Labour’s ‘grey belt’ plans could result in isolated communities, warns leading architect

Labour’s plans to boost housebuilding by allowing the construction of thousands of homes on green belt land could have the unintended consequence of producing isolated communities, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has warned.

Muyiwa Oki said the government should avoid making the mistakes of the past, which have led to housing estates being built without proper access to transport, schools or shops. This would require more architects and design experts to be hired and retained in local authority planning departments, he said.

In a shake-up of planning rules announced on Tuesday, the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, said councils would be asked to review local green belt land and identify so-called grey belt sites. Grey belt sites include spaces within the green belt but deemed as not contributing to it, for example sites next to roads, or in former petrol stations or car parks.

Rayner also controversially announced that she would get rid of the stipulation for new developments to be “beautiful”, which Oki said architects welcomed as it had proven a “barrier to quality development”.

“It can cause confusion because something that’s beautiful to someone else can be not beautiful to another person. That’s why we want to focus on the language of high quality and embed that into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

“When you have high quality, it considers context, community, layout, as well as things like space, form, light etc – things and attributes that can bring out the best possible outcomes for the local community, for people and society at large.”

Although he saw opportunity in the plans to make it easier to build on the green belt, Oki said we “need to think where to site [estates] and is it appropriate in that location”. This included engaging with the local community and ensuring their needs were served, such as access to transport and green space. “It’s my view that the term ‘beauty’ doesn’t really speak to those measures.”

Developers could “do better” on quality, he added, citing as a shining example Chowdhury Walk, a lane of houses in east London’s Hackney commissioned by the council which uses the sale of private homes to fund social housing, and has been nominated for the RIBA’s prestigious Stirling prize. “It sets that blueprint for how you deliver a housing project and how you can get it through planning.”

In a separate announcement, Rayner’s department said a new towns taskforce would explore the creation of an as-yet-unknown number of new towns.

Oki said that new towns must learn from the mistakes of their midcentury predecessors – arguably exemplified by Milton Keynes’ infamous urban sprawl and lack of green space, a legacy of the postwar enthusiasm for cars that has resulted in it regularly being voted one of the UK’s worst places to live.

“We’ve learned more in the past 50-plus years, and it’s my view we need to have mobility of more kinds, so where we focus not just on the car but we try to bring in other forms and modes of transport like walking, cycling, mass transit – and ensuring in these new cities you can actually walk from the train station to the city centre,” he said.

In the past, architects have not always been involved in “socially significant” projects, despite being leaders in the design of the built environment and “best placed to deliver quality”, he said. “For the housebuilding revolution to be a success architects should be involved earlier on in the development process.”

If buildings and estates were not well planned and built, “people don’t take care of it, they don’t have a sense of civic pride”, he said. “That’s why good, high-quality design is important; it helps you live a better life.”

Although he welcomed a commitment towards 300 more qualified design professionals in planning offices, Oki said more funding was needed to ensure that planning authorities could properly deal with the anticipated increase of at least 1.5 million planning applications, and evaluate them for quality.

This would involve stemming the “churn” from local authority into the better-paid private sector. “We need to ensure that working in a local authority or planning department is as rewarding,” he said.

Oki also urged ministers not to include any public buildings affected by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in the delays to the Conservative government’s “unfunded” infrastructure projects outlined by Rachel Reeves on Saturday.

“Any building that causes any immediate safety risk we would like to see that mitigated. That includes Raac, because ensuring the safety of built environment is a priority for RIBA,” Oki said.

“We urge the government to ensure that any public building, public infrastructure with Raac or which has any other deficiencies is remediated as a matter of urgency.”

Public buildings needed “more looking after”, he added, to ensure they could be enjoyed by future generations, especially Grade I and II listed buildings.