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Memorandum from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) (BDH 37)
1. Introduction
1.1 Set up in 1999, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment works for an improvement in people's quality of life through good design. CABE champions well-designed buildings and public space, running public campaigns and providing expert, practical advice. We work directly with planners, designers, clients and architects, offering them guidance on projects that will shape all our lives. CABE is a statutory executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and funded by DCMS and the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG).
1.2 CABE's statutory function is to improve the standard of the design, management and maintenance of the built environment, and to advise government on how best to do this.
2. What lessons can be learned
from the Decent Homes programme and equivalents in Scotland,
2.1 CABE has well-known concerns about the
current quality of housing, neighbourhoods and places being produced - and the
legacy this will leave for future generations. CABE's Housing Audit - the first complete picture
of housing design quality in
Any future decent housing standards will therefore need to look wider than council housing as the Decent Homes programme has shown the work that results when design for a changing climate is not factored in. Affordable housing is now provided by a much wider range of providers, not just councils. As both housing for sale, which may be rented to low income families and individuals in due course (and, in the case of buy-to-let may already be so let) and Registered Social Landlord (RSL) housing have been found wanting, we are concerned that this legacy will have a huge impact on decent housing standards post 2010. Many of these homes may be the decent homes of the future needing extensive refurbishment in the next ten years.
2.2 Building for Life
While we applaud the Government's commitment to refurbish existing stock we believe that future decent housing standards should go further and look at the wider housing stock and neighbourhoods as well as individual homes.
CABE's assessment of well-designed homes and neighbourhoods centres on the Building for Life criteria - established as the national standard for design quality in new housing developments.[2] Building for Life promotes and enables developments which are functional, attractive and sustainable, with an emphasis on the importance of place-making. A partnership initiative, Building for Life is led by CABE and the Home Builders Federation.
The 20 Building for Life criteria embody the partners' vision of what new housing should be, functional, attractive and sustainable. New housing developments are scored against the criteria to assess the quality of their design.
The criteria are also founded on government policy and help gather together how a scheme performs across the range of national and local guidance and policy. Phrased in terms accessible to a lay public, the criteria lend the evaluation of design quality greater transparency and enable an inclusive discourse about the design quality of new housing developments.
Furthermore in July 2008 CLG published a set of revised core output indicators which introduced Building for Life as the indicator of housing quality (Indicator H6). From 2009 local authorities will have to report the number and proportion of total new build completions over 10 dwellings of housing sites reaching very good, good, average and poor ratings against the Building for Life criteria. To support this CABE is in the process of training a Building for Life assessor in each English local authority by 2011. Building for Life assessors will help with the assessments for the annual monitoring reports but will also conduct assessments at the pre-planning stage.
2.3 Neighbourhood energy Rather than just focusing on individual homes future standards should target neighbourhoods as well which are a key scale at which we can develop effective and efficient responses to the climate change challenge - whilst simultaneously creating successful, sustainable communities and places to live and work.[3] At this local scale, it's possible to bring together planning, design and management holistically to achieve a step change, for example through the integration of resource management, transport and green infrastructure strategies. In new developments and redevelopment opportunities, sustainable masterplanning is key to bringing about appropriate change in the most effective and efficient way. Masterplans can be part of the planning policy framework - as Area Action plans or as Supplementary Planning Documents. Embedding climate change considerations within these frameworks enables masterplans to contribute to the future resilience of a neighbourhood - and its capacity to contribute to our low-carbon future. At present, such masterplans are rare and tend to focus on climate change mitigation - it's essential that adaptation measures are also included. For example the most common form of decentralised energy supply is community or district heating. This is where space heating and hot water is delivered to multiple occupants from a local plant via a network of insulated pipes buried in the ground. Local decentralised generation plants can be housed in 'energy centres' or block plant rooms and are therefore best planned at the neighbourhood masterplanning stage.
2.4 Recommendation:
We would recommend that any future decent housing standards compliment existing standards by looking at overall neighbourhoods as well as individual homes.
