Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
13 DECEMBER 2004
MR PAUL
FINCH OBE AND
MR RICHARD
SIMMONS
Q180 Andrew Bennett: It is coming along
rather slowly, is it not?
Mr Simmons: We are hoping to become
involved in helping them to speed it up shortly. If you go to
Kensington High Street and see the work they have done there,
removing the barriers and so on, achieving a reduction in accidents
which is counter-intuitive, then you can see how, if the balance
between the pedestrian, the car and the cyclist is changed, places
can become safer.
Q181 Mr Cummings: Evidence to the Committee
suggests that CABE really could have been more successful in improving
the design of the construction programmes led by government departments,
specifically mentioning health and education. Is it a problem
and what is the problem in liaising with these departments?
Mr Finch: I think there are several
problems. One is the capacity of the construction industry and
its professionals to cope with what will be the most significant
post-war building programme. There is a wave of health and educational
building going on at the moment and it is going to become more
significant. One of our tasks has been to try and gear up in terms
of making preparations to give additional skills to professionals,
to enable them to cope with this. I do not doubt that there have
been buildings in the first wave of PFI health and education buildings
which could have been better. This is a new process and we of
course acknowledge that without that process, they would not be
being built at the moment, so one has to make a balance there.
We have tried very hard to look at potential exemplar projects
through various schools programmes, schools for the future and
through our enabling programme with education authorities up and
down the country.
Mr Simmons: We are working with
the Department for Educational Skills and with the National Health
Service and Department of Health at the moment to try to improve
and inject some design quality into the schemes that are being
built. I think there are some successes coming forward: the Kings
Mill Hospital at Sherwood Forest for example. When the design
for that becomes public, we expect that you will be able to see
the input that CABE has made there. I think the DfES have done
an enormous amount of work as well through Partnerships for Schools
to try to provide exemplar good designs for school developments.
Q182 Mr Cummings: When you talk about
schools are your referring to universities from where these engineers
are graduating?
Mr Simmons: No, I am talking about
the building of schools for the future programme in which the
DFES is currently trying to build new secondary schools.
Q183 Mr Cummings: Are you saying that
designers and architects are leaving universities with degrees
which do not really equip them for the job that you foresee them
doing?
Mr Simmons: I think I am talking
at cross purposes. I am talking about the design of new schools
at the moment.
Q184 Mr Cummings: I am speaking generally.
You have mentioned the amount of time and effort that you yourselves
are spending ensuring that designs are compatible with what is
required today. Are we saying a vacuum exists within the normal
training establishments?
Mr Finch: There is a vacuum, particularly
in relation to urban regeneration projects, brownfield sites.
This was first identified in Lord Rogers' report on the urban
renaissance and what he predicted is, five years on, in fact true,
which is that the number of skilled professional who are not only
architects or planners or engineers, but who have very specific
skills in relation to how to make these things come together and
work in some of the areas of the country which most need the investment
and the development, is more than one set of professional skills.
Q185 Mr Cummings: What I am getting at
is whether the universities are churning out design engineers
with the quality of education that you are requiring to tackle
these problems.
Mr Finch: I would say that the
first phase of the education is fine, but it is not enough to
have degrees in those things; a lot more professional training
is required.
Q186 Mr Cummings: Are any of the universities
taking this on board?
Mr Finch: Yes they are, because
a lot of them are now doing post-graduate studies, some of the
planning skills for example, are doing year-long courses, or indeed
short courses, to try to put people through training which is
in addition to the professional skills they already have. But
this is a big task, because there is a very big regeneration programme
going on. It is tens of billions of pounds and that will require
more and better trained professionals.
Mr Simmons: It is also true to
say that the age profile of some of the professions, particularly
my own, town planning, is starting to move in the direction of
people like me. The number of older men involved is quite large
and within the next 10 years, we expect to see quite a few of
those starting to retire and the universities are not churning
out large numbers of new planners and civil engineers at the moment.
Architect courses are holding up, but in fact people are not coming
forward to volunteer to become planners and engineers in the numbers
that we will need over the next 10 to 15 years.
Q187 Sir Paul Beresford: Even so, you
would agree that a large proportion of the design is done by competent
people. How often do you look at a design that has come across
your desk and said "Great" and sent it back?
Mr Finch: Actually, I would say
sometimes rather than all the time. Even if you have competent
designers, it does not necessarily mean that the client's brief
has been a great one, or that the local circumstances, the planning
archaeology if you will, makes it an easy task to produce a good
building on a particular site. One of the things that we have
been able to do on occasion is to say to some very, very good
architects, if not great architects, that there might be things
which could be improved in their designs. Contrary to what one
might expect, sometimes they are very happy to get this advice
because it may have been what they have been saying to the client
or the local planning authority all along and to have a bit of
backup from somebody who has not got an axe to grind can be useful.
