New Housing Design In England Overwhelmingly Mediocre Or Poor Says Warwickshire Charity

NEW HOUSING DESIGN IN ENGLAND OVERWHELMINGLY MEDIOCRE OR POOR 

A report made for CPRE and Place Alliance on the basis of an audit conducted by University College London shows that 75% of the designs for new housing development were not good enough.
 
Room for Improvement - a housing design audit for England, based on 140 housing developments in England since 2007 shows that one in five of these developments should have been refused planning permission outright as their poor design was contrary to advice given in the National Planning Policy Framework. Half of the others should not have been given planning permission without significant improvements.
         
The audit also found that:

·        Less affluent communities are ten times more likely to get worse design, even though better design is affordable;

·        Low-scoring housing developments scored especially badly in terms of character and sense of place, with architecture that does not respond to the context in which they are located;

·        The worst reported aspects of design include overly dominant highways and the poor integration of storage, bins and parking, leading to unattractive and unfriendly environments with likely negative health and social implications;

·        Some gains have been made – schemes scored relatively highly for safety and security and were also typically successful at integrating a variety of sizes of houses.
 
Professor Matthew Carmona, the chairman of Place Alliance, who led the research, said: “Research has consistently shown that high quality design makes new residential developments more acceptable to local communities and delivers huge social, economic and environmental value to all, yet we are still failing in this regard across England”
 
“For some housebuilders, as long as there is a ready market for poor quality design and they can continue to get product through the planning system, there is little incentive to improve.   For some highways authorities, the very notion of good place-making is, as yet, simply not on the radar”.
 
Tom Fyans, Campaigns and Policy Director at CPRE, said: “The Government has presided over a decade of disastrous housing design and must raise standards immediately. This research is utterly damning of larger housebuilders and their failure to build the homes our communities deserve. They must significantly raise their game if we are to create the sorts of places that future generations will feel proud to call home”.