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Sir Roger Scruton’s dismissal as chair of the government’s housing design commission will have no impact on its timetable, a senior civil servant has confirmed.
Speaking at the British Property Federation and the Planning Officers Society’s joint conference, Steve Quartermain, chief planner at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), said the timetable remains the same.
The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission was launched in November last year to tackle “the importance of design and style” in new housing developments.
Sir Roger, a conservative philosopher, was sacked as chair last week after what an MHCLG spokesperson called “unacceptable comments” about Chinese people, Jews and Islamophobia.
These followed on from previous comments he had made before his appointment. These included reports of him saying there was “no such crime” as date rape, referring to the neo-fascist group National Front as “egalitarian” and dismissing sexual harassment as advances “made by the unattractive”.
The commission had originally planned to provide an interim report to housing secretary James Brokenshire in July, gather further evidence for the rest of the year and publish a final report in December.
Mr Quartermain told the conference: “We’re still anticipating… that we’ll have a chair in place soon and that work will continue and it will continue to the timetable that we have previously set.”
Some in the housing sector, including Sir Roger himself, have previously suggested that the commission could be a distraction from more serious housing policy issues.
His dismissal was welcomed by the Royal Institute of British Architects, whose president, Ben Derbyshire, said that the government should “move on from stylistic obsessions to the issues that lie at the heart of solving the housing crisis”.
Mr Quartermain, however, defended it, saying: “It’s about hearts and minds. If you want to build 300,000 houses a year and we’re talking to communities where this is going to take place, then we need to say to them, the offer is, we’re going to build these houses, but it’s going to be great.
“It’s going to be great places that are going to add value. There is a benefit to development and you need to understand that. It’s not just how it looks, it’s how it works.”