RIBA calls for architects to have greater role in government’s planning reforms

RIBA has called for a greater role for architects in the government’s proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

A consultation on the reforms, proposed just weeks after the election of a Labour government in July, ran until Tuesday of this week.

The changes aim to increase housing supply by reintroducing mandatory targets, introducing a new ‘grey belt’ land class and removing references to beauty.

But RIBA president Muyiwa Oki said real change would only happen if the proposals are backed by “adequate support and resources”.

“Architects are poised to bring the high-quality design that these reforms call for, but the uncomfortable truth is that most volume homes never pass through an architecture design studio,” he said.

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“Add to that the lack of investment in local planning authorities, which are stretched thin and lack the design expertise necessary to oversee the process effectively.”

Oki’s comments echo those made by RIBA client advisor Jennifer Dixon at the Labour conference earlier this week.

Speaking on a panel discussing how Labour could achieve its affordable housing targets without sacrificing quality, she called for closer cooperation between architects and planners on the government’s plans to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years.

“Most of the loved and admired new towns and urban extensions of the 19th and 20th century had the benefit of architects and planners working really closely together,” she said.

Dixon said the two professions are now “very siloed” and only the most “enlightened” clients bring planning practices and architectural practices together in the early stages of a project to set underlying principles for placemaking and healthy communities.

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“The role of architects in delivering mass market housing has massively declined and with that decline has gone much quality which we now know is necessary, and architects in some cases diminish into a kind of cursory involvement in design and specification of housing types,” she said.

“It’s only when you see planners and architects working closely together side by side that you realise how quick the synthesis of thinking is and how much can be achieved and how much can be put in place.”

Housing bodies broadly welcomed the proposed changes to the NPPF but suggested a number of potential improvements in their responses to the consultation.

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) said the government should set out the proportions of different tenures that should make up the overall 1.5 million home target, with a focus on social rented homes.

It also welcomed the grey belt review, while warning that “care must be taken” to protect natural habitat sites, and welcomed the ambition that all local authorities should have an up to date local plan and the return of strategic level planning.

But the CIH urged the government to redefine “affordable rent” in terms of “local, lower quartile wages” instead of the current practice of defining it as 80% of market rates.