Building for Life, which is already recognised as the national standard for design quality in new housing developments, should be fully integrated into any future housing standards to ensure new developments don't become homes that will need refurbishing in the future.
The Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) are committed to retro-fitting existing properties. Yet government funded programmes have so far targeted housing quality and energy efficiency at an individual property level or, in the case of decent homes, at an estate level. They have not run a programme for climate change mitigation and adaptation at the wider neighbourhood scale.[4]
Such a programme could be designed to work across all housing types and
tenures, including private rental and owner occupier, and be delivered by local
authorities and the voluntary sector. It could create exemplar neighbourhoods,
in the spirit of
CABE is currently working with the Sustainable Development Commission to investigate neighbourhood scale solutions to adaptation and mitigation. This is being done in conjunction with HCA, CLG and DECC. Operating at a neighbourhood level would not only save time and money but would also stimulate the market for green building materials and renewable energy technologies, and generate jobs in the construction trades and professions that are suffering in the recession. It could play a strong role in engaging local communities, and create ownership of the climate change adaptation agenda through collective action.
3. How should the Decent Homes target for private sector homes occupied by vulnerable people be taken forward?
3.1 The government's Decent Homes programme has gone some way to addressing fuel poverty and energy efficiency in existing homes within the social housing sector, but it was never intended to be a response to climate change. New plans are needed to tackle carbon emissions from existing social housing but also the private sector. Currently the Decent Homes programme applies to social housing and whilst we welcome the extension to include vulnerable people in private sector homes we believe that post 2010 standards should look at more consistent incentives and standards across the private sector.
The Decent Homes programme has been successful but only addressed a small area of what is going to become a much wider issue. For example we need to tackle households who will be able to afford to continue heating inefficient homes but who aren't currently being incentivised to make the changes needed to improve energy efficiency. Often insulation initiatives vary from area to area and are frequently hard to access.
We also need to ensure we avoid a situation where a section of private home owners become trapped in inefficient and costly homes because they are unable to afford to refurbish them or move to more efficient properties.
3.2 Homes for our old age CABE has recently published research into housing for an ageing population which looks at the design of independent living.[5] As our ageing population increases so do the pressures on designers, planners and the Government to provide adequate housing to meet demand. Furthermore people who need care support generally want to stay in their own home and therefore the publication highlights examples of refurbishment of existing properties.
Only 4
per cent of older and disabled adults move to a care home. The rest will be
reliant on their own resources and most prefer to stay in their own home: 67
per cent of over-85s still live at home, compared to only 19 per cent in
institutional settings. Most people in the
This again shows the need for any future decent homes standards to look beyond the current programme and focus not only on refurbishments that target sustainability but also issues of inclusion and adaptability for older people.
3.3 Recommendation
Having set zero carbon targets and timescales for new homes, we need a new initiative for upgrading existing homes to the lowest possible carbon standards. This could be achieved by harnessing and consolidating financial resources from funding programmes such as the Energy Efficiency Commitment, and the Warm Front programme. Clear targets and milestones for comprehensive sustainable refurbishment and adaptation should be set, and specific incentives developed to engage homeowners and landlords.[6]
Existing
homes can be effectively adapted, but at a cost, and expert advice and grants
are not always available, despite the efforts of organisations such as Care and
Repair
September 2009
[1] Housing audit: assessing the design quality of new housing in the East
Midlands, [2] The criteria are outlined in detail in the guide Delivering Great Places to Live (CABE and HBF, 2005; updated 2007). See www.buildingforlife.org [3] CABE's work in this area can be found on the Sustainable Cities: Preparing towns and cities for a changing climate Website. See www.sustainablecities.org.uk/scales/neighbourhood
[4] Hallmarks of a sustainable city, CABE, March 2009 [5] Homes for our old age: Independent living by design, CABE, 2009 [6] Sustainable design, climate change and the built environment, CABE, 2007 [7] Homes for our old age: Independent living by design, CABE, 2009 |