear is how it intends to achieve this figure. Part of the strategy is a new towns programme, as announced by Angela Rayner at the UKREiiF property conference in Leeds last month and confirmed in last week’s manifesto.

But, while building new settlements in the countryside is a headline-grabbing proposal, this is a multi-year enterprise, relying at the very least on compulsory purchase reform, huge investment in infrastructure, changes to strategic planning, and the formation of development corporations. Even with a good headwind and an improving economy, there’s little chance of the target 300,000 homes each year being built via this route any time soon.

The UK has not achieved anywhere near this level of housing delivery since the 1970s, despite this being a central tenet of the Tory manifesto. Housebuilding has sent the Conservatives into paroxysms, with its own backbench MPs campaigning against the very policies ministers have claimed are necessary to meet these targets. So how might a new administration jump-start housing delivery without getting bogged down in the quagmire of long overdue planning reform? The leafy suburbs of south London might provide a clue.

In 2017 Croydon Council published guidelines setting out how its outlying areas should be gradually intensified through small site development. The council was already delivering a heroic number of new homes through the development around East Croydon station, although for a time this included a large number of very poor office-to-residential conversions. Rightly identifying that every part of the borough has a part to play in meeting the city’s acute housing need, its Suburban Design Guide received plaudits as an innovative way to meet its housing targets as set out in the London Plan.

The guidance was intended to provide applicants with certainty around what type of development would receive support. It included a range of long-term development scenarios which showed how different suburban conditions might evolve over the next 20 years, providing explicit examples setting out how, for example, a single detached family house on a large plot might be demolished and replaced by a block of flats facing the street, augmented by a small terrace of townhouses to the rear. Other examples set out conditions through which semi-detached and terraced houses might be redeveloped to significantly intensify individual plots and, through assembly of adjoining dwellings, push the uplift even higher.

Armed with this guidance, small developers could acquire land with a good idea of what it was worth, due to the ability to predict what might be built on it with a high degree of certainty. And by following the guidance in the SPD, schemes could be drawn up by architects safe in the knowledge that they would be supported by planning officers. The accurate balancing of acquisition cost and development value also meant that there was little benefit to flipping sites, in the hope that each time this happened a little more could be squeezed from the scheme — a phenomenon which pioneering small site developer Roger Zogolovitch referred to as “pass the parcel”.

The Croydon guidance focused on a handful of areas identified for intensification where the council believed there was greatest capacity for new homes — primarily those with low densities but close to high streets or train stations. The results of this policy were remarkable: in a four-year period, Croydon delivered nearly 2,000 homes on small sites, three quarters of which were within developments comprising fewer than 10 homes — by far the largest number of any borough in London. That’s not just approved, but built. The second highest (some way behind) was Barnet, which in the same period managed 700, despite being almost exactly the same size and having the same area of green belt.

Extrapolating this approach across the remainder of London’s low-density suburbs surely has the potential to yield a very large number of new homes. But how many?

Most of central London sits somewhere between 20 and 60 homes per hectare (dph), with a few pockets around Kensington, Bayswater, Tower Hamlets and Maida Vale which top out at about 150dph. In outer areas this drops as low as two dwellings per hectare, even within ten minutes’ walk of suburban stations (Crews Hill, in Enfield’s green belt is an egregious example; albeit soon to be corrected).

This is clearly an aberration in a world city, particularly when one considers the massive green belt, the very purpose of which is to promote urban intensification. Current green belt designations make little sense where there’s nothing to distinguish it from the boundaries of those cities it’s intended to constrain. 10% of London’s total area is located within ten minutes’ walk of a station whilst simultaneously having a residential density of less than 20 dwellings per hectare.

An obvious route to meeting the one-and-a-half million homes that Labour has committed to would look more closely at these areas and focus development on suburban intensification. Croydon has shown this can work. But development of this scale does not come without compromises, and incoming Conservative mayor Jason Perry unceremoniously scrapped the SPD after running on an unashamedly NIMBY ticket.

Across London there’s around 47,000 hectares of suburban housing within 800m of a station, once protected open space and industrial land are removed. This has an average density of just over 31 dwellings per hectare. An uplift of just 25% in density, capped at 100dph and no lower than 40dph, could yield some 900,000 homes — just in those areas less than ten minutes’ walk from a station. Coupled with more modest increases outside these areas, the figure is well north of a million — and that’s just in London alone.

Expanding this approach across the rest of the country could easily get to the targets that Labour has set for itself; putting a rocket booster under regional economies to boot, as local developers, trades and supply chains respond to a sudden increase in demand for their services. Berkeley Homes alone currently builds around 10% of all homes in London. This isn’t a healthy state of affairs, but when we place so many hurdles in the way of small-scale development, it’s no wonder we suffer from housebuilding hegemony.

40 dwellings per hectare isn’t high, being equivalent to a neighbourhood of two-storey Victorian terraces. Applying a 25% increase in density to all of the areas identified, with a minimum threshold of 40 and a maximum of 100 and making a modest adjustment for those parts of London which have a high proportion of detached and semi-detached houses or large gardens, the areas within 10 minutes’ walk of London’s stations can accommodate around 850,000 homes. Include the areas just outside this, and there’s potential for over a million. Far from being a “war on the suburbs” as some have claimed — such an approach would help breathe new life into them.

Despite the protestations of comfortable suburban homeowners, suburban intensification would not radically transform the character of their neighbourhoods. There are myriad examples across London of sprawling, inefficient, land-hungry houses being replaced by compact and sustainable family homes. A charming example of this is to be found in Purley, where small site specialists Harp & Harp have designed seven new family homes on a corner plot. Repeating this on each corner of the block would easily achieve a 40% uplift in density, whilst being entirely compatible with local character. Yet local Nimbys have repeatedly attempted to challenge the planning approval, including at the High Court, no less.

What policy levers might an incoming government pull to jump-start intensification? Paragraph 129 of the National Planning Policy Framework already states that local plans “should include the use of minimum density standards for city and town centres and other locations that are well served by public transport.” However, a get-out clause remains: authorities can knock back development “if the resulting built form would be wholly out of character with the existing area”.

It’s time to pop that statement in the recycling bin. Instead, the government should follow examples in Canada and New Zealand and adopt a very strong presumption in favour of intensification close to stations, coupled with a prohibition on minor applications being decided under anything other than delegated powers. National housing targets should include a proportion to be delivered on small sites, rather than considering these as “windfall”. Finally, all planning authorities should be mandated to produce small site design codes, with a national version to fall back on should they refuse to do so.

Labour has already identified the lagging economy, pitiful productivity and the dire social and environmental consequences of poor-quality housing as major barriers to growth, but the idea that it can deliver 1.5 million homes via a new town programme in the first term of government if for the birds. Rapid intensification of our cities’ suburbs might offer a solution.

This article originally appeared in Building Design.

Small Sites, Big Ambitions

In comparison to other similarly sized world cities, London is not very dense. With limited exceptions, such as Maida Vale, parts of Tower Hamlets and Kensington, much of the city has no more people per hectare than the satellite towns surrounding it. Arrive by train and this is only too apparent, with railways cutting through miles of two-storey Victorian terraces, only giving way to mansion blocks, high rise towers and high-density housing estates close to the heart of the city. Our housing is too thinly spread.

Map of London showing population density using data from the 2021 Census.
Map of London showing dwelling density using data from the 2021 Census.

All land in London is a precious resource, and to sustain our capital’s economy and vitality we must use it more effectively—and more fairly.

Living in any major city—and benefiting from all the amenities and conveniences that it has to offer—comes with a moral responsibility to allow others to do the same. London’s suburbs could do much more to help provide the homes that the city so desperately needs—no more so than in those areas which benefit from good access to the public transport network, and where reliance on private car ownership diminishes. But in outer areas which have not been identified for large-scale regeneration, the process of intensification can be a tortuous one.

