26
Examination of witnesses
Amanprit Arnold, Dinah Bornat and Councillor Holly Bruce.
Q55 The Chair: Good morning. Welcome to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee, where we have been looking into the Government’s policy on new towns and expanding settlements. The module that we are focused on at the minute is around communities and placemaking and how to make those communities successful. I am delighted to welcome three fantastic guests and very esteemed witnesses before us today, to talk about inclusive design and accessibility. I wonder if the witnesses could introduce themselves first, and Dinah, perhaps I could start with you, please.
Dinah Bornat: Good morning, thank you for inviting me. I am the director and co-founder of ZCD Architects. We are quite a small practice based in London, and we do a range of different projects. We are a research-based practice with expertise in child-friendly design alongside architecture, and I have written a book, All to Play For: How to Design Child-Friendly Housing, which has come from the work we do. We have created toolkits for children and young people with Grosvenor estates, TCPA and Sport England, and another one with investors for the Van Leer Foundation. This has led us to work with the Earls Court Development Company in west London, establishing an intergenerational panel.
I am a regular speaker about our research, and an honorary professor at Queen’s University, Belfast. I am a member of—I have to read this out—the Government’s Fundamental Review of Building Regulations Guidance panel, a former Mayor’s Design Advocate for the Mayor of London, and currently a Design Review Panel member for Harrow, Hounslow and Brent councils. I also gave evidence to the select committee inquiry on children and young people and the built environment in the House of Commons a year and a half ago.
Councillor Holly Bruce: Good morning, thank you so much for having me. I have been an elected councillor for Langside ward in Glasgow City Council since 2022. Before that—and, full disclosure, I am not a planner or an architect—I have been campaigning, researching, collaborating and working in this policy area for the best part of four years. I was an activist first and a politician second. Back in 2020, when we were all locked down in our houses, I was part of a campaign group: the Young Women’s Movement in Scotland, which helps increase women’s participation in political life. We did a research project on feminist cities and how we can build cities better for all women and girls. I am by no means the main authority on this subject matter, but I have worked with other politicians, planners, architects, researchers, artists, academics—you name it—and I feel I can give a really broad view to the subject matter today, and build on the feminist urbanism movement that we are seeing in the UK at the moment.
Amanprit Arnold: Hi, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I am delighted to be providing evidence to the committee on this work; it is a real honour to be here. I am a disability urban strategist, which basically means that I bring disability inclusion to city-making, urban development and placemaking. Being born profoundly deaf I have lived experience, but also professional experience with 15 years in the built environment. I am the founder of Disability Urbanism as a thought-leading, accessible and inclusive practice, fostering an inclusive environment for everyone. We look at how the built environment can better shape experiences for regeneration of public spaces, planning and housing. I set up this consultancy, which it is quite new, because I recognised a huge planning gap. I am also the chair of SignHealth, that looks to address health inequalities for deaf people and I have my BSL interpreter here, who will be supporting me with communication.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We are delighted to have you all here, and I am personally very excited about today. I think you know that we have a series of questions that we will go through and we will break up into groups around the horseshoe. If you do not feel like you have the answers to the questions or you have nothing to add please just say that; there are no gotchas here. The only thing I would ask for is brevity: please keep your answers concise, and that goes for committee members in their questioning as well. I am delighted to welcome Baroness Warwick in the first area.
Q56 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Good morning and thank you very much for coming; it is great to see you all. It is a great agenda that we are covering today. The New Towns Taskforce argue that, “New towns should be developed with a focus on creating thriving, inclusive and resilient communities”. However, it does not actually tell us what it means by that, and it does not really help us to say who it is referring to; you have each referred to different groups.
We have an opportunity here to influence the Government’s thinking on this issue, and you have, too. So I wonder if you would tell me why it is important to consider the needs of specific groups when planning for new towns, rather than looking generically at inclusion. Maybe I will start with Dinah, who is on my right-hand side here.
Dinah Bornat: I will try to be brief, but it is 10 or so years of work behind me. What I wanted to talk about in the context of this question is something I call social innovation. The industry is very reluctant to change patterns of behaviour and systems, and that is what our practice has been looking at over the last 10 years. It is very research-based: we take evidence to market and evaluate whether it works.
