The man overseeing the set-up of the government’s new housing design advisor, the Office for Place, has rejected the suggestion the body is just a reheated version of Cabe, the design quango scrapped by the coalition in 2010.

Nicholas Boys Smith, chair of the advisory board overseeing the set-up of the unit, said the Office for Place was “not Cabe 2”, and was being set up to achieve different things.

Boys Smith also said that the aim was that the Office for Place, currently a unit of around a dozen staff within the housing ministry, would become an independent body.

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