We try not to second-guess what the circumstances are which have
produced a particular proposal.
Q188 Sir Paul Beresford: So they all
send you a Christmas card.
Mr Finch: Some of them do, but
never, never, never anything else.
Q189 Mr Cummings: How could other government
departments work more closely with CABE in raising design standards
within their own development programmes?
Mr Finch: One word from me, but
this is Richard's territory. The fact is that we have had huge
co-operation right across the spending departments who have sought
our advice and given us support, including, I may say, ODPM. We
started life merely as a creature of DCMS, but the work that we
have done with and for ODPM is one example which is spreading
across.
Q190 Mr Cummings: Which government departments
are not signed up to a design agenda?
Mr Simmons: It is hard to think
of one now. There were some issues and concerns about the Department
of Health recently but we now seem to have moved on very well
with them and they are looking through their future plans for
what will replace NHS estates, to build the good practice from
NHS estates on design into the Department of Health. It is worth
saying that CABE's approach has been to start with the people
who have the money, the Treasury and Office of Government Commerce
and the Office of Government Commerce has been very supportive
of CABE's work because of the fact that what we are proposing
is looking at the whole-life cost and value of buildings and saying
that good design contributes to that. In October the OGC issued
new guidance for PFI and other projects, looking specifically
at design as part of the gateway review process, as they call
it, which is a process by which you look at projects during various
stages. That has been an encouragement to all government departments
to work closely and we have helped the OGC to produce those documents.
Mr Finch: It is worth mentioning
some of the departments we specifically work with. We have done
a whole number of things on MoD major projects with special design
reviews on some of the really big barracks programmes—they
are not called barracks any more but residential programmes. We
have worked with the Home Office on their new HQ in Marsham Street;
the Department of Health has already been mentioned; FCO on embassy
design and the Lord Chancellor's Department specifically on the
court programme which was quite an extensive one. So we have had
a lot of support from these departments and I hope our advice
is useful. We are still getting requests, so I assume it is.
Q191 Sir Paul Beresford: That could of
course be taken as a criticism of the confidence of the departments
and public service approach to design in any event, or a compliment
to you in that they know they will have a much easier run getting
it through planning if they have your label on it.
Mr Simmons: One of the things
CABE does a lot to help with is how to be a good client, and we
have produced quite a lot of guidance on that and one of the problems
you face as a public servant is, say you work for a health trust,
that you may be asked once in your life to be the client for a
multi-million pound project. To be able to come to an organisation
like CABE, which has expertise and knowledge, to help you to select
the right design team, to put an enabler in, as they are called
in the jargon, to help you to manage that project is something
they value. The potential to make huge mistakes on very big projects
is always there and the value of having somebody to support you
through that process is something which reduces the risks to government.
Mr Finch: Specifically, there
are fewer architects, certainly in the top echelons of the civil
service, than there were perhaps 30 years ago, when you would
routinely have a chief architect for the health department and
actually for most departments and they, for whatever reason, no
longer exist. There is a sense in which we are seen as an adviser
or a shoulder to lean on, by departments which do not have the
internal expertise in quite the way they used to.
Q192 Christine Russell: I was going to
ask you about the MoD, but you mentioned the MoD. However, many
of the buildings that were formerly owned by the MoD, rather grand
listed buildings in many cases, have been passed to the Crown
Estate. What sort of relationship and influence do you have with
the Crown Estate, because a number of those buildings are now
giving serious cause for concern?
Mr Finch: We see schemes that
the Crown Estate promotes occasionally in the general run of things
and we have the occasional discussion with their chief executive,
for example. I do not think we have a specific programme of helping
the Crown Estate as such; it is on an as-and-when basis.
Christine Russell: Perhaps you could
make them aware of your existence.
Q193 Mr Cummings: One of the problems
seems to be the design quality of PFI projects. How do you believe
you can persuade the procurers and providers to give greater weight
to design issues?
Mr Finch: I must say this has
been a long, fight is the wrong word, it has been a long campaign
on our part to try to do whatever we can to promote design quality
within the PFI process. Now the help we have had on this has largely
come from OGC, because they produce more than one document which
has stressed lifetime value as opposed to initial cost and in
fact the government's better public buildings policy endorsed
by the prime minister back in 2000 has some specific recommendations
and advice about design quality whatever the form of procurement
might be. It is really acknowledged by the whole profession, I
think everybody including PFI suppliers, that there are aspects
of PFI procedures which can militate against design quality. We
have identified what many, if not all of those are and the discussions
go on, in order to try to get the best outcomes. Fortunately,
we are now at a point where buildings are starting to come through
as built, where we can point to ones where we think that the PFI
process has worked well, for example, Brighton Library. Having
the examples of certain MoD buildings where you can say to people,
if they want to know how to do it well, then follow the way these
people did it and not the way that perhaps some other people have
done on projects which have been less successful.