About 10 years ago, as a parent of three children at the time, I identified a problem that I could see. I got involved in a movement called Playing Out, which originated in Bristol, where parents are given the tools to close roads so that children can play immediately outside their front door. It is something that I was really happy to be able to do as a child, and it was very common then; perhaps you were all able to play out as children as well. It is incredibly essential, really, for childhood development and freedom and joy, but it is something that has become lost.
I became very interested in building some evidence around that at the time through my work at university and then through industry-funded research projects. We carried out hundreds of hours of observational research into housing design and where children were and were not playing out. We found some really interesting pieces of evidence that has broadened beyond children, if you like, but essentially I just want you to think for a moment that what we found was that spaces that are well-used by children are also well-used by adults. We coined the phrase that children are the generators of community life. We found that spaces that are well-used for play and social use will always be directly connected to home, so you absolutely must not have a road in between the home and the place where children play because that severs that link, if you like, and those spaces need to form a network around the residential area.
That is not generally how the house-builder model might be thinking, but we call it real doorstep play. It is the one-minute city, if you like; 15 minutes is too far to go. We wanted to make this into a really simple process so that the organisations, developers and housing associations we were working with could recognise what we were doing. We developed a mapping system, which is in the book that I referred to, to show how those layouts worked and supported that kind of social use of space through other examples of good case studies.
They contrast with the typical house-builder scheme and that is why it is useful for the new towns. We are thinking of a marginalised group, if you like, which is children and young people—20% of the population—but according to the Department for Education they spend 80% of their waking hours not in school. So where are they? Hopefully they are not on screens. It is interesting, and actually I would suggest you have a look at this paper from the House of Commons Library, which gathers together lots of research on this subject and is really revealing on that, that if you ask children whether they would rather be playing outside or on screens, they would actually rather be playing outside. That is something for us all to think about in the built environment because all is not lost. We have something in our species, if you like, that is fundamentally important to us.
When I read that word inclusion, or about inclusive communities in new towns, I am really thinking of the benefits for that group and I now know that that brings benefits to other groups as well, and I can speak to this in other questions so I can come back to this. But the websites and so on that we have developed are really about helping other organisations do the same, and work with children and young people in that area. To answer your question, in looking at this marginalised group and being able to innovate like this and give them space to be children, we have demonstrated how important that is for housing design. Essentially we are looking outside a narrow field of view so that it is not business as usual because in fact that is not really designing good housing at all.
Councillor Holly Bruce: So much of what you have just said crosses over with my work as well. But to start, I am sure you can agree that towns, cities and places have traditionally been built by men and for men, and it has disproportionately impacted women over many years. Decisions on planning and budgets that have been made in political spaces do not really reflect the everyday experiences of our very diverse public; we know that and can be honest with that. These spaces have overwhelmingly been dominated by cis-gendered white men, and we can see that largely across the UK within political spaces and the built environment sectors today.
For too long residents have been considered neutral within planning constructs, but we know that a neutral resident does not exist; not a single person on this planet would describe themselves as neutral. We are real people with lived experience, norms and perspectives that drive the decisions we make every single day. By having this geographical perspective on gender—this new kind of feminist town planning offer—it helps us understand how sexism and misogyny functions on the ground in our everyday lives. We know that male power and privilege is upheld by keeping women’s movement limited and access to spaces constrained. It is my job, and your job, to help to reimagine and build communities where absolutely everyone can thrive.
You might be asking, “What is a feminist city?” I would like to start from a place and a vision where women have a right to the city, are able to walk, wheel or cycle around freely, push a buggy with ease, are able to access public transport, childcare and green spaces, and afford adequate housing. It starts from that positive reimagining and that empowering place, not as women seen as marginalised or vulnerable beings, but inherently part of public life. Currently it feels like women are seen as vulnerable, rather than thriving public participants.
