You don’t need me to tell you that our profession is facing intense commercial and insurance pressures. These, alongside our responsibility to ensure a safe and sustainable built environment, have led me to conclude that we should be lobbying the government now to reintroduce protection of function for architects.

We should be the statutory guardians of the “golden thread” of design information suggested by Dame Judith Hackitt in her 2018 report, increasing the responsibility of the profession as happens, for example, in the USA.

Like most other architects we have recently found our insurance premiums rising at an almost exponential rate, even as a practice which is fastidious in our attention to design and detail, with no previous claims.

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