What next after the Office for Place?

The Office for Place has come and gone. It was a scion of the Conservative government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, whose 2020 report, Living with Beauty, made 45 or so quite sensible recommendations – if perhaps rather too many – on how to go about better placemaking. The last of these was to set up an organisation to monitor the delivery of the rest.

Thus, after a huge effort from interim chair Nicolas Boys Smith, the Office for Place was born earlier this year, established as an arm’s-length body reporting to what is now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on its remit “to create beautiful, successful and enduring places that foster a sense of community, local pride and belonging” – motherhood and apple pie, or so you might think.

Back in April this year, I wrote a piece endorsing the role of the Office for Place for its potential to embed holistic design quality more widely, based on local engagement – reviving a spirit of proactive planning whereby communities can buy into sustainable development that supports their wellbeing. By then, Boys Smith and I had both been interviewed, and shortlisted, for the job of its permanent chair.

My pitch led with the challenges: first and foremost, the climate emergency and the collapse of the biosphere; inequity in the distribution of space, resources and opportunity; crisis in the supply and affordability of homes; poor standards of design, construction and performance – in speculative housing particularly; deterioration in our existing stock of buildings and places, failing performance, undermining communities; a depleted and demoralised planning system, afflicted by inconsistent policy and failing to provide certainty; and finally, a shortage of resources and skills in the public sector especially.

My response was to endorse planning as a discipline, supporting and enhancing the current system rather than continual, let alone radical, change. I stressed my conviction about street-based urbanism and mixed neighbourhoods and my belief in the principles of order, humanity and sustainability – not just beauty – as drivers for quality outcomes.

Many architects, me included, saw in the Office for Place the chance to resurrect something like New Labour’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment

I expressed my concern that preoccupation with style is a misleading distraction and my understanding that investing in culture and society are essential ingredients in delivering popular and successful places.

Many architects, me included, saw in the Office for Place the chance to resurrect something like New Labour’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). As an independent but government-backed organisation, CABE attracted the very best talent in planning, urban design and architecture. It was light on its feet and its outputs were excellent, relevant and incisive.

As with CABE, central government can and should create an overarching framework for quality, and it’s reassuring to read that the Office for Place team will be absorbed into MHCLG. A large number of non-governmental organisations are concerned with improving the quality of places, both existing and new (Design Council, Good Homes Alliance, RTPI, Institute for Place Management, the Historic Places Panel – I could go on…). It may be that the decision to close the Office for Place relies on this ecosystem to support central and local government to deliver better outcomes.

But there remains a need for independence capable of elaborating the ingredients for the best in contemporary process and design. Paul Finch, one-time chair of CABE design review (respected if not feared by the development industry), has suggested significant housing applications should be vetted by a standing panel of people “who know what they are talking about” – rewarding clients and design teams who are doing the right thing by helping to expedite approvals.

Not everything about the Office for Place was quite on that trajectory. But in its absence, we need to think again about providing the clarity and support it might potentially have offered industry and local government in delivering the 1.5 million homes the government has correctly identified as necessary by the end of this Parliament.