This is the kind of theoretical framework of feminist-gendered-lens thinking; I will get to examples in the next questions, but I have been doing this for the last four years and I know it is relatively new to folk as a concept, and it is quite abstract. I am sure you have heard of concepts like the gender pay gap, gender budgeting and gender mainstreaming, but not a lot has been done on gender geography. This new task force is a really good opportunity to look at that.
People often say, “Why use the term feminist?” I am considering that may be a question later on, so I will address that first off. Feminist town planning is gendered-lens thinking. I sincerely do not think I would be sitting here today if I said “gendered-lens thinking” in my policy. The feminist city town planning approach has empowered so many people—women, architects, academics and artists—that I have been working with, as I mentioned earlier, and without that I do not think it would have had this much attention and emotive thought. We will speak about what that means in practice later.
This policy intention has now been adopted by Glasgow City Council, Edinburgh City Council, Perth Council and Lancashire Council, and they have committed to rolling that out in their city development plans. The chief planner for the Scottish Government is very keen on this being rolled out nationally with a local context as well. As I said, architects are reviewing practices, holding training sessions and discussing this more widely. Just last week I had the privilege of presenting on this subject at a conference in Mexico City in collaboration with the United Nations. There is real appetite, want and need to see change happening on the ground: planning should be much more than technical things, it should be about the social things. This new urban narrative should not only inspire but also be felt. I feel that designing cities for women will make them safer, healthier and more vibrant for absolutely everyone, and make them pleasant places for people to live harmoniously together. That is my vision, and a lot of people’s vision.
Amanprit Arnold: I am focusing on disability. There are nearly 17 million people in the UK with a disability. That is nearly 25% of the population, and it is a growing statistic that we cannot afford to ignore in the planning of our new towns. When I talk about disability it could be permanent, temporary or situational. Disability-inclusive design goes beyond physical access: it creates environments that are accessible and usable by the broadest range of people, regardless of abilities or disabilities. It removes the barriers by creating an equitable experience that benefits everyone, including reducing social care costs in the long run as well.
If you design generically you will stop at basic physical access and miss the deeper considerations and that will lead to exclusion, so we need to move beyond minimum compliance and towards a cultural shift, which is the affirmative model of disability, and not view it as a medical one. Disability is already the largest minority group and a club that anybody can join overnight, but if you design generically you will fail to identify the barriers and that will create sources of tension. Even within the disability group there are multiple disabilities, not forgetting their parents and carers. You will end up fixing an inaccessible environment that will cost money and time, when it could have been designed inclusively from the beginning.
There is a statistic from the Centre for Inclusive Design that if you are retrofitting to improve inclusivity it can be up to 10,000 times more expensive than incorporating it from the beginning. This impacts our carbon emissions and material waste as we retrofit inaccessible homes and spaces. There is a difference between a generic plan where you have a ramp and an inclusively designed one, which will have rest spaces every 50 metres with backrests and armrests.
I am somebody who went to a special education needs school that was designed inclusively and supported by the Department for Education, but then you have the other end of the spectrum for care homes and co-living homes. You have to ask yourself, why is the built environment not thinking about inclusive design from school-leaving age up until the age of 65? If we can design special schools, hospitals and care homes, then should we not take a holistic approach by connecting them, instead of having a fragmented urban fabric?
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Amanprit, can I just ask you specifically, is it appropriate to categorise all disabilities under a single umbrella when it comes to the built environment?
Amanprit Arnold: I would say so, yes, because it is about your experience of barriers in the environment. For example, I am profoundly deaf and that is permanent, but then a temporary one might be that you have glue ear so your experience of the environment is limited.. A situational example is that you might be in a very busy restaurant and unable to hear anything and you cannot get involved in the experiences. The situational one would probably not be included as a disability, although actually the figure is probably higher, and people are not disclosing it. Awareness-raising and empathy is probably the reason you are seeing those statistics increasing.
The Chair: Amanprit, I am sorry to pick on you. You mentioned the costs of retrofitting versus putting it in at the beginning but there are also societal costs in not doing it, so there are economic and societal costs. But what are the benefits of putting it in purely economically, and societally, in much more inclusive design?