Obtaining permission to build even a small development of new homes is disproportionately complex, time-consuming and risky when compared to larger strategic developments.

Yet, even within existing planning policies, all the tools exist to establish
an environment where land seemingly lost to low-density housing can be
reinvigorated through a process of gradual densification.

Focusing on areas within a ten minutes’ walk of the city’s suburban train and Underground stations, there is the potential for up to a million new homes to be built, surprisingly quickly and effectively. When Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s London Plan was adopted in 2021, it set out, for the first time, housing targets that must be achieved on small sites in each London borough.

This included the City of London Corporation and two Mayoral Development Corporations. In this case, small sites were defined as anything with an area of less than 0.25 hectares—roughly a third of a standard football pitch. Accompanying these targets was guidance and policies on how such development should be encouraged through plan-making and decisions.

Although it didn’t become formal policy until 2021, Khan’s version of the Plan had first been published in draft form at the tail end of 2017. The boroughs either embraced or resisted the Plan’s ambitions largely depending upon their political persuasion at the time. Labour-run Croydon Council, on the southern edge of the Greater London area, was one of the first out of the blocks, quickly establishing a set of planning principles to be followed by applicants wishing to bring forward small-scale development in suburban areas—generally towards the southern border with Surrey.

The award-winning Suburban Design Guide was adopted in April 2019, and provided clear parameters for the transformation of large, land-hungry houses into efficient, mid-rise developments. Essentially, if developers followed the rules established by the guidance, there would be no reason for their applications to be rejected. Some examples provided within the document demonstrated how, for example, a pair of adjoining large houses
could be turned into as many as 20 to 30 new homes.

Five years on from the adoption of the guidance, which was scrapped in 2022 by the incoming Conservative mayor, there is sufficient data to demonstrate the effect.

The impact this policy had on housing delivery—and the figures are remarkable. In the four-year period between 2018 and 2021, Croydon managed to complete nearly 2,000 new homes on small sites within developments consisting of fewer than ten dwellings (noting that even this is below the London Plan’s small site threshold, which determines plot size but not the number of homes within it).

The next highest delivering borough was Barnet, which in the same period delivered around a quarter of this figure.

Extract from Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide Supplementary Planning Document.

The Suburban Design Guide neatly illustrated how larger areas of suburban housing could be intensified incrementally, resulting in a broader mix of smaller flats, townhouses, and large family homes. This is exemplified above showing how two large homes could be replaced with a block of flats and eight townhouses. This approach is borne out by the number of homes delivered in Croydon during a relatively short period of time: around 500 per year. There are 20 outer-London boroughs including Croydon.

If the remaining 19 had managed to deliver housing on small sites at the same rate, we could have had another 25,000 homes built by now.

Extract from 2023 Housing in London report by the GLA showing the number of homes delivered on small sites, and with fewer than ten homes.

Suburban intensification is tricky, and alone will never be able to deliver all the homes that London needs. But experience from Croydon has demonstrated that when the right conditions are in place, it can be implemented quickly, and at scale. As the country recovers from a long period of stagnation, this is one way that we can not only build the homes we need—quickly, where they’re most needed—but also promote economic growth.

This article was originally published in the Fabian Society pamphlet “Homes for London” in April 2024

Housing development in London has a new weapon: AI

A map of Lewisham showing the distribution of potential small sites as found by AI

When the latest iteration of the London Plan was adopted in 2021, for the first time in its 20-year history the policy demanded that the capital’s 35 planning authorities deliver a proportion of their overall housing targets on small sites – that is, with an area of no more than 0.25ha. The figures varied across the city, but the total number of homes to be found on these pockets of land stood at 120,000 – just under a quarter of the overall housing target for the whole of London.

This number was way below that originally proposed by the London mayor in 2018. Alongside a ‘presumption in favour’ of development on small sites close to public transport, the earlier version of his plan compelled planning authorities to find space on small sites for a quarter of a million homes, with the outer boroughs expected to deliver the lion’s share.

The pushback was inevitable, with London Assembly member Andrew Boff claiming, hyperbolically, that this amounted to a ‘war on the suburbs’. With the GLA lacking convincing data to demonstrate the figures were achievable, the targets were slashed before adoption.

But quiet, in the background, progressive boroughs knuckled down and got on with putting plans in place to promote intensification. In 2020 – nearly a year before the final version of the London Plan was adopted – Lewisham Council appointed RCKa and Ash Sakula to prepare dedicated guidance for new homes on its small sites. Just six months after the London Plan became official policy, Lewisham’s Small Sites SPD was formally adopted.

Two years on, as Sadiq Khan looks towards what’s increasingly likely to be a third and final term, he will be considering updates to the London Plan to cement his legacy as the mayor who did the most to tackle the city’s profound housing crisis. Small sites are likely to be a key focus of this work, and it would be a shrewd move to ramp up the small sites targets accordingly. But the question remains over whether there is sufficient data to justify this increase. To counter resistance to suburban intensification (as happened in Croydon) the new plan will need to be backed with robust evidence of the quantity and distribution of these sites.

So where are they? And how many? We tried to find out.

Land Registry data tells us that there are some 66,000 freeholds in Lewisham, and about 85 per cent of these meet the small-site criteria. Armed with our intimate knowledge of the Lewisham SPD and the site “types” it identifies, we set about mapping every one of them. Having built up a vast library of sites, based on the SPD, we trained an AI to categorise a bunch: backland, infill, amenity space and so on. Then, setting our learning model on the remainder of the borough, we created a complete map of Lewisham, including the location, size – and a rough idea of capacity – of every development opportunity from Deptford to Beckenham.

What we found was striking. While Lewisham’s London Plan 10-year small sites target is currently 3,790, based on early outputs from our data we think there might be capacity for two to three times this number. In fact, our AI model shows that there are enough sites to deliver Lewisham’s target on just two types alone. And as we trawl through the data, the AI improves. Ultimately, our plan is to apply the learning model to capture the whole of London.

Now, just because a site is developable it doesn’t mean it will come forward. The AI makes no distinction between public and private ownership, and many of the sites it has picked out will not provide new homes: some are private gardens, others active builder’s yards and occupied garages. But by establishing a policy landscape that makes planning less risky – as Lewisham has done – boroughs can go a long way to meeting these targets.

Extrapolating these figures across the rest of London, we think there’s sufficient capacity for at least 350,000 homes. Backed by our AI, there can be no more arguing over targets when we know not just how many sites there are. We can even point to them on a map. This is a huge opportunity, and those boroughs still lacking a dedicated small-sites policy should be compelled to implement it as soon as they can. It’s time to take small sites seriously.

This article was originally published in the Architects’ Journal.

Britain’s Green Belt is Choking the Economy

I contributed to an article in the Economist newspaper about the state of Britain’s green belt, and the potential to build hundreds of thousands of homes around rural stations.

Sadiq Khan should be bold. He should rethink the green belt

No aspect of planning policy is quite as divisive, or as misunderstood, as the green belt. Covering some 16,000km2, England’s 14 green belts occupy one-eighth of England’s total area (equivalent to three-quarters of the area of Wales, if that’s your preferred unit of measurement).

London’s metropolitan green belt alone stretches from Haslemere in Hampshire to the North Sea—a distance of some 100 miles—and with an area of over half a million hectares is over three times larger than the city itself.

Although its origins precede the Second World War, the green belt was formally established by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which allowed planning authorities to protect open space with this designation. And while the policy has been extremely successful in achieving its original objective of constraining urban expansion, three-quarters of a century on, it’s surely time to reform this anachronistic policy and ensure it meets the needs of the modern world.

Among the marshes of estuary Essex and the undulating hills of Hampshire, there are motorways, waste transfer depots, landfill sites, distribution centres, poultry farms, golf courses and car parks that are all protected from development by the simple virtue of their presence within the green belt. Many areas of otherwise undeveloped space are of limited quality too.