Q194 Chris Mole: Apart from the fact
that there are clearly more planning applications than CABE can
possibly comment on and you talked a little about the targets
that the department give you, geographical, building types etcetera,
but bearing in mind the importance of your advice standing up
to scrutiny after the event, would it not be better if you looked
at slightly fewer schemes perhaps more thoroughly than offer what
could be considered a superficial view on some more?
Mr Finch: Let me kick off on that
one because we can leave a sort of flow chart showing how we decide
which schemes to assess.
Q195 Chris Mole: Is this published.
Mr Finch: Yes, it is but I am
not sure that it is in this form. It is written down and we tried
to produce something which is not that simple. In a nutshell,
there are four streams. There are schemes of low significance
which are probably not appropriate for us to comment on which
are being referred to us in a routine way. There are schemes of
medium significance which are discussed by staff and a commissioner;
we look at a number of those every week. There are slightly more
complex schemes, of medium to high significance, which involve
a site visit by a member of staff and possibly a commissioner
and the drawings are looked; it is known as a pin-up, where the
drawings are pinned up and they are discussed by staff, the commissioner
and two or three members of the design review committee, and then
the highly significant schemes, which I think is where we are
getting to what you are interested in, are where we do up to 100
a year where there are all the other things which I have already
mentioned, but there is a full-blown presentation by client and
architect usually with the local planning authority present, plus
English Heritage and any other relevant authority, like the GLA
if it is a significant scheme in London. So there are 100 key
schemes that we look at in a lot of detail each year and then
400 or 500 others in lesser detail; that is how we try to cut
and dice it.
Mr Simmons: One of the things
that CABE differentiates from the Royal Fine Arts Commission,
because design review is something that we succeeded them in doing,
is the fact that we publish learning, we produce documents called
design reviews and this is one which looks generally at what schemes
we have looked at. We also produce specialist ones on shopping
centres and so on. I would say the number of schemes is about
right at the moment to enable us to have enough of a sample to
do this and this is used in feedback to the industry. In my last
job before I became chief executive of CABE, I used the one on
shopping centres with a developer who was having some difficulty
developing a scheme we were working on together to assist in looking
at some of the key features they could incorporate in the scheme.
I think the number of schemes we are currently looking at is probably
about right; too few we would not be able to get the learning
to put into this kind of document and redistribute it back to
the industry.
Q196 Chris Mole: Just back on your flow
chart and the criterion there to help you decide which is going
to go, is that published, as AHL were suggesting might be a good
idea?
Mr Simmons: Yes, it is on our
website.
Q197 Chris Mole: In our first evidence
session, we heard some criticism of these informal sessions where
you said it was staff and a commissioner. Do you think that when
local authorities and developers are hearing this view they should
understand what weight should be given to those in comparison
to what weight should be given to the ones that go through the
fuller process?
Mr Simmons: Yes. I think the point
was well made that although we publish the names of our design
review panel members generally, we do not at the moment and have
not in the past actually put onto each report the names of the
people involved in the review and that is something which we will
do in future.
Q198 Chris Mole: So you would say the
status is the same between the two?
Mr Finch: I think the advice is,
that if it is moderately significant scheme, then we would expect
the comment to be read and understood without very much discussion
by the architect and it is generally speaking copied to the client
and the planning authority. Where the schemes become more complex,
then usually the architect in the first instance will talk to
whoever it is on the CABE staff who is the case officer to seek
further clarification or sometimes bordering on design advice.
They might have meetings to go over what has been said and why
and what strategic approaches we might recommend. As the schemes
become more complex and the advice becomes more detailed, then
it is not infrequent that there might be two or three meetings
between CABE staff and the applicants, partly to prepare them
for when they come before the design review panel as we are now
calling it, rather than the committee, because it is a large group
of people from whom we select each time. So there is quite an
iterative process and there is a lot of discussion. We feel that
the more significant and the more complex the scheme, the more
you would expect, where advice is needed, and sometimes it might
be one tiny thing or nothing at all, there to be more meetings.
Q199 Chris Mole: So you are not worried
that people might take the sort of pin-up reviews and say, well
that has got CABE approval and it is the same as if it had been
through a full DRC.
Mr Finch: I think the only slight
dilemma, it is the way of things, is that if somebody gets a letter
which perhaps makes four points and three of them are negative
and one of them is positive, they are inclined to quote the positive
one. Now of course, it is rather difficult to control that, but
if it comes to our attention that it has happened, then we would
just write to them and say, you should not be doing this. Fortunately,
because everything gets copied to the local planning authority,
they and the councillors will see it before any planning decision
is made; that is a public process. Our work is done by then. The
information is on the public record, so somebody might try to
pull the wool about what it is we have said, but they stand to
be found out, because our comments are public.
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