A decade ago, I quit my well-paid, well-pensioned, high-status job to set up a social enterprise in my dining room with no income, few pertinent connections and no relevant professional experience or qualifications. I called it Create Streets. 

My aim was to make Britain less ugly, to put good and popular design back at the heart of development and planning and to change the debate about how and where we create desperately needed new housing; to empower popular preferences in building design and to reduce citizens’ fear of development not through spin but through improving reality. The poor suffer the most from denatured neighbourhoods, scarred by wide, polluting roads and ugly, faceless buildings. But we all suffer from the chronic undersupply of housing through high prices and the reduced flexibility of our labour markets clogged up by the growing difficulty of matching the right person with the right job, so sclerotic is the supply of housing.

Incredibly, only two per cent of us trust developers to make existing places better. And only seven per cent trust planners to fix this. Two-thirds of us say that we would never consider buying a newly built home. And pricing data consistently says that most of us will pay a premium to live in old homes and neighbourhoods rather than new ones. 

When you think about it, these statistics are deeply perverse. We should be better at making homes and neighbourhoods than we used to be. And yet, according to the British public’s stated and revealed preferences, the opposite is true. We are so inured to the obvious fact that most old places are better and less ugly than most new ones that we have ceased to find it surprising.

“Don’t do it” warned one friend, “your chances of persuading the Conservative Government to worry about good design are zero.” Others were more hopeful. On reading the first draft of my first paper, another advised, “You lucky bastard, you’ve found what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.”

The former Government began to take notice but beyond some modest sums for estate regeneration and a few vague public pronouncements, it did little. 

I was then asked first to join and then to co-chair the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission alongside Sir Roger Scruton in what was, sadly, to prove his last work. With the resources now available to us to interview and to commission research, we were able to evolve a profound and precise series of changes to English planning to make places better and more popular and profoundly to de-risk development if it followed simple and popular guidelines that local people could accept.

Our final policy proposal had been the creation of a modest new public body, to champion the policy reforms, to “own” them and, above all, to help guide confused councils to a planning system that could be very different, more visual, more predictable and more respectful of local preferences. Mindful of the proven “design disconnect” between the preferences of the wider public and the design professions, and nervous about the potential for “regulatory capture” I was initially reluctant to include this idea but Sir Roger was adamant adding with a twinkle, “you should run it.” Not convinced that I would have the time or capability, I kept that to myself.

Six months later Robert Jenrick asked if I would chair a committee to examine what such a body should do and how it should be formed. I agreed and asked that my committee could be widely based including those from the left as well as government supporters and from neighbourhood groups as well as professionals. The polling shows that most of us, left or right, rich or poor, north or south, agree about what makes for good neighbourhoods. Any new body should reflect that, I was certain. Nor should it be based in London.

Heavens, it was a lot of work. Most officials were clever and generous with their advice but one senior official dogmatically opposed our creation. We overcame this “Sir Humphrey behaviour” and slowly jumped through the many necessary hoops. The next bulwark to overcome was the Treasury and Cabinet Office. For many years the Treasury has firmly believed that place matters little and that investment should be focused on people more than infrastructure. Not entirely unreasonably, they are also instinctively chary of new public bodies. Without Michael Gove’s support we would certainly have fallen at this hurdle. 

But, with huge effort, we got there. Late last year, the Office for Place finally came into formal legal existence and set up shop in our home of Stoke-on-Trent which, by happy coincidence, means “place” in Anglo-Saxon English. It seemed that fate was smiling at us. We began recruiting staff and a permanent board. And we began actually doing things.

Naively (in retrospect) I was relatively relaxed about the probable forthcoming change of government. Labour’s, very sensible, focus on more homes only increases the need for public consent. And Create Streets, which is resolutely non-partisan, was helping Labour, in opposition, on green belt, transport and new town policy. We also had friends within the likely new administration who understood and sympathised with what we were trying to do.

In the dash for quantity there needs to be an independent voice for quality

After the election, the new Housing Minister confirmed to the BBC that our existence was secure and we were allowed to continue hiring. So, it was naturally a little surprising to be informed two weeks ago, following the budget, that in fact the Office for Place was to be closed. In the dash for quantity there needs to be an independent voice for quality. Will that voice now be lost within Whitehall? We will find out. I hope not.

Nye Bevan said that, “while we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build…. we shall be judged in 10 years’ time by the type of houses we build.”

We set up the Office was Place to be independent, non-partisan, broadly based and as the servants of public preferences in a complicated planning process. I guess my job now is to keep asking the questions.

The Office for Place was going to publish an annual review into place-making and beautiful and regenerative development across England. How many councils have visual pattern books in place? Can they demonstrate that they are locally popular? Are they linked to fast-track development to help us build more homes with public consent? Are they making it possible for the attractive intensification of existing streets? Can our streets grow again? Above all, is the public’s confidence growing in our ability to create new homes and places without scarring existing neighbourhoods?

Will the Government still publish this review? Is there a risk of them marking their own homework?

No one disagrees that we are going to need many more homes. The most common request from councils is for more planning staff. This is not surprising given the highly discretionary and inefficient way we have ended up running our planning system. The Office for Place did not have a magic wand to fix this. But the Government doesn’t have one of those either. We were designing the Office for Place as a “force multiplier.” Our intent was to help councils “move the democracy forward” and work smarter by setting clearer, more visual and more clearly locally popular policies to permit more homes with more public consent. This means that each individual planning application can be handled more efficiently without losing public good will.

If you like, we were trying to help not just force more development water down the planning pipe but to widen the pipe.

I wish the new government well in their important work. I stand ready to support them. And I am delighted that they are keeping important hooks in the planning system for beautiful and popular place-making. But will those hooks be enough without a small body committed to supporting councils putting them into practice with enabling and popular local plans? We are going to find out.

My board was marvellous, our advisors expert and our officials dedicated and kind. I am so pleased that the team will be able to move to new roles. We also had plans to bring in national expertise to support the regenerative development of our home, Stoke on Trent. It is a source of huge sadness to me that we will not now be able to put those into action.

I am sad that our attempt to create a small, independent and powerful voice for the importance of place within government has hit the buffers. One day we will get there. And the mission to create new places and steward existing places to be happy and healthy, resilient and beautiful is never-ending.