10 years of CABE

11/09/2009

Turning 10 usually comes with its fair share of excitement, the novelty of entering ‘double digits’ among them. But on its 10th anniversary, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment faces the kind of uncertainty that jelly and cake just can’t salve.

Even discounting the English design watchdog’s recently threatened demise in a Tory government’s ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’, it faces the challenges imposed by recession, the meltdown of the development industry and the certainty of future cutbacks in public expenditure.

Can it survive? Chief executive Richard Simmons is putting on a brave face. ‘Well, I don’t dread a change of government because CABE is not a political organisation,’ he says. ‘From my experience in local government, Conservative voters are often very concerned about the quality of the environment, but Conservative and Labour administrations have different approaches on how to achieve it.’

CABE is undeniably a creation of the Labour government, which set up the quango in 1999 to replace the Royal Fine Art Commission. And in its first 10 years, its budget has multiplied more than 25 times, from £510,000 million in 1999 to £13.3 million today. Five staff have become 120.

Mr Simmons has already admitted that CABE would expect to be singed but not burned in a bonfire of the quangos. His defence is that CABE is remarkably cost-effective for the work it does in raising the design quality of buildings and spaces across England. ‘We have calculated that we cost £0.0001 per cent of total UK development expenditure - ie we cost almost nothing,’ he states.

Red tape

But will this be enough to save it? In 10 years CABE has had its fair share of detractors. A common complaint from developers, public and private, is that the commission’s bread and butter design reviews impose an extra bureaucratic hurdle on project teams. Former Medway Council director of development Mr Simmons rejects the barb, claiming that design reviews take place during the normal period of processing planning applications in local planning authorities.

Perhaps so, but scheme designs must very often be vetted by several individuals and committees during that period. As Steve Coleman, development director of Genesis Housing Association, puts it: ‘Going to so many people is costly, frustrating and you’re left with three different professional opinions to reconcile.’

CABE has also clashed with the house builders. Although it has formed a joint venture with the Home Builders’ Federation in Building for Life, which sets national design standards for homes and neighbourhoods, CABE repeatedly castigates house builders on what it claims is poor design. Just last month it blamed house builders for not providing enough space for furniture, kitchen appliances, storage or children’s play in new homes. There’s little love lost.

‘The house building industry will not allow itself to be publicly humiliated every 18 months in the breakfast news,’ says David Birkbeck, chief executive of pressure group Design for Homes.

Ashley Lane, director of Westbury Partnerships, the affordable arm of volume house builder Persimmon, says CABE does not understand the all-round commercial pressures on house builders. ‘A lot of things that are called for in Building for Life’s design code cost huge amounts of money, such as special materials for house elevations and roadways,’ he says.

Others say the watchdog is out of touch in the style stakes. Robert Adam, architect of later phases of the Prince of Wales’s model traditional village of Poundbury outside Dorchester, argues: ‘Unpublished surveys reveal that 80 per cent of the public prefer traditional houses, but CABE thinks it’s the other way round. If house builders paid attention to CABE, their schemes would not be marketable.’

Ammunition

When it comes to CABE’s future, such criticisms could well be used as ammunition by developers against a relatively puny public sector quango, in a battle of survival in the prolonged aftermath of the current recession. Arguably a Conservative government might have more sympathy than a Labour one for the business interests.

However, as Mr Simmons makes plain, CABE has at least two supplies of powerful ammunition of its own. The first is the achievements of its first decade.

The second is that, as of last April, design has for the first time been established in planning legislation as a material consideration in planning applications. Developers can no longer dodge design issues when seeking planning approval.

Paradoxically, it could be argued that the greatest threat to CABE is its success. It has spread the gospel of good design to the extent that design review panels and design policies have been adopted by local and regional planning authorities nationwide, as well as by the Homes and Communities Agency, Partnerships for Schools and the Olympic Development Authority. It has also been joined in promoting design review panels by three built environment professions, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Landscape Institute.

In that sense, CABE has outsourced much of its activity, chiming well with the doctrine of localism that is promoted by both main political parties. So even if CABE were to be singed in a Bonfire of the Quangos, the spirit and activities it has set up acros the country are likely to live on - whichever party wins the next election.