One of the most prominent obstacles to a sensible discussion is the fact that the arguments for and against the green belt have become so utterly polarised. Listening to both sides of the debate, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we face a simple binary choice between the preservation of dwindling landscapes and concreting over every last inch of them. And yet, the green belt has actually grown in recent years. It’s preposterous to claim that it’s under threat.

While we can’t lay the blame for our pitiful national productivity solely at the feet of green-belt policy, it’s clear that our inability to build – whether it’s homes, railways or solar farms – in the places we need, is partly a product of misplaced constraints on development.

Lobby groups like the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) insist that any rethink of the green belt isn’t necessary, but these claims simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. Its latest State of Brownfield report confidently concluded that 1.2 million homes could be built on brownfield land alone, but this is only a quarter of the current shortfall, and certainly insufficient to meet future demands. Furthermore, many of the areas it proposed for new housing aren’t even in the places where need is most acute. I’m not aware of many CPRE members upping sticks from leafy Surrey to the post-industrial wastelands of northern Britain.

There’s a common misconception about the purpose of the green belt in the public sphere, with many mistakenly believing that its purpose is to protect precious rural landscapes. Close to where I live, campaigners against the Cockfosters car park development argued that planning permission should be refused because it would be visible from the green belt, as if the prospect of catching a glimpse of it whilst hurtling along the M25 was a prospect so horrific it didn’t bear thinking about.

In a poorly researched article in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins recently pondered why there wasn’t the same level of protection for the country’s rural parts in the same way that our cities are preserved by Conservation Areas. Any architect or planner could have pointed him towards a whole bunch of protections: AGLV, AONB, Ancient Woodland, SSSI, Ramsar and National Parks, to name a few. Rural areas in fact benefit from far more protections than our towns and cities do, but this is indicative of a wider misunderstanding of planning policy, where green belt is wrongly conflated with other designations that actually do pertain to landscape quality and biodiversity.

It is true that too many open spaces have been relinquished to low-quality, car-dependent sprawl, and nobody – other than the volume housebuilders – wants to see more of that. But, despite what the CPRE claims, we cannot build the homes our country needs on brownfield alone, so some release of open space is inevitable and probably desirable.

There’s a compelling argument that green-belt policy is actually damaging the valuable open spaces that the CPRE is keen to protect. Because building homes is so difficult in places with large areas of green belt, developers target sites beyond it, creating their unsustainable car-dependent sprawl on the outskirts of settlements instead.

Likewise, building new homes on brownfield land far from public transport makes little sense when we could instead cluster them around stations in rural areas, and as an added bonus, give millions of families convenient access to the countryside – something the CPRE claims to support. Not that this should be a free-for-all. Any release of green-belt land for development must be accompanied by robust masterplanning and design codes to ensure that when land is set aside, it is done in a way that is sustainable, accessible, and responsive to local character.

The amount of green belt that would need to be lost to provide a million new homes is so small that it’s little more than a rounding error. Even with modest densities, we’d lose just 1 per cent of the green belt to deliver a million homes. That’s a price worth paying.

Labour’s recent pronouncements in this respect are welcome – if vague . But there are encouraging signs from planning authorities, such as Enfield, that are prepared to tackle this challenge head-on. And emboldened by a lacklustre field of opposition candidates, the mayor of London might revisit his blanket opposition to green-belt release in the next iteration of his city-wide spatial plan. We can but hope.

It’s surely time to set ideology aside and face the fact that an evidence-based review of green-belt policy is long overdue. If we’re to have any chance of facing the challenges of the coming decades, we need to roll up our sleeves and, maybe, loosen our belts.

This article originally appeared in the Architects’ Journal.

Off the Rails

Since its introduction in the post-war period, where it started life as a pragmatic constraint on urban sprawl, the green belt has mutated into an ideological battleground.

Those who consider it to be an unnecessary constraint on progress advocate for its complete removal; others consider it to be sacrosanct, inviolable from development and to be protected at all costs.

The Green Belt Challenge

The reality is—of course—more complex than this, yet it cannot be argued that a blanket ban on any form of development within the green belt, or any amendments to its boundaries, is either pragmatic or reasonable.

It is increasingly apparent that green belt policy needs to be revisited to ensure that it is delivering the best outcomes for citizens. There is not enough land to deliver the homes that we need.

Local planning authorities, who are responsible for managing green belt boundaries, are unlikely to be able to undertake such a task, needing a unified strategy spanning multiple authorities.

Given the strength of feeling and the geography of England’s green belt, this should take the form of a Royal Commission. Only an inquiry with this authority will be able to bring together the relevant parties to properly consider the full range of issues.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to find affordable housing within our cities, those who need to travel frequently to work are forced to live beyond the green belt – in particular, those on lower-paid jobs and the key workers on which cities rely. This adds significant time to the daily commute and acts as a huge drain on productivity and hampers growth.

Station Development

A core objective of green belt policy is to prevent the merging of adjacent settlements. This is sensible. On the other hand, the almost blanket ban on any significant development within designated green belt represents a misunderstanding of its original purpose.

Many cities are surrounded by smaller towns which sit within the green belt: St Albans, Coventry, Guildford, Potters Bar, Macclesfield: these are all towns which are located entirely within the green belts of England’s cities. Green belt inhibits the merging of adjacent settlements, but also prevents the introduction of new settlements within it, even if they possess clear boundaries and sufficient green space to ensure they remain distinct from one another.

England’s train routes tend to radiate from the centre of its cities. Along many of these are stations which benefit from short travel times to urban centres, but which are located entirely within the green belt or open land.

These rural stations provide an obvious opportunity for high-density development close to public transport and within easy reach of places of work.

Multiple studies have shown that these rural stations have the capacity to sustain well over a million new homes. Yet restrictive planning policies, not least green belt protections, prevent this from happening.

10 minutes’ walk equates to around 800m (half a mile). A circle around a single station with a diameter of a mile could, even at modest densities, support up to 15,000 homes. That’s around half of the total number of homes that will be delivered on the Olympic Park.

Unlike Victorian and pre-war England, where new train lines and stations were built so that the land around them could be developed for housing, we would not need to construct new railways for this purpose. They already exist. But the mechanisms for bringing forward such development are subject to considerable planning constraints which often delay projects for years.

Development Corporations

To speed up the delivery of homes in these locations we might adopt a Development Corporation model, with planning powers devolved to a specially incorporated body responsible for delivery. These development corporations would be responsible for bringing forward development in these locations within a defined period – perhaps 10 years – acting as a “master developer”, acquiring land and setting out a masterplan for each location, accompanied by a strict design code informed by the location and local character.

Design codes should set out building heights, street patterns, the quantum of accommodation, orientation and massing, but not favour any particular style: they should promote specificity and a sense of place, rooted in an understanding of context, but this does not mean that they should attempt to ape local vernacular styles.

To coordinate development along transport networks, development corporations could be established following railway lines. This would allow the introduction of social infrastructure, such as schools and healthcare facilities, which need a certain population to support. For example, Meldreth, Foxton and Shepreth stations, which lie on the London to Cambridge line, could together provide homes for over 50,000 people—yet none of these stations is more than 12 minutes apart.

The introduction of new active transport routes, such as cycleways, could also be enabled through the acquisition of land either side of the existing railway, linking these new settlements by sustainable means.

It is not just stations within rural areas that should benefit from development. Transport for London has struggled with securing planning consent for some of its suburban stations.

Therefore, there should be the introduction of new policies to make such development easier. This might take the form of a “presumption in favour” of development close to all stations – including those in urban areas, where densities are significantly higher than those in the surrounding areas.

To mitigate the loss of open space in rural areas, for every hectare taken out of green belt for the purposes of development, an equivalent area could be included within it elsewhere, resulting in no net loss of protected space.

