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| Document Type: | General |
| Publish Date: | 2020 |
| Primary Author: | James T. White, Tom Kenny, Flora Samuel, Chris Foye, Gareth James and Bilge Serin |
| Edited By: | Saba Bilquis |
| Published By: | UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence |
Well-designed places have an enduring sense of place and are characterised by diversity in form, function and community. Research has long shown that good design has a positive impact on health and well-being, the economy and environmental sustainability. As a result, the value of design is foregrounded in planning policy across the UK. Yet, the quality of new-build housing remains poor and design is consistently undervalued – we call this the housing design quality conundrum.
This report examines the complex and meandering process of planning, designing and developing new homes and neighbourhoods through a series of case studies conducted in all four UK nations during 2019 and 2020. Our aim was to understand why new homes and neighbourhoods are poorly designed and, using the evidence we collected, to make a series of recommendations about how the status quo might be changed.
The design quality of new homes and neighbourhoods across the UK remains stubbornly low: Our research found that new homes and neighbourhoods fail to meet the aspirations of the national planning policy statements in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The responsibility for delivering design value is shared: The four UK governments, local authorities, housebuilders, and their consultants are all accountable, in different ways, for allowing poorly designed places to be created.
Despite differences in policy emphasis and articulation, the four planning systems in the UK do not deliver better (or worse) design outcomes than each other: Our research found that housing and neighbourhood design is undervalued across the UK and, more often than not, planning decisions are driven by the need to achieve housing targets or to make a planning decision quickly and efficiently. The barriers to design value are wide-ranging: They encompass the ways in which the four UK governments plan for new housing and the extent to which local authorities are prepared to foreground design as an issue of genuine local concern. There is also an endemic culture of deprioritising design in the housebuilding industry.