By Colin Wiles, housing consultant.

Every house with a fruit tree in its garden. That was one of the headline recommendations from Living with Beauty the final report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission published last month. The report argues that all future building should embrace beauty and
reject ugliness.

I wrote about the Commission’s interim report last July. Not a great deal has changed with the final report. There is still no clear definition of beauty (in the eye of the beholder etc.) and the report is still full of flowery historical quotes. (This is not surprising given that the chair of
the Commission, the late Sir Roger Scruton, published a book in 2000 called England: An Elegy, a nostalgia fest in which he looked back at a vanishing England of fox hunting, cricket on village greens, grammar schools, “an enchanted territory, which called to its children in
every far-flung corner of the globe, furnishing them with the idea and the love of home”.)

The nearest that the report comes to a definition of beauty is this: “Beauty includes 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. It is not merely a visual characteristic, but is revealed in the deep harmony between a place and those who settle there. So understood, beauty should be an essential condition for planning permission.”

Are you any the wiser?

The other main author of this report is Nicholas Boys Smith of Create Streets, who took over when Sir Roger was sacked by the government last year. Create Streets argues for “gentle” densities. Their Twitter feed is full of photos attacking sub-Corbusian blocks and praising narrow pedestrianised lanes and Georgian frontages: all very lovely, but which raise in my mind a number of practical questions such as where do you put the car, the bikes and the bins? What is the internal arrangement? What is the energy efficiency? For Create Streets, physical appearance appears to trump liveability.

A lot of the report is motherhood and apple pie stuff that few could argue with. But many of the 45 recommendations are vague aspirations, rather than hard policy proposals. For example, better funding for planning; the NPPF should include reference to placemaking and “the creation of beautiful places”; “Beauty and placemaking should be embedded more widely across relevant government strategies”; “we aim for long- term investment in which the values that matter to people – beauty, community, history, landscape – are safeguarded. Hence places, not units, high streets not glass bottles, local design codes, not faceless architecture that could be anywhere”; and so on and so on.

But one of the report’s problems is that it seems to ignore wider policy and societal issues. For example, it says brownfield land should be prioritised, but there is no analysis of how “gentle densities” can be achieved without building on greenfield sites, including selective development of the Green Belt. London’s population in the early eighties was 6.4 million and is now approaching 10 million, so more than three million extra people have all been stuffed into a municipal footprint that was created in 1965.

There is no mention in this report of how “gentle” densities can be achieved given this constraint. Neither is there anything here about how to end the cartel of major housebuilders that is churning out ugly, matchbox homes, or any details on how planning departments can be properly funded to pursue the beauty agenda.

Nor is there anything about the need to invest in social housing. The commissioners visited places like the Elephant Park scheme in Southwark, once the Heygate estate, praised as “…a mix of homes…rented as well as homes for sale… a new park and other public spaces,
accommodating small businesses, extensive tree planting and development of a community energy centre”. Absolutely no mention that hundreds of social rented homes were lost in this scheme; of the revolving door between Southwark councillors and officers and the developer Lendlease; or the huge local opposition to social cleansing.

They also visited Eddington, “a large scale urban extension of 3,000 homes in North West Cambridge as part of the expansion of the University of Cambridge. The plan is to provide a mixed use neighbourhood with new homes, student accommodation.” Again, no mention that none of these homes will be made available to city council nominees. This is a big blind spot in the report. You would almost believe that it had been written by well-off, well-housed people who have little experience of the housing market and its failings.

Some of the proposals are sound; for example, local authorities should take a more strategic and less reactive approach to their local plans; Homes England should take a strategic master planning role; and permitted development rights should be scrapped. Then, in the next breath, they argue that the local plan process should be speeded up, but that the system should be more democratic. To me, that means more nimbysim and a slower process. You cannot have speedy planning and democracy. The two are in conflict.

Strangely, both Create Streets and the Beauty Commission’s report have been a big hit with the government. In a press release, Secretary of State for Housing Robert Jenrick said: “…beautiful, high-quality homes must become the norm, not the exception… I am interested in the proposal of a ‘fast track for beauty’…I too want to see a return to planting more trees. We set out in our manifesto that we will expect all new streets t be lined with trees and are working to make this commitment a reality…local authorities will need to play a leading role in this design revolution. We will need to ensure they have the right skills and leadership to fully carry out their role as placemakers.”

So, we can expect some tinkering with the National Planning Policy Framework and some diktats about building only beautiful homes in future. Watch this space, and do not forget the fruit trees.