Building within ten minutes’ walk of England’s accessible stations could yield at least 1.2m homes, with the loss of just 680 square kilometres of green belt (in fact it grew by 242 sq km between 2022 and 2023 alone).

There are more reasons to build around stations than not. The mild inconvenience faced by those living in outlying areas who will be unable to use station car parks will be more than mitigated by the huge gains achieved through the provision of new homes, social infrastructure, increased productivity, and economic growth.

This article was first published in the Fabian Society pamphlet “Homes for Britain” in March 2023.

Rural stations are the key to building 1.2m homes in the right places

Perhaps we’ve been desensitised to the stark realities of the housing crisis, with the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the baby boomer generation (which, we need to remember, lived through very little genuine hardship in the post-war years) prevailing. But in other any functional democracy where 3.6 million young adults remained at home due to generational housing inequality, this would be a national scandal. According to some estimates, we are millions of homes short of where a country with our population should be.

The fact that none of the mainstream parties have yet to articulate a plan to address this crisis is a damning indictment of current political discourse. Not only is this a social failure, it’s an economic one too. Productivity in the UK is woefully low, with young people unable to relocate to where jobs are, or otherwise struggling with extended commutes. Worse still, a generation is delaying starting families as housing costs, employment precarity and overcrowding threaten to detonate a demographic time-bomb which nobody seems willing to defuse.

I live on the northern fringes of London, the final stop before the railway plunges into the capital’s green belt. In less than 30 minutes I can be in central London, on one of six or more trains that run every hour. There are many similar lines that extend out of London, providing convenient access both to the city and countryside for those who live close to them. It’s difficult to think of more appropriate locations for new homes.

Resistance to urban expansion is often (rightly) based on a fear of perpetuating low-density, car-dependent sprawl on the outskirts of our rural towns and villages. So it follows that, in order to create new homes less dependent on private vehicle ownership, we should instead look to optimise development around existing public transport networks. But how many homes might we build? And where?

Using various publicly-accessible data sources, I mapped every train station in England and examined the constraints on development around each. Anywhere at risk of flooding was excluded, as was land within national parks, existing urban areas, or those sites protected by landscape designations because of their quality or scientific interest. Green belt, though, I considered fair game: regardless of what the CPRE claims, it’s increasingly clear that we cannot deliver the homes we need on brownfield alone, and a pragmatic review of green belt policy is long overdue. Drawing an 800m radius around each station (equivalent to a 10 minute walk) and extracting constraints, I arrived at a pleasing 777 stations with development potential.

Not every one is close to a population centre, and some are used by only a handful of passengers each year. As there’s no easy method of measuring current or potential frequency of service, I pegged target densities to passenger annual numbers. Those stations closest to major cities were assigned 75 homes per hectare, those in remote areas much less. But even at modest densities this reveals a huge potential for delivering the new homes we need.

A case in point: Ashwell & Morden sits mid-way between London and Cambridge, with frequent services to both. Yet look at it on Google Maps and you’ll see the station is surrounded by little more than open fields. It’s not even in the green belt of either city. Even at modest densities, this site could accommodate 7,000 homes for some 30,000 people. Development of this scale, supported by a decent masterplan and robust design coding, could provide social infrastructure and sustainable travel for residents. And rolling out a similar approach to the rest of the country could be transformational in providing high-quality homes in sustainable locations such as this.

The familiar complaint from those in comfortable circumstances that we risk ‘concreting over the countryside’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when – even with these additional numbers – we’d lose less than 0.4 per cent of England’s rural space in the process (Britain’s roads take up around three times this area).

The coming general election could be a turning point in whether we take genuine steps to address generational inequality, particularly in respect of housing delivery. Building homes around rural stations won’t go the whole way to achieving this but, combined with other bold ideas, it could play a part.

This article was originally published in the Architects’ Journal.

Croydon’s Conservative Mayor has put suburban resistance before home building

Announced with considerable fanfare in 2018, and becoming formal planning policy the following year, Croydon Council’s Suburban Design Guide supplementary planning document (SPD) was London’s first – and, even now, most ambitious – attempt at encouraging its woefully sparse outer areas to do more to meet the city’s housing needs.

The publication made no bones about its intentions. “The evolution of the suburbs to provide homes that will meet the needs of a growing population,” its introduction stated. It went on: “It must however be recognised that delivering approximately 10,000 homes in the suburban places of Croydon will result in an evolution of the existing character of suburban streets, and that the increased density of homes can impact on the amenity of existing residents if not properly managed.”

The guide was rightly heralded as a progressive and practical attempt to deliver new homes in those places best able to accommodate them, and it was quickly celebrated as an exemplar for how to sustainably densify the city’s fringes. Croydon’s in-house spatial planning team took home a planning award in 2019 and the guide was highly commended at the New London Awards the same year. From a personal point of view, it was an important reference for my architectural practice’s own small sites SPD in Lewisham, which was adopted by the council a year ago this month.

However, just three years on, Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide is no more. In May, the borough’s voters elected Conservative Jason Perry as their first Mayor. He had promised that one of his first acts if he won would be to revoke the “dreaded” SPD, which he claimed has “destroyed” Croydon’s character and led to the “destruction” of homes – a peculiar claim given the huge number of dwellings it had in fact enabled in a relatively short time.

The SPD had been produced in response to Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, which was first published in draft in 2017 but not formally adopted until March 2021. The Plan enshrined the need for the boroughs to consider the importance of small sites in meeting London’s housing needs. For the first time, every London planning authority was tasked with finding ways to encourage development on sites with a total area of less than a quarter of a hectare (roughly one third of a standard football pitch), with a ten-year small-site housing target set out in unequivocal terms.

Not only was this to be a way of delivering much-needed homes, the Plan also acknowledged the importance of nudging small-scale developers back to a market that had become dominated by a handful of volume housebuilders since the 2008 financial crash.

Inevitably, the draft Plan’s publication was met with hyperbolic outcry: a “war on the suburbs” is how Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff described the proposals, oddly failing to recognise that small-scale infill development tends to deliver a higher proportion of family homes than small flats; another bête noire of his.

After a robust challenge from several outer London boroughs, Khan was forced to dramatically reduce the small sites housing targets and blunt the “presumption in favour” the Plan had demanded. Having been required to deliver the highest absolute number of homes on small sites of any of the London planning authorities, Croydon Council received the greatest net reduction, with its ten-year target reducing from 15,110 to 6,410 – a drop of nearly 60%.

Croydon is one of London’s least dense boroughs, even when its 2,300 hectares of Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land are excluded from the calculation. At 65 people per hectare, it has around a third the population density of Islington. Its number of homes per hectare is broadly the same as other similarly sized outer boroughs, such as Barnet and Kingston. And, like those boroughs, it clearly can accommodate many more.

In its defence, Croydon has delivered a lot of new homes in the last decade and a half—more than any other borough—so it’s perhaps fair to argue that the council had indeed “played its part” in meeting the city’s housing need. Yet the figures are misleading. Much of Croydon’s new development is concentrated in the urban centre, where clusters of tall residential towers have sprung up around East Croydon station within easy reach of central London.

This is good. Less good, however, is the quality of much of this new housing. Until halted by the implementation of an Article 4 Direction, more new dwellings were created under dubious permitted development rights, which allow commercial buildings to be cheaply converted to residential outside conventional planning permission, in Croydon than in any other borough. It’s not a statistic to be proud of given the sub-standard quality and small size of many of them. Until the introduction of the Suburban Design Guide, the leafier southern wards had got away without making much of a contribution.

Aware of the inherently risky nature of small sites, and that developers interested in taking them on are less able to absorb the cost of delayed or unpredictable planning decisions, the guide presented a series of suburban intensification methods which, if employed, were highly likely to be nodded through.

