These were the momentous words of John Penrose MP, Minister for the Built Environment, speaking at the launch of RIBA’s new report, ‘Good Design, It All Adds Up’. The report sets out, once again, the case that good design is not about adding a few cosmetic features to new schemes. It is about ensuring that the client is able to develop a good brief, and then meeting that brief in a way that delivers ‘firmness, commodity and delight’.
As we know, it is becoming increasingly common for design professionals, including landscape architects, never to encounter ‘the client’ at all, but to deal only with a project manager and their ‘value engineering’ processes. Procurement systems have evolved in recent years that are supposed to deliver best value for money. But if they separate the designer from the ultimate client, they simply cannot do so.
Over the last year, government ministers have made a number of aggressive statements about architects. This suggested a tendency in some official quarters to regard design professionals in the built environment as a problem to be overcome rather than as a key asset in delivering the infrastructure for the country’s future. John Penrose’s recent statement is a welcome sign that other voices are starting to make headway in government, and that there is a renewed understanding of the value good design can bring and the importance of procuring it properly.
In terms of improving the understanding of the value of design, the Department of Communities and Local Government recently commissioned the Design Council to undertake the Bishop Review of the importance of design support for the built environment. The work on the Bishop Review, which the LI has been involved in, will be concluding in the next month. We will be arguing for recommendations as to how good design requirements can be incorporated into the new National Planning Policy Framework, and as to how planning permission might be refused to schemes that fail in terms of landscape quality.
As most members are aware, the LI is also involved in a parliamentary enquiry into procurement, which is going to tackle the same problem from the opposite end of the equation. Public procurement in particular often separates the designer from the ultimate client, as well as overburdening smaller businesses with ridiculous and disproportionate requirements. Fortunately, the effects of this are so widespread and so deleterious that there is uniform determination across the built environment professions to improve it significantly. As the government recently recognised in respect of defence procurement, mechanisms intended to reduce risk, limit costs and deliver best value can go spectacularly wrong and end up making matters worse rather than better. If the LI and the other built environment professions can come up with positive, workable suggestions for improvement, we can be sure they will be well received.
As well as contributing to the Bishop Review and the enquiry on procurement, the LI is also preparing a Good Client Guide and will be launching a guide to Green Infrastructure and Localism in the autumn. For the sake of the environments in which we all live and work, it is vitally important that the public sector becomes, at every level, a ‘smart client’ for design.
As Greg Clark MP, Minister at the Department for Communities and Local Government, so aptly put it: ìDesign and contribution to the economy are at the heart of what we are aiming atÖif there is one outcome that we would all want to see, it is that the built environment is better than it otherwise would be, and that it is beautiful and functional for people to live in.”
I am glad to see this as I consider that THE PRESENT PLANNING SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE REPLACED (OR SUBSTANTIALLY MODIFIED) TO BE STRONGER, FAIRER, BETTER FOCUSSED AND LESS EASILY SWAYED BY VESTED INTERESTS AND FAR LESS COMPLICATED, TIME CONSUMING (AND SOMETIMES ULTIMATELY POINTLESS) THAN THE PRESENT SYSTEM - NOT THE REVERSE AS COULD BE THE CASE WITH A PRESUMPTION IN FAVOUR OF ‘SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’
A piece of erutdoiin unlike any other!