I will turn to all the panellists to ask this: maybe Dinah can speak of the Earls Court development, and Councillor Bruce could report from Glasgow and wider Scotland. But fundamentally that is still a cost, and if you are looking through a lens of new towns, who should be the people who ultimately pay for this? I do not know where to go. Let me start with Amanprit, if I may, because you mentioned the cost first.
Amanprit Arnold: Who should be paying for inclusive design from the beginning goes back to whoever is commissioning the project with the client. As long as you are really clear in the brief, it really should not be a cost to other people, but to whoever is funding new towns. It is that sort of thinking approach to embed in the design at the beginning, I would say.
You could also be innovative and try to speak to other departments, such as the Department for Education: look at its spending costs and its brief when it is designing special education needs schools; or the healthcare department as well, when it is designing hospitals. Have a look at what is in its brief and think how you can really bring that into new towns. I do not really see much evidence for a whole new area just designed inclusively for those with disabilities; it is pockets.
Q57 The Chair: I suppose the other question related to that is unlocking the economic benefits of groups that are perhaps marginalised as well. So actually from my point of view it is not just a cost; it is also a wider benefit as well, perhaps economically.
Councillor Holly Bruce: I would agree with that. Women having mobility within cities, towns and new places is really good for the economy: it means that they can be more mobile, they dwell and spend more time in places. If you are out caring for a child in a public park, for instance, and there are no public toilets available or there is not enough adequate lighting, you are not going to spend your time there longer to maybe go to that café or spend money elsewhere.
But in terms of the policy and local government perspectives of your question, Amanprit is right about the brief situation. One thing we are doing in Glasgow is starting the process of embedding it at the procurement stage, ensuring that when you are procuring for infrastructure for, say, play park equipment, it says in the brief that you must do this through a gendered lens, or it must satisfy gendered-lens thinking.
As well as that, you have the planning application process and the way that works. I know it is slightly different in England than it is in Scotland, so forgive me if I make some errors there. But in terms of Scotland, when you submit your application to the council for an interest at the pre-application stage, we are looking at reforming that process to ensure that women are consulted at the earliest stage of design. It is not an afterthought, an add-on or a retrofit; it is done right at the beginning, before the plans have even been created. So if you are able to satisfy the council—or whoever is giving the planning permission—that you have consulted women at that pre-application phase and here is your evidence, that helps with things down the line so there are no retrofitting, amending or repairing costs down the line.
Amanprit Arnold: Just to go back to your point when you were talking about the economic cost, I would just like to flag the recent update to the purple pound. The purple pound shows the combined spending power of disabled people and their households and in the UK it is £446 billion, which is 30% higher than five years ago. That shows the missed economic opportunity of disabled people because of inaccessible places and spaces where they cannot shop, eat out or go to events to support the local economy. Hopefully I have answered that specific point.
Councillor Holly Bruce: I am going to quickly come in, and this might seem morbid, just on the cost on human life. A lot of women tend to feel very isolated in their homes and are scared for their safety walking about the streets at night or getting from A to B. If we are able to build cities that are more accessible, have the perception of safety and women want to be in them and thrive in them, that will increase money and GDP, but it will also mean that there might not be an end of a life.
That really needs to be thought about here as well because, knowing the amount of violence against women and girls—murders, rapes and assaults—that happen in public spaces, I am sure you all can agree it is not good enough. We need to try to have infrastructure that at least starts to change the culture in that conversation.
Dinah Bornat: I want to give an example of a project that I have been working on for four years now, which is the Earls Court development in west London. If you do not know about it I am sure you will more and more because it is the largest master plan and regeneration project in London at the moment. It is 44 acres of the former exhibition site that has been empty for a number of years. The plan is to deliver 4,000 homes, 12,000 jobs and 20 acres of public realm.
