Member News
Ahead of his oral question, Lord Howarth of Newport demonstrates how high-quality design may be lost if funding for the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment ceases.
The background to this question is twofold.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has announced that it will no longer fund the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), a body which I set up as minister for the arts in 1999.
CABE is a small organisation, with no statutory powers to do more than offer advice, whose role is to promote good design in the built environment, including by making high quality advice on design matters available to developers, planners and the public.
We know that good design – design which is fit for purpose, sustainable and pleasing – provides value for money and improves wellbeing. The costs of bad design are experienced in prematurely replacing buildings that don't stand the test of time, poor quality of life, under-achievement and social distress. £12m of public funding for CABE has been a superb investment in helping to obtain better architecture across the country – for example, in new schools, hospitals and housing – better urban design and better public space.
The government is also about to introduce the Decentralisation and Localism Bill, lightening the planning regime and encouraging local people to play a fuller part in shaping their neighbourhoods. I can happily support the government's objectives in the bill to promote local solutions to the creation of distinctive places and collaboration in neighbourhood planning, particularly if ministers make clear an insistence on quality. But local people, most of them with little experience or specialised skill in design, will find it difficult to achieve high-quality design if they are not supported by knowledgeable advice.
I hope, therefore, that the minister will respond to my question by acknowledging the value of the work that CABE has done in the past and by accepting that, in an appropriate new incarnation, CABE should support local people in the challenging task which the government proposes to them.
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