Examination of Witness (Questions 145-159)
1 NOVEMBER 2004
MR RORY
COONAN
Q145 Chairman: Thank you very much for
coming this afternoon. I am sorry we have kept you waiting a little
bit longer than expected. Could you identify yourself, for the
sake of our records, please?
Mr Coonan: I am Rory Coonan. I
am an independent design adviser.
Q146 Chairman: Thank you. Is there anything
you would like to say by way of introduction, or can we go straight
into questions?
Mr Coonan: No, thank you, Sir.
Q147 Christine Russell: Mr Coonan, good
afternoon. You said in your submission that you think CABE should
do fewer things. What do you think it should stop doing and what
should it prioritise?
Mr Coonan: I think that CABE has
been an enormous success so far, and the things that it has done
well it has done exceptionally well, but, as we have heard already,
it is five years old and perhaps the limits of success are being
discovered. It is perhaps taking on too much. There were last
year 660,000 planning applications, of which CABE reviewed 480.
That is less than one-eighth of 1% of that, it is a tiny number.
They cannot possibly review any more than a fraction of these
planning applications. I should say, in answer to your question,
that they need to be more selective, given the resources they
have, in relation to the projects that they view, the better to
give more force and power, if you like, to their opinions. Also
I think they should cease having these, what I call, tied panels
of advisers, persons who are selected by them who join the ranks
of the enablers. On the Groucho Marx principle, that I would not
wish to join a club that would have me as a member, I have declined
to join the enabling panel but I am sure it does very good work.
My real objection to their having these panels of advisers is
that it creates an impression, true or not I do not know, that
a certain caste or cadre of persons is giving advice. I have said
elsewhere that I think it would be much to the improvement of
the quality of architecture if a genuine market in design advice
were to be created, so that independent bodies, local authorities,
government departments, agencies of all kinds, could take advice
from whomsoever they pleased. Rather than, as in the case of the
CABE enabling panels, they are, as it were, allotted a person
whose rates of pay, I notice, are fixed.
Q148 Christine Russell: Would not that
give Government and local authorities just another job to do,
a kind of advertising, I do not know, competitions, "Come
and help us design this building," or whatever?
Mr Coonan: I think it was you,
Mrs Russell, who only a few minutes ago alluded to the fact that
local authorities once used to possess this skill, so I should
say, in answer to your point, that, yes, they should acquire it
again. They can choose to do that, or they can choose to source
advice locally, that is to say, regionally rather than necessarily
metropolitanally, if I can put it that way.
Q149 Christine Russell: Going back to
the first half of the question which you answered, do you think
that, the 480 applications, they should be more selective and
in fact review fewer than that, rather than to go back with a
begging-bowl to the Government and say "Give us more money
because we only do 480 and we'd like to do more"?
Mr Coonan: They should not review
fewer applications, they should perhaps do more, but they could
do more by being selective about the things that they choose to
do, the better to make an impact. There is an enormous explosion
of public investment, as evidence elsewhere to your Committee
makes plain, some £35 billion worth of projects, including
Private Finance Initiative projects. If CABE were doing fewer
things, perhaps less advertising of itself, it could concentrate
more on this enormous explosion of public sector investment which
happily is taking place, and where it could make a real impact.
It could begin to punch above its weight rather than simply trying
to affect the quality of individual projects, which is a hopeless
cause, given the £12 million it has and the 82 persons it
employs for the purpose.
Q150 Christine Russell: I can understand
what you are saying, that they should do less in the way of research,
but, as far as the actual planning proposals that they are reviewing
at the moment are concerned, which ones should they stop their
involvement with?
Mr Coonan: It is not a matter
for me. All I know is that their remit, both from the Department
of Culture and the department that you have the privilege of shadowing,
makes it plain that they have to look at projects of scale, projects
which stand as an exemplar for other sorts of projects, projects
affecting certain so-called heritage sites. The rules are already
set out. They may need to be more selective about the ones that
they choose to review.
Q151 Andrew Bennett: Of all the witnesses,
you are about the only one who wants CABE to have more powers.
What extra powers should it have?
Mr Coonan: I speak as a person
who spent 10 years at the Arts Council of Great Britain, a body
which took 40 years to evolve its systems of review, its equitable
systems, its probity, all that has taken many decades to establish,
so I am not surprised that five years is a very short time to
establish itself. From my Arts Council experience, I look at the
long-term prospects for CABE and I see this. I see the possibility
that the exigencies of government policy, the vagaries of the
individual policy, will change, as indeed they do, and that a
new set of tasks may be given to CABE and that they may not be
able to carry them out, or they will simply be, as it were, moved
from one set of concrete policy objectives to the next. The culprits
here, of course, are ODPM rather than the DCMS, who seem to have
rather few strictures when it comes to applying to CABE. In relation
to ODPM, there are a specific number of tasks they are enjoined
to do. I do not think that is what a long-term body should be
doing, it should be making its own policy. I think CABE should
be robust and authoritative in carrying out the functions which
DCMS and ODPM jointly have given them and say, "Well, actually,
thank you very much but we will ordain our own day-to-day policies
on what we should do precisely." The list from ODPM is astonishing.