I am an independent consultant, if you like, so I do not work for the Earls Court Development Company—ECDC—but I wanted to get some words from them so that I could explain from their perspective. They said, “From the outset at Earls Court we sought to ensure we focused on inclusion throughout our consultation, giving a platform to those who are usually excluded from the process and enabling a range of voices to be heard”. That is the private sector speaking directly. As I said, four years ago we began working with ECDC to set up what is called the Public Realm Inclusivity Panel, the PRIP, within a much wider local community engagement programme across a whole range of issues that matter to the community. The PRIP is a group of 15 local people ranging from 14 years up to 80+, drawn from youth clubs, older people’s groups and disability groups in both the boroughs that the site sits on: the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
You talked about cost, and just one week ago one of our panel members spoke in support of the application to the planning committee at Hammersmith and Fulham where it received unanimous approval. That is significant for our client and the consultant team because this project is edging towards £12 billion over the next 20 years, so I would actually put it the other way round. The benefits have been enormous in working this way, and it has been transformational. She herself described growing up on the PRIP, as she was 14 when she started with us and she is now 18 and at university. That experience has been hugely important to her: she can talk about disability and about old age because she has been working with people with different needs to hers. She is also a politics student, but when she walks around the local area she thinks about the built environment differently, through other people’s eyes. She thinks about whether wheelchairs can get up kerbs and stuff. That is a young person who is taking that experience into her work, and that is incredible. She explained to the committee how she feels her voice has been heard within her own community, and we have learned from that through discussions at the sessions and the way we run the sessions, which are really wide-ranging; we talk about gender inclusivity, disability and being a teenager in the public space. It has also been heard by the development team and the client, who have designed and adapted the proposals in response to what they have heard.
My client also said, “It isn’t enough to just aim for diversity; many people feel excluded for a range of reasons”. Amanprit makes a really good point about different times of the day and different times of your life, which inevitably means that those who are more confident about the process are disproportionately represented. The PRIP equipped a group of people with the skills to get involved in genuine co-design and critique our application. It sat within broader outreach and engagement, bringing a lot of people from different demographics into the process, working beyond the red line boundary. The last point that she made was, “Listen, engage and be open to dialogue, and the outcomes can be genuinely transformational”.
I have found the project transformational in the way that I practise, on this and the other projects I work on, and that has been the case for the rest of the team too. They have been able to take what they have learned, and as well as working within the project they can change the way they work on other projects.
Because ECDC wants to share some of this approach beyond the project, we have created an inclusive safety toolkit together with this panel, which has been used by industry and beyond. That is what I mean by social innovation, and my optimism is that the new towns should embrace this way of working. Everyone involved on the team at ECDC, and other people beyond—like in the GLA—say that this intergenerational approach where everybody comes together, hears from their community and the net is cast wide should just be the standard now. But I worry that the outlier becomes, if you like, the exception that proves the norm, and that we must take projects like this, run with them and use them as blueprints.
Q58 Baroness Andrews: Thank you very much for concluding in the way you just have. Congratulations to each of you for what you are doing. I was going to ask you whether, on the basis of your experience, you were optimistic that things were changing, and the idea of inclusive design is becoming more normative in terms of procurement or development.
Dinah, you have given us an excellent example of co-design with all the people who are normally traditionally excluded being included and making the early decisions. Our other two panellists, Amanprit and Holly, are representing groups of people—mind you, women is a pretty large group—who, you could strongly argue, have traditionally been excluded.
In terms of the new towns there is a massive opportunity to get in at the ground floor. You concluded, Dinah, by essentially saying you want it scaled up, to be everywhere and not just a flagship—you want a whole fleet of this happening behind you. How can you three, for example, work more closely together to get in at the ground floor with the new towns, even if they are greenfield or extensions? The challenge for this committee is to find out how good practice can be universalised and made absolutely practical in terms of how the new towns are going to operate. Have you had any contacts so far? Do you know any of these places?
Dinah Bornat: I have to admit that although I have my fingers in lots of pies and I am quite well networked—I know plenty of people in Homes England and across the GLA, politicians, but also civil servants—most of the architecture sector, and we tend to be all over everything, does not have much involvement, if at all, with what is happening with the new towns. We are all waiting to see who is making what decisions.
