Not continuing with Theresa May’s focus on design standards would be catastrophic for new homeowners

While the prime minister’s speech is a positive step forward, her successor isn’t necessarily bound to the plans she has tabled. This, together with the hugely ambitious increase in housebuilding planned for the next decade (300,000 new homes a year by the mid 2020s), means there is a risk that these critical plans won’t be adequately folded into housebuilding policy.

This would be catastrophic for the millions of people moving into the new housing stock, not to mention the long-term effects and cost that poorly designed housing could have on the economy, the NHS, and the overall health of communities up and down the country.

To help guard against this, we recently submitted evidence to the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission outlining how the government can ensure that all new housing is of a high standard of quality and meets the needs of the people it’s built for.

Some of the guidance we gave as part of this includes:

1. Design must be recognised as a golden thread running through the whole development and planning process, from setting the overarching plans for an area and individual site and development proposals, to delivering quality in construction, future management and maintenance. Used in this way, design provides a way to integrate the economic, social and environmental objectives of sustainable development.

2. A major culture change is required to allow genuine community engagement throughout the entire development and planning process – continuing after schemes receive planning consent. This will help ensure that housing genuinely meets the needs of the community it’s being built for and provides the public with real opportunity to affect change.

3. Investment is needed to rebuild the design skills in local planning authorities at both officer and councillor level, otherwise any attempt to raise the quality of what they design and build could be futile. At a minimum, every local planning authority should have its own dedicated and skilled design officer, and government should fund independent expert design guidance to help support and train local authorities in embedding design quality into their processes.

4. A ‘whole place’ approach is needed to planning that focuses on every aspect of a community’s needs and how a place functions, such as reducing car dependence, increase resilience to climate change, and how places contribute to physical and mental health and well-being. Developing a strategic vision can achieve this and offers similar opportunities and helps provide the public with confidence in the quality of future development and the future of the place where they live.

At Design Council we believe that taking these steps will help ensure that the size and quality of new housing isn’t compromised by the urgent need to address the housing shortage. Uniquely, we also have a 450-strong team of built environment experts around the country contracted to us who can provide this skill and expertise to deliver this agenda.

The government needs to take this guidance on board and make the necessary steps to fully integrate the prime minister’s plans into policy, ensuring that the homes we build in the coming decades and beyond are fit for purpose and allow us all to live healthier and happier lives.

Sarah Weir, chief executive, Design Council