Basically, it tells what CABE should have for breakfast, dinner
and lunch, and it is not a diet which I think is sustainable.
I think, for a long-term body to evolve, it has to make up its
own mind, it has to assert itself and it has to do more to discharge
the wider cultural role that DCMS has given it, but which so far
I think it has not had the opportunity to do because it is so
trammelled by this multiplicity of tasks, aiding and abetting
the Government's policies, as sensible of course as they are,
for developing sustainable communities.
Q152 Andrew Bennett: There was a slight
smile there. We cannot get a slight smile on the record. Can I
just press you. You want to give them more powers, to have much
greater independence and to have much more freedom to do what
they think is right. How do you convince people that they are
not a self-serving élite?
Mr Coonan: I have nothing against
élites. As Raymond Williams once said, I want them for
everybody, and an élite of brain surgeons is not regarded
as a bad thing, neuroscience being a field and a discipline where
few people are qualified. I do not think we should apologise for
the fact that CABE is an élite, if you mean by that a body
of persons with expert knowledge who are proud of the knowledge
they have and are willing to deploy it in the public interest,
and I see no reason why CABE should not carry on that way. It
is not self-serving, it is very much a body, as I see it from
the outside, which is in the service of the public, and that is
a jolly good thing.é
Q153 Andrew Bennett: Do you see there
is a conflict between public interest and profit?
Mr Coonan: Whose profit did you
have in mind?
Q154 Andrew Bennett: To a certain extent,
there must be profit for those people who are offering architectural
advice, must there not?
Mr Coonan: Do you mean those persons
who are working for CABE, delivering advice?
Q155 Andrew Bennett: Anybody who is involved
with particular styles and approaches to architecture has an interest,
do they not, in particular schemes, particular ideas being developed?
Mr Coonan: Do you mean a financial
interest, a pecuniary interest?
Q156 Andrew Bennett: Yes.
Mr Coonan: I am not sure that
is true, Chairman. I think there are many persons who are disinterested
in the projects on which they advise. I would count myself amongst
them, alas. It is perhaps to my detriment that I am not. I do
not think there is anything wrong with that. There is an argument
for having a greater number of persons who dispense this advice
in a disinterested way. I must say, I agree with many previous
witnesses this afternoon who have said that they wish there would
be a greater variety of persons amongst the CABE Commissioners
and amongst the design review panels, persons who are not those
persons who have a professional interest in the outcome. That
would do much to dispel any view that CABE was, as you put it,
self-serving.
Q157 Chairman: Perhaps, if the altruism
that you are identifying yourself with were prevalent throughout
society in general, we would all be relaxed about it, but there
is a concern around, is there not, that there is so much money
hinging on some of these developments that not everyone might
be giving advice from that perspective? Is not that a concern,
that if you start to give more and more powers to people, some
of whom may have a different take on it, that we could be entering
into very difficult waters?
Mr Coonan: If CABE were a Commission
for poetry or sculpture, its deliberations no doubt would be interesting
but they would not necessarily be compelling. The reason why CABE,
as a Commission for Architecture, is compelling is because enormous
sums of money turn on the outcome. The art of architecture is
no less important than the arts of poetry or sculpture, but that
is the difference, because, architecture being a practical art,
a greater number of persons have a stake in the outcome and that
complicates the thing. Giving powers to CABE to bolster its independence
and the scrutiny that it is able to give to projects would be,
I think, a very good thing. I would describe them as the power
of discovery, a legal term, the power to look at papers and look
at drawings, and the power to delay, because if, as I said earlier,
this enormous raft of public investment over the next 10 or 20
years comes to fruition there may well be many applicants, or
perhaps we should call them supplicants, to CABE who may be uninterested
in taking advice. Whereas as in the case, say, of a large London
teaching hospital they prove recalcitrant or perhaps uninterested
and the design is poor, I suspect that in due course, as these
projects multiply, CABE will benefit from having the teeth to
pass observations, to give advice, but from a position of strength.
In other words, the success of the first five years is no guarantee
of its success in the next five or 15 years.
Q158 Sir Paul Beresford: Just because
CABE does not agree with, you used, the London hospital design,
it does not mean it is poor and it does not mean it is wrong,
it means it is different, because part of an art is an opinion?
Mr Coonan: Indeed, but the reason
we have CABE is because we have persons on CABE who have an informed
opinion. That is the whole point. Persons whose opinions are informed
are more likely to proffer advice that is, by definition, informed,
and a number of people may choose to ignore them where they may
take that advice. I think it is an argument in favour of having
a strong CABE with well-informed people.
Q159 Sir Paul Beresford: So architects
and designers that are not on CABE are ill-informed?
Mr Coonan: I do not see how logically
that applies.
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