Sophia Worringer is the Deputy Policy Director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Labour wants to scrap references to beauty in the planning system. The Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, said references to ‘beautiful’ and ‘beauty’ in the planning system were subjective and blocking vital housebuilding from taking place. This would be a major mistake.
Reasserting the importance of beauty is an opportunity for the opposition to establish a pro-housebuilding platform and right some of the wrongs of their struggles in Government to unlock housing supply. One major problem the previous Government faced was that so many people thought that new housing was ugly and out of place. Quite often they were right. As the Conservatives learnt bitterly through by-election results and threatened rebellions the force of central Government to drive through planning reform was no match for the local campaigning power of councillors and community groups across the country who were staunch and vocal in their opposition to ugly new developments on their patch. By embracing beauty, as set out in a new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), alongside the broader use of design codes and neighbourhood planning, public trust in the planning system can be restored.
Beauty was included in the planning system for the first time in 2021 in response to recommendations by the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission (BBBBC), co-chaired by the late Sir Roger Scruton. Its inclusion was never popular with large chunks of the housing sector lamenting that it forced traditional styles on the design and architectural professions. One architect claimed it was designed to appeal to “blinkered, quasi-fascist old white men.”
I understand why people wrinkle their noses at something as seemingly subjective as beauty being a guiding force for house building. But beauty does not have to mean one narrow look: it doesn’t mean everyone lives behind a white picket fence. Extensive research does show that what communities value is knowing their neighbours, frequent greenery, and walking around a neighbourhood that feels safe. The beauty of all that is that good aesthetics can be different depending on the area, matching the character of the existing buildings. To quote the BBBBC beauty is “everything that promotes a healthy and happy life, everything that makes a collection of buildings into a place, everything that turns anywhere into somewhere, and nowhere into home.”
If that still sounds too subjective and airy fairy for policymakers, it is something the public really understand. CSJ polling shows that nearly half of adults think architects and planners are out of touch with what local people want. Over two in five said that buildings do not encourage a sense of community. Emphasising beauty is one way of local people taking back control from professionals who are not prioritising their preferences.
Failing to consider the preferences of local people is turning communities against the new housing we urgently need. Over half of the public say that local people do not have enough powers to block new housing development. Planners and architects need to be responsive to what communities actually want and not use town planning or housebuilding as an experiment for their own design fantasies.
While delivering the target of 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament, the Government also have an opportunity to make this ambitious target work harder and to simultaneously tackle another of the nation’s scourges – loneliness. Lonely Nation: How to tackle loneliness through the built environment published this week by the CSJ argues that beauty in the planning framework provides a vital bulwark against badly designed and ugly places.
Writing in the foreword of the report, Create Streets Founder Nicholas Boys Smith MBE and Labour MP Margaret Mullane MP state:
“The reimagining of placemaking with infrastructure and a sense of ‘the good society’ at its core must take centre stage. Otherwise, we risk building our way into the social problems of the future.”
We need to build homes, but in the rush we must not build damaging ones. Front gardens have all but disappeared from new housing developments in favour of concrete drives, yet having a front garden has been shown to contribute to neighbourly relationships and better mental health.
Beauty in housebuilding is a social justice issue. The most disadvantaged have historically been pushed to live in degraded built environments where it is harder to be healthy, happy and socially connected. The opposition should hold the government to account on the quality and design of new social and affordable housing.
Beauty is not as subjective as architects, or the Housing Secretary say. I’m sure most ordinary people would say that the findings of the CSJ’s report are blindingly obvious. Of course, our built environment should be beautiful. When did this become controversial? Yet to those in charge of government policy this needs repeating.
The design of the built environment must serve the people who will live in it. It is not an opportunity to build cheap and quick, or for controversial artistic expression, but to ensure that people are able to live happy, healthy, and socially connected lives in homes that they love.