The acquisition of a pair of suburban semis – of which Croydon has many thousands – could easily lead to their replacement with a small block of flats at the front of the plot and mews houses in the rear garden. In this scenario, there could be a net gain of up to ten homes with no loss of family housing. The guide demanded that new development be no lower than three storeys – a not unreasonable request if we are to have any hope of densifying London’s laughably sparse peripheral areas.

Of course, this inevitably meant that some areas of the borough would experience some change, but that is a small price to pay for living in this great city. There would be benefits too. As the guide’s introduction made clear, higher housing density inevitably attracts local amenities and better social infrastructure – shops, restaurants, schools, healthcare and community facilities – that might actually mean suburbanites wouldn’t need to hop into their giant SUVs quite so often.

It’s no surprise that those areas most resistant to the principle of intensification tend to lie on the city’s fringes, and often consider themselves to be residents of the Home Counties rather than London. The Green Belt itself is often declared as an unnecessary and anachronistic constraint on the capital’s growth. There is some truth in this, but we should start by turning our attention inwards a little: it is the sparsely populated “greyfields” of outer London we need to tackle first.

The citizens of the suburbs must accept that the evolution of local character is a small price to pay for easy access to everything this wonderful city has to offer – and that it is also their duty to enable others to do the same. Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide was a valiant and progressive attempt to achieve this. We should mourn its passing.

This article was originally published by OnLondon.

How to use London’s golf courses to build homes

The summer lockdown of 2020 in England allowed some of us who were working from home to explore parts of our neighbourhoods where we had not previously ventured. I took the opportunity to poke around bits of north London close to where I live.

Most days my walks took me from familiar Victorian terraced streets into the green fringes of Barnet. Reaching the edge of the built-up area, my route took me along a path that plunged into the dense, ancient woodland of Monken Hadley Common.

This comprises part of the London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP) linking Cockfosters at the end of the Piccadilly Line to Chipping Barnet a few kilometres to the west. In the heart of the woodland lies Jack’s Lake, a popular spot for fishing and picnicking.

On a map, the common’s straight northern edge marks a clear boundary between the London Boroughs of Enfield and Barnet; a buffer of green belt separating the wealthy community of Hadley Wood – home to footballers, pop stars and bankers – and the working-class neighbourhood of New Barnet immediately to the south.

The dividing line is not just administrative or economic. Visitors to the common unfamiliar with the well-trodden paths through the trees find their route blocked by a battered sign nailed to a tree warning:

With club membership capped at 500 and fees of more than £2,000 per year, the course is an extraordinarily exclusive use of land. Yet is it far from unique. It is only one of seven courses in use in Enfield, and its proximity to the borough’s boundary with Barnet places it ten minutes’ drive from half a dozen more.

Enfield’s courses together take up an astonishing 330ha, around 4% of the borough’s total area. Two – Hadley Wood and Bush Hill Park – are privately owned, and yet the freeholds to the five other courses are under public control.

One, on the far eastern flank of the borough, is owned by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. The other four belong to Enfield Council, totalling 180ha. Coincidentally, this is almost precisely the same area of green belt that the borough is currently – and controversially – proposing to remove from its green belt in its draft local plan.

This is a common pattern across London – particularly in the outer boroughs where fingers of green belt push their way towards the centre between radial rail and tube lines. Nearby Barnet has nine courses; Bromley in the south east of London has 11. Although Richmond upon Thames has only seven courses, together they take up 7% of the borough’s area, the largest proportion of any in London. Southwark’s Dulwich & Sydenham Hill Golf Club is the closest to central London, owned by the Dulwich Estate, and extends to more than 33ha in the borough’s southern tip.

At the time of writing there are 94 golf courses in use in Greater London. Cumulatively they occupy an area greater than the whole of Brent, which is home to 330,000 people. London’s publicly owned courses alone – of which there are 43 – take up an area larger than the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, with a total population of 185,000.

Map shows London Borough of Brent that covers 4,325ha, compared to total area of all London golf courses covering 4,331ha and total area of all publicly owned London golf courses covering 1,596ha.

Courses represent inequitable land use

When the city is under such pressure to provide homes for a growing population and with house prices continuing to spiral upwards, it is only right to question whether golf represents a just use of a scarce resource.

In Enfield, where there are six golf courses in the affluent western half of the borough, there are some 10,500 people living in temporary accommodation and 4,500 households on the council waiting list. Everyone in dire need of housing in Enfield could be provided within a home by developing just two of the council’s own courses at modest densities.

Of course, wholesale redevelopment of Enfield’s – or any borough’s – fairways and putting greens is not realistic. Irrespective of the political challenges, the planning constraints are considerable. Most golf courses sit either in green belt or metropolitan open land, the latter being a planning designation unique to London that affords the same protections as green belt.

If two of the council’s golf courses were redeveloped, 10,500 people in temporary accommodation and 4,500 households on the council waiting list could be rehomed.

But surely it’s right to question whether a game enjoyed by a small proportion of the population – around 1%, and likely far less in a relatively youthful city such as London, should occupy such a huge amount of valuable land.

It’s true that golf has had a modest resurgence during the pandemic, but this is likely a temporary blip in a long-term decline. Despite this – and with clear evidence that many golf clubs are struggling to survive – the idea that we might take a more nuanced approach to the city’s green spaces is usually met with outrage.

Others are investigating ways to release land for other uses that might provide much-needed income to invest in tired facilities, but they come up against the very planning barriers imposed to protect them from unwanted development. Even when development is necessary for a club’s survival, the mere suggestion of building on surplus green space is met with opprobrium.

Rebuffing green space arguments

The argument reinforced by planning policy is that golf courses provide vital open space accessible to Londoners and they contribute to the city’s ecology. But this is a fallacy. High water usage and frequent mowing of a largely monocultural landscape do not, as many claim, provide significant biodiversity benefits. While trees and hedges along the edges of fairways attract wildlife, the same argument could be made about motorways – and no one is promoting those as a means to green the city.

An average-sized suburban golf course might have around one-fifth of its area occupied by either fairways or green, half by rough, and 30% by tree cover. That’s not an insignificant amount; but rewilding and opening these spaces to the public, as Lewisham Council did in 2019 at Beckenham Place Park, could offer significant ecological benefits to the wider area.

It’s become clear during the pandemic, if evidence were needed, that open space has an important part to play in enhancing mental and physical well-being. Before the introduction of housing space standards there was nothing to stop developers building flats without external private amenity space, and millions of homes were built lacking such provision.

Fortunately, parks and gardens occupy around 11,500ha of land in London, and playing fields and sports grounds 5,600ha. That compares well with other global cities, and a third of London’s area considered to be green.

Golf courses are the third largest category of open space, though, occupying more than 4,330ha. With each golfer requiring around 1.6ha to play, this significantly limits the capacity of the city’s courses to deal with a wider societal need.

Indeed, one of the definitions of metropolitan open land as set out in the London Plan is that it must ‘serve either the whole or significant parts of London’ – a difficult argument to make when the density of use is so limited and the barriers to entry so high. The area required for a single golfer to enjoy a round could provide homes for approximately 380 people. So is it time to start replacing golf courses with housing?

The area required for a single golfer to enjoy a round could provide homes for around 380 people. So is it time to start replacing golf courses with housing?

Although it is often presented as a binary choice between fields or concrete, development in open space does not have to be a zero-sum game. There is no reason why, with a little creativity and imagination, we cannot find ways to improve public access, promote biodiversity, provide vital new social infrastructure, parkland, food production, leisure uses and new housing, while at the same time respecting the important contribution that open spaces make to the character of suburban London – or even enhance them.

Releasing land for homes

Clusters of high-density housing, set in biodiverse landscapes and linked to the wider public transport network by cycle routes, would be entirely compatible with the broader policy aims of the London Plan, if carried out in an intelligent way. Policy must evolve to allow this to happen.

