Spaced out

‘There’s not enough room to swing a cat!’, people cry all too often in our communities when describing their home. An amusing cliché perhaps, but it does underline the serious problem of space and design in modern life.

It suggests to me that the homes built today, compared with homes built several generations ago, aren’t always what the consumer wants. This includes more storage, more bedrooms, outside space, and flexible living space. The quality of our home is, after all, key to our sense of well-being and mental health. So why is there such a mismatch?

Space standards have ebbed and flowed over the years and become more sophisticated, but it’s no secret that the UK has held the dubious honour of building the smallest average rooms and new homes in Europe.

Bizarrely, Britain, unlike most of Europe and the US, uses a home’s bedroom count rather than overall footprint, to indicate the size - and therefore the desirability - of the property.

That was brought home to me during the research phase for the recently published HAPPI report, where an HCA-led collaborative expert panel tussled with housing our elderly population and compared inspirational schemes across Europe. Key to these marvellous places is design around residents’ needs. Walk-in store rooms, for instance, are standard in many European schemes.

In Britain, new social housing is often more spacious than private dwellings. More recently, we’ve witnessed a well-documented trend for private developers reducing overall property size while trying to minimise any reduction in value. In inner city areas particularly, large-scale developments of smaller one or two-bedroom flats - some of which are now selling at a huge loss - were prioritised over larger, more flexible apartments.

You could call this a response to the huge demand for homes. But in many cases clever marketing for open plan starter homes, geared towards entertaining and single professionals, only disguises a small property with limited use living space.

Elsewhere in Europe, space standards are promoted through fiscal incentives or regulation. Planning and building rules are combined into a single permit, which includes space standards. We could learn from this.

Setting the standard

A major problem in the UK is that it lacks unified standards for house building. Oddly, England and Wales are the only European countries with no minimum space standards for housing. Granted, various individual bodies have set up and managed standards to improve the quality of housing; but there is no overlap between them. Confusion reigns.

As the single housing and regeneration agency for England, with our remit to create great places people want to live in, the HCA is in a very strong position to lift the lid on this debate and demystify, influence, lead and build on the work our legacy agencies did on standards.

I look forward to our soon-to-be published harmonised set of core standards for consultation, to apply to all new homes funded by the HCA or built on our land, with enhanced standards for some schemes. We hope this will set the benchmark for the whole housing industry.

The standards should not be seen as yet another layer of regulation. Instead, consider them a core standard, addressing the design criteria at the heart of creating high quality homes and communities.

Crucially, we will embed these standards into our single conversation process and development of local area agreements.

Environmental challenge

Of course, no debate on standards can ignore the environmental impact of creating desirable new homes.

Currently, only some HCA housing schemes reach level four of the Code for Sustainable Homes; we must improve. To this end, sustainability is high on the agenda for our standards consultation.

We want to see flagship schemes like Hanham Hall near Bristol - England’s first large-scale zero-carbon housing development - become widespread. We know that while hitting code level six is challenging, we must do so to prevent the impact of climate change and dwindling natural resources.

This is one of our greatest tasks, particularly in these tough economic times. The house building industry has a responsibility to play a major role. We must seek simultaneously to significantly increase the number of new homes we build and lower their carbon footprint. We know that this will not be easy, but creating a unified set of core standards will be a major step along the way.

While there’s room for more research into what consumers need, we already know enough to take steps to improve the quality of what is being built. Key now is how we implement what we already know. We must agree what good design actually means in practical terms and how standards should be used to achieve this.

Perhaps the planning system should do more to ensure high quality schemes. Yet this must be combined with closer quality control through the construction phase and a good design to start with. This applies to both public and private sectors.

If we can do this, then we will be able let the proverbial cat it stretch out and sleep in peace.

Sir Bob Kerslake is chief executive of the Homes and Communities Agency