This could be achieved without a net loss of golfing capacity. The intelligent consolidation of a single course could shorten some higher-par holes without reducing their total number, releasing much-needed land for other uses and improving the experience for time-poor players.

A surprising number of London’s courses lie in easy reach of public transport or close to high streets. More than 1,400ha – exactly a third – lie within what the London Plan considers to be highly accessible zones and therefore suitable for incremental intensification.

Public golf course areas could provide homes for 140,000 people. If redeveloped, London golfers would still have 1,500 holes to play. There are further 74 golf courses within 5km of the outer edge of London. 1,400ha of highly accessible zones. 2,800ha free highly accessible zones left according to the London Plan

Public golf course areas could provide homes for 140,000 people. If redeveloped, London golfers would still have 1,500 holes to play. There are further 74 golf courses within 5km of the outer edge of London. 1,400ha of highly accessible zones. 2,800ha free highly accessible zones left according to the London Plan.

The areas of public courses that meet these criteria could alone provide homes for 140,000 people, and London’s golfers would still have 1,500 holes to play. Most of London’s courses lie within the outer edges of the city, and there are a further 74 courses no more than 5km over the border into the Home Counties. Golfers are not deprived of choice when it comes to places to play.

The challenges facing London are myriad, and no single change will solve the current housing crisis. But failing to house those who need a decent place to live is not a result of factors outside our control, but a choice. Access to decent housing is one of the most significant contributors to social and economic inequality. Perhaps more sophisticated thinking about the use of land in London is one way in which we might start to bridge this divide.

This article was first published in the RICS Land Use Journal on 26 July 2022.

The removal of the small sites policy from Sadiq Khan’s London Plan is a betrayal

Take a stroll around any London suburb and before long you’ll come across a pocket of land – a row of garages too small for modern cars, an overgrown gap of uncertain ownership nestled between houses, a sliver of broken concrete beside a railway line – which, with a little tenacity and creativity, could provide space for a new home or two. These sites exist in their thousands across London and are particularly abundant in the outer fringes of the city.

London itself is not very dense. Islington, with around 160 people per hectare, is the borough with the greatest number of people relative to its size. Bromley, with the smallest, has 22 people living in the same area. Compared to Paris and Madrid (neither of which could reasonably be described as unpleasant places to live), with figures of 213 and 286 per hectare respectively for the cities as a whole, it’s clear that London should be able to accommodate far more people than it already does.

In his version of the London Plan (the blueprint for London’s growth over the next ten years) Sadiq Khan set out ambitious targets for the delivery of new housing across the capital. Where the previous mayor, Boris Johnson, adopted a “blue doughnut” approach to planning, which capitulated to the Outer London, largely Conservative-voting, boroughs’ demands for more autonomy over planning decisions, Khan initially required those very councils on the edges of the city to do more to help deliver new homes. As an example of this new approach, Merton’s housing targets rocketed from just over 4,000 in the Johnson’s version of the London Plan to more than 13,000 in Khan’s – an increase of nearly 225 per cent.

For the first time, a key strategy of the Plan was the exploitation of small sites to help achieve overall housing targets. (Small sites, in this context, are defined as those providing up to 25 homes). Previous Plans had ignored the potential of such sites to make a significant dent in housing targets, largely because their capacity was so hard to quantify. Yet under the current Mayor this was to become an important component of the new housing strategy. In total, it required no less than 245,730 homes to be delivered on small sites over ten years—more than a third of the total housing target for London over that period.

To compel insubordinate councils to comply, the Plan included a controversial clause requiring them to adopt a “presumption in favour” of approval for small developments on sites close to stations or high streets, at the same time acknowledging that the character of some areas would need to evolve to accommodate London’s anticipated population growth.

Predictably, this was met with a hyperbolic response from Conservative politicians, with Andrew Boff, leader of the Tory group on the London Assembly, claiming that the policy amounted to “war on the suburbs”. Yet a less partisan analysis clearly shows that the Outer London boroughs are not doing nearly enough to combat the housing crisis. Even the government’s own, less ambitious, targets demonstrated that several of the suburban boroughs are falling short, with Havering achieving only a third of its target.

Prior to becoming official policy, any new London Plan has to go through a process of public consultation and interrogation by an independent planning inspector. With Mayor Khan’s draft new Plan, this took place in spring of 2019, with a queue of homeowning suburbanites duly trotting up to City Hall to lambast the Mayor’s proposals. Complaints were raised about the complex statistical methods for calculating the capacity of Outer London to deliver new homes and familiar, tired accusations that a wave of “garden grabbing” would be unleashed were made. Inevitably it was the least dense boroughs – and therefore the ones with the greatest capacity for growth – which pushed back hardest against the Mayor’s proposals.

The outcome of the examination was a resounding rejection of the small sites policy by the inspector, who called for its wholesale removal. A recently as November the Mayor rejected this call, claiming that London could indeed “deliver those homes within London’s boundaries with no development on the Green Belt” (the latter stance, by the way, was something else the inspector had recommended the Mayor reconsider). However, when the Mayor’s final version of the Plan appeared in December, the small sites policy was almost entirely gone – and with it the associated housing targets. In some cases the numbers had been slashed by half. Across London, this resulted in a total reduction of 125,000 potential homes.

What was the reason for this extraordinary change of heart? With an election looming, perhaps the Mayor was hopeful of making a political play for support in those boroughs currently holding fast against the red tide? After all, eight of the ten biggest reductions for small sites targets were in non-Labour voting boroughs, the same number that voted Conservative in the 2016 mayoral election. Perhaps it was felt that this policy risked holding up adoption of the Plan? That seems possible, though recent criticism by secretary of state for housing Robert Jenrick suggests that the government considers the Plan not to be ambitious enough. In his letter to the Mayor, Jenrick also objected to the Plan’s emphasis on building flats rather than family houses – something that small sites tend to deliver.

The idea that the suburbs continue to represent a bucolic escape from the grime and overcrowding of Inner London has long been anachronistic. With home ownership in the central boroughs now out of reach for most, Outer London is increasingly proving an acceptable compromise between commuting and housing costs. Change in the character of Outer London is inevitable as the city adapts to growth, yet in reality even the more ambitious small sites targets of the Plan would hardly have resulted in noticeable change in the character of suburban neighbourhoods. Dividing large houses into flats, small-scale development on infill sites, utilising scraps of redundant land and above shops: all of these count against the figures, and when spread across a wide area would barely be noticeable, even with the higher targets.

The claim that suburban boroughs are unable to deliver their fair share of the homes is preposterous: under the latest, less ambitious, version of the London Plan, Hackney – with a total area of 1,900 hectares – is, over the next decade, expected to deliver 6,580 homes on small sites compared to 2,950 in Hillingdon, despite the latter having an area six times larger. Inevitably some standards must change: policies that require a minimum distance between windows of no less than 20 metres, as is the case with many suburban boroughs, are no longer fit for purpose in a rapidly densifying city. As has consistently been pointed out by campaign group Create Streets, many of the older homes considered desirable today would not comply with contemporary planning policies.

The removal of the small sites policy from the London Plan represents a betrayal, not only for those citizens of London desperate to get a foot on the housing ladder but also for all of those small businesses so vital to the city’s construction economy: builders, developers and design professionals, for whom the risks inherent in the planning and delivery of small-scale developments are often too great to justify. With the last-minute extension to the Mayor’s term due to the coronavirus we can only hope for the reintroduction of the small sites policy so that we can get on with delivering the homes London needs.

This article was originally published by OnLondon.

Grenfell Inquiry has exposed design and build as our dirty little secret

The infamous game of exquisite corpse, invented by surrealists in the cafés of early 20th-century Paris, involved participants contributing to an evolving drawing, oblivious to their predecessors’ intent, save for a few short lines extending across a crease in the paper concealing the previous player’s work. With only limited information with which to extrapolate, each artist’s efforts unwittingly transformed churches into chickens; fish into fountains. The drawing revealed at the conclusion of the exercise could be surprising, disturbing – but never predictable.

As the second phase of the Grenfell public inquiry kicked off last week, the general public unwittingly glimpsed the construction industry’s own version of exquisite corpse. While shocking to many, the lack of oversight, ownership and liability that the inquiry has exposed is of little surprise to those of us who are immersed in the everyday realities of contemporary construction.

Design and build is construction’s dirty little secret; a seductive contractual brew which purports to offer clients certainty and comfort but amounts to little more than the delusive reconciliation of the cost/time/quality triumvirate. This commissioning and construction process has not only enabled the derogation of responsibility; it has positively encouraged it. The labyrinthine blame game now taking place within the inquiry is as predictable as it is devastating.

D&B is not, in and of itself, the problem. Rather it’s the inevitable manifestation of a rotten culture of risk-avoidance, which has demoted the pursuit of quality so far down the list of priorities that in some cases it ceases to factor at all. Yet it’s easy to understand why it remains so popular with clients. The opportunity to offload the risk of cost and programme overruns to a main contractor, thus saving face when things go awry, is too tempting to ignore, particularly within a public sector paralysed by fear of failure. In response, contractors – working to razor-thin margins and possibly bidding below cost in the hope they can recoup costs through subsequent ‘value engineering’ – simply bat the risk down the supply chain to the design team, suppliers, specialist subcontractors, or whoever else happens to be in the room at the time. Deniability is plausible when nobody really knows who is responsible.

The Hackitt review went some way to addressing this, but misidentified the elusive ‘golden thread’ as information, promoting the idea that a more robust transfer of data is the cure. But without singular oversight of the entire process – a sole point of responsibility – it’s no wonder what emerges is a poor facsimile of what was intended. No, the golden thread must be quality – the setting out, from beginning to end, of what a project must be like; then the presence of an ever-present and empowered agent with the authority and capability to intercede when things are not as they need to be. 

The bereaved, survivors and relatives group, in its submission to phase two of the inquiry, put it thus: ‘Under Design and build there is a danger that the architects, once novated, are squeezed out of the process. They are, after all, now a cost burden for the design-and-build contractor. That certainly seems to have happened here. And there is no independent professional person to administer the contract and ensure that the design intent is fulfilled.’

It doesn’t have to be this way. Within the last quarter-century, a sea change has taken place elsewhere within the UK construction industry, with the number of site accidents and injuries plummeting. Changes in legislation have helped, but this has been principally due to a significant change in culture. The tragedy at Grenfell has made it apparent that our attitude to quality must now undergo a similarly profound transformation.

This article was first published in the Architects’ Journal, 28 February 2020.

The Pursuit of Quality

By and large, architecture is not a well-paid vocation—certainly considering the substantial debt and considerable time it takes to acquire the coveted Part III. One can only conclude from the abundance of young architects entering the profession that the reason they persevere with the innumerable late nights and modest reward is something other than financial remuneration. It is also apparent that, far from being aloof from the troubles of ordinary people, if not a majority, then certainly a significant number, embark on careers not for personal reward but to better serve a society which largely considers them to be detached from it. It is an irony, then—and undoubtedly a source of immense frustration—that rather than being considered as vital servants of society, architects are often viewed with suspicion, and even contempt.

On the morning of June 14th, 2017 the country awoke to the news that a horrific blaze had ripped through a west London tower block resulting in huge loss of life. That such a catastrophic event could take place in twenty-first century London was as bewildering as it was terrifying; that the building fabric, either in its design or its composition, was likely to have been a significant contributor to the loss of so many lives was a wake-up call for the whole industry, sending shockwaves through the entire profession. In hindsight, that such a tragedy had not happened sooner is something of a miracle.

400 miles north, and a year-and-a-half earlier, the early-morning collapse of a poorly-constructed masonry wall at an Edinburgh school could well have resulted in a similarly terrible tragedy were it not for the fact that it occurred just an hour prior to students arriving at the beginning of the day. Outside the specialist press this event attracted only limited news coverage, yet following a detailed investigation by Professor John Cole the circumstances that led to the building failure raised a fundamental concern about how the public sector commissions buildings—and one which has profound implications for the architectural profession.

Although the circumstances leading to each event were vastly different (one an existing residential tower latterly wrapped in lightweight rainscreen cladding, the other a new-build, low-rise masonry school), flaws in the processes through which these works were commissioned were demonstrably (in the case of the Edinburgh Schools) and likely—in the case of Grenfell Tower—a significant contributor to both failures.

Over the last quarter of a century the commissioning of public buildings has suffered immensely from the erosion of independent oversight within the construction process; historically a vital representative of the client’s interests, the role of Clerk of Works has all but vanished, whilst the architect—bound equally by law and duty to act equally on behalf of the client and society—relegated to the role of just another sub-contractor. With increasingly few construction firms now employing direct labour, modern contracting has become a complex service industry reliant upon a fragmented yet pliable supply chain, with “just-in-time” procurement and narrow margins, with clients—especially those in the public sector, wary of being seen to be profligate with taxpayers’ money—keen to delegate risk to whomever will accept it; regardless of the inevitable effect on quality. The architect, more often than not, having his or her appointment batted backwards and forwards between client and contractor, no longer benefits from independence and is increasingly distanced from the ultimate beneficiaries of their work. In such an arrangement the tension between legal duty to the client and the moral obligations to the ultimate occupants (which, in the case of public buildings, is frequently not the same group) can be challenging to reconcile. The prevailing use of Design & Build procurement and integrated contracting would seem to be at the heart of this dichotomy. The fact that some clients include so-called “whistleblowing clauses” within these contractual arrangements is an indication of the fundamental contradiction in this approach, although this seems to be an initiative favoured more by the private sector than public clients, and sadly little more than a sticking plaster for a greater malaise.

Independent oversight would demonstrably have prevented the defective works at the Edinburgh schools, and possibly have mitigated the circumstances that led to the rapid escalation of the fire at Grenfell. It’s certain that the architect’s isolation from the construction process, as demanded by the particular method of procurement selected in each case, could not have improved matters.

And so, for architects, an opportunity: the sudden realisation amongst public clients that systemic change is necessary to ensure that—rather than focusing solely on short-term budgets and the mitigation of illusory risks—procurement must instead be principally concerned with long-term outcomes: longevity, sustainability, wellbeing. And that, at the heart of this renewed focus, the architect is ideally placed to understand and accommodate these objectives; uniquely able to balance both the demands of the client with the wider needs of society—with skill, professionalism and compassion.

This article was published in the book “Defining Contemporary Professionalism: For Architects in Practice and Education” by Alun Jones and Rob Hyde, RIBA Publishing 2019.

Photo of Grenfell Tower by Guido van Nispen.

Heart of the matter: Why architects need a key role in the construction process

To find an architect lamenting the erosion of the profession’s role within the construction process may elicit from many little more than crocodile tears or, to others, smack of a futile act of self-preservation when faced with challenging financial targets, shrinking capital budgets and the avoidance of risk. But while architects’ railing at the demotion of quality in favour of ‘certainty’ is hardly new, events of the last year have suddenly thrust our concerns into the spotlight.

It is still far too early to apportion culpability for the horrific fire at Grenfell Tower in June, but it is possible that this may emerge as the latest, and most tragic, manifestation of decreasing oversight that architects have been warning about for so long. At the very least, there is clear evidence that a lack of professional, independent scrutiny has resulted directly in catastrophic failures elsewhere that could – had circumstances been only very slightly different – have resulted in tragedies of their own.

One example is the Edinburgh Schools fiasco, where Professor John Cole’s extensive inquiry into the collapse of a masonry wall at Oxgangs School in Edinburgh identified clear areas where a lack of oversight during the construction process phase had allowed poor workmanship to creep, unchecked, into the works.

Crucially, it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident, but one which was found to be endemic in the wider schools delivery programme, with a further four collapses directly attributed to workmanship not in accordance with the consultant’s designs. Professor Cole determined that independent scrutiny would likely have prevented such incidents occurring.

As well as the obvious risk to life, such events have had a dramatic financial and personal impact, with hugely expensive rectification work and extensive disruption to the education of students the new buildings were supposed to enhance.

There are innumerable, less spectacular, examples to be found throughout the country, many resulting in minor irritations but others which dramatically affect the enjoyment of buildings by those who inhabit them; in some cases, such as the Orchard Estate in east London, the result of a poor quality construction process and a lack of oversight has had a detrimental effect on residents’ quality of life.

It is a criticism often levelled at architects (and one not entirely without merit) that we have allowed ourselves to be pushed to the margins of the construction process, becoming adept at piloting complex schemes through an increasingly tortuous planning process, but superfluous when it comes to putting the thing together on site. One consequence of a decade of austerity is the presence of many young architects rising through the ranks of the profession for whom an understanding of construction techniques remains an abstract concept; lines on a drawing that have no analogue on a muddy building site.

While there’s some truth in this, in reality our marginalisation extends back far further than the recent financial crisis, with our traditional role at the heart of the construction process having diminished gradually as contractors, and other professionals, stepped into a void that we only had a small part in creating.

A shift away from what came to be known as ‘traditional’ contracting and the adoption of so-called ‘collaborative’ forms of contract, exemplified by design and build, were conceived as a way of reducing the adversarial nature of construction in the hope that by working together the entire team could focus on delivering projects to programme and budget.

It was expected that D&B would magically reconcile the elusive triumvirate of cost, quality and time. What really happened was a transfer of risk, with the balance of power shifting from the contract administrator (a role most often fulfilled by the architect) to the builder.

With the architect no longer acting on behalf of the client, and often taking their place as just another subbie within the builder’s extensive supply chain, the custody of quality was left up to those consultants, often from a cost background, remaining by the client’s side.

The benefit was obvious: a contract could be signed – often much sooner than would previously been possible – and the cost was fixed, with the risk of cost overruns now the responsibility of the contractor. It was up to the builder how to deliver the project within the sum agreed and any unexpected increases would be down them to resolve. This arrangement was so compelling it became the default choice for most public sector projects of any significance. The inevitable consequence was, however, that contractors would look to save money within the parameters laid down by the contract information in the desperate hope of widening excruciatingly narrow margins. Something had to give, and the sacrifice was quality.

There’s a perception in some sectors that our obsession with quality is simply a demonstration of our detachment from the realities of modern contracting. Why spend £50 on a tap when we could spend £500 and have it in gold? This is nonsense, of course. Our concern extends not only to the needs of the commissioning client but also those who will ultimately occupy those buildings we design; rarely are these the same, particularly in the public sphere.

We care about the contribution our buildings make to wider society; the effect on those who live and work around them, too. We understand that decisions made during the design stage can have a profound effect on longevity, enjoyment and quality of life. Quality extends not only to the thoughtfulness of a building’s design, the selection of materials and how they are put together, but to the enjoyment of those that live, love, work and sometimes die in it.

The impact our buildings have on the lives of the people that inhabit them can be profound and success cannot simply be assessed on the day the building is handed over, but only after months, years or even decades have passed. Architects understand that the construction process itself is only a brief excursion within a far greater journey. By retaking our position at the heart of the process, we can concentrate our efforts on arriving at the right destination.

This article was originally published in PBC Today and was quoted in the BSR (Bereaved, Survivors and Residents) Group’s submission of evidence to the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry.

After Grenfell

Passengers touching down at London City Airport are likely unaware that buried beneath the tarmac lie the brayed concrete remains of a 22-storey tower, the demolition of which signified a watershed moment in British housing. Erected hastily towards the end of the 1960s, Ronan Point concluded two decades of rapid housebuilding. At its peak, some 400,000 homes were completed annually, and in the fervour to replace the bomb-damaged slums of Victorian London it was perhaps inevitable there would be compromises in quality, with budgetary constraints eclipsing architectural ambitions and social concerns.

It was remarkable that on that spring morning of May 1968 so few people lost their lives. A gas explosion in a kitchen on the 18th floor blew out a load-bearing panel, which led to a collapse of one corner of the building, killing four. Although it stood for nearly 20 more years, Ronan Point was eventually pulled down in 1986, along with a number of other blocks built using the same construction methods, and deposited under the nearby airport runway.

This notorious event had two important outcomes, the effects of which we are still feeling today. The first was a comprehensive review of the Building Regulations — the statutory instrument that determines a building’s suitability for habitation — which were revised to outlaw the form of construction that enabled the ‘disproportionate collapse’ of the east London block. Secondly, it signalled an end to the British love affair with tower blocks and the modernist utopian dream. By the late 1970s we were building hardly any residential towers at all.

Fifty years on, the housing crisis of the early 21st century has reacquainted London with the concept of high-rise living. Inflating land prices have meant that developers wring every last square foot of space from tiny patches of brownfield land scattered across the city. Many of those towers that survived the purge of the 1970s and 80s, previously decried as failed social experiments, have been snapped up by canny developers and rebranded as desirable places to live: ‘luxury flats’ in convenient, accessible locations. Towers that remained in public ownership underwent less glamorous refurbishment through the Decent Homes programme, announced by the then deputy prime minister John Prescott at the turn of the new century. This ambitious initiative demanded that, within a decade, all social housing achieve minimum levels of quality. Often this work included the replacement of kitchens and bathrooms; in some cases upgrades to windows, thermal insulation and cladding to ‘spruce up’ ageing concrete.

Much of this work was carried out by a cabal of large construction companies who had become adept at offering councils a ‘one-stop shop’ of design and delivery, shielding the client from the risk of cost and programme overruns. Public clients, recoiling in paroxysms of fear at the prospect of capital projects running over budget, embraced this approach, taking comfort in the fact that fixed-price contracts would prevent costs unexpectedly spiralling out of control. As with the housebuilding boom of the late 1960s, the ambition of this new programme meant that design quality was sometimes of secondary importance to the need to deliver desperately needed new homes on time and within budget.

A consequence of this approach was the gradual excision of the architect from the construction process. The profession became seen as contributing little other than cost and complication, and its responsibility withered away to a point where it was seen as useful only for picking colours of cladding and helping to navigate tricky planning committees. Its technical expertise, pursuit of quality and consideration for those affected by the work became of secondary importance – an inconvenience that the budget and programme could ill afford. Rather than working directly for public clients, the design team began to work instead for main contractors, isolating architects yet further from the communities they were supposed to serve.

Just a few short weeks on from the Grenfell Tower catastrophe, it’s still too early to speculate as to why the fire spread with such terrifying rapidity. It may be that a particular configuration of standard building components contributed to the spread of flame across the outer skin of the building. Quite why in this case a small domestic blaze – of which there are many hundreds each year within tall residential buildings – led to so many deaths may take many months to determine.

It’s also impossible to say whether more meaningful involvement from the architect could have mitigated the tragic effect of the Grenfell Tower fire, but it is apparent from other recent cases that their exclusion has allowed bad practice to seep unchecked into the construction process. The recent Cole Report into problems with a raft of contractor-led schools in Edinburgh identified poor construction and inadequate supervision as the principal reason for a large number of serious building failures. Architects used to serve a nobler cause; now they have little choice but to serve those who pay the bills.

In his riposte to the Prince of Wales’s withering criticism of the profession in 1984, ex-RIBA president Maxwell Hutchinson claimed that the failure at Ronan Point was not because architects were involved in the construction. It was because they were not. Can it really be the case, half a century on, that we are back where we started?

This article was originally published in Icon magazine.