Although there are things such as the National Planning Policy Framework that need to be really super clear around inclusivity, and I am really encouraged that the word inclusion is in the intentions behind it, it needs vision and leadership. It needs people saying, “This is what we mean, this is what it looks like, this is what the outcomes are”, and we need it to be just repeated again and again and again. If I had one wish it would be to become involved with Government and to be explaining what it is we mean at every stage, and how we can do all this work together. I honestly do not think it is about money: it is partly about leadership, but it is also making sure it goes through every level.
Baroness Andrews: Amanprit, where would you want the leadership to come from?
Amanprit Arnold: In my experience there are a few meaningful changes that I would ask policymakers to think about. First, you need to have an inclusive design framework: new towns should be able to outline their key commitments in order for the design team and the supply chain to follow. You may have a vision to say, “Our new towns are accessible and inclusive”, but you need to be more specific in what that looks like. Is it step-free? Is it more accessible homes? Is it more mobility-accessible hubs to help people move around their town? Is it more toilets?
I would like to refer to one example when it comes to leadership, and it is quite new. The Crown Estate and Grosvenor launched their Inclusive Spaces and Places report last year. In that report they have five commitments, and the first one is to “Listen and involve lived experience” to inform the design of building and spaces. The second one was to “Measure” accessibility levels to guide improvement. The third one was to “Communicate” and share clear, accessible information to help the users navigate spaces confidently. The fourth one is to “Exceed” minimum standards by embedding inclusive design in all new developments; and then to “Collaborate and educate” with the industry to promote inclusive design. Because they set those five principles, they are expecting businesses to follow those commitments through. For new towns, it would be good for you to outline exactly what your commitment looks like.
Secondly, you asked, “How do we work together?” I would recommend access panels. Dinah has already mentioned the Public Realm Inclusivity Panel. There is another example where accessibility and inclusion is really central to the planning process: the London Legacy Development Corporation, which is based in the Olympic Park where they hosted the Paralympic Games, set up a Built Environment Access Panel, or BEAP. That panel involved disabled and non-disabled people reviewing development projects at each stage, not only upskilling the authority and the client, but everybody; they are learning from that experience and they provide critical input into design briefs and test proposals.
I would also encourage you to work with national disability charities such as Sense, Scope, Royal National Institute of Blind People, Royal Association for Deaf People, and gender organisations or children’s organisations, in recruiting for those diverse experienced panel- members.
Thirdly, I would look at the RIBA Inclusive Design Overlay, which was launched two years ago. It is all very new, and there is more material around accessible design. That looks at planning for diversity from conception to completion, making sure the spaces are welcoming for all ages, abilities and backgrounds. When you apply this overlay it goes into every stage and sees it through, and it will make everybody feel valued and able to participate fully throughout their whole life.
Baroness Andrews: Holly, do you think your example can be universalised nationally?
Councillor Holly Bruce: Yes, and I was going to start off with that as well. My perspective is not coming from a brand new town or an extension of a new town, but I think some can be lifted and reshaped into what you are trying to do here with this task force. First, the policy that I have been pushing was the city development plan within Glasgow. You mentioned the national development plan and framework, and embedding a gendered lens into that framework from the start. What does that look like? It is consciously analysing each application and each design with a gender equality lens, and looking at how women navigate a city: what decisions do they make every day and how does that support or hinder women’s mobility? That is when the decision-making comes in. The policy that I am pushing in Glasgow—the city development plan—is a legal framework, so that makes it non-negotiable. Developers, architects, everyone who builds a built environment, has to do this in order for it to pass the planning committee process. So by embedding it at that stage you are ultimately placing it in law.
As well as that, I mentioned the planning application process and procurement, Dinah mentioned toolkits, and Amanprit mentioned overlays, which are so important for officers within local governments but also for designers. There are many around and it is upskilling and making those available to developers when they are planning and submitting applications to councils and areas.
Other things are equality impact assessments, or EIAs, that should legally be done on policies as a public sector equality duty but are often a rubber-stamp, tick-box exercise that do not do anything. We really need to look at how we do those and the evidence that has been provided. We need to use data better. One thing I noticed when I became a councillor was that the data that is gathered is not disaggregated by gender, or even looked into in terms of disability, race or LGBT. We really need to look critically at the data that we hold on consultations and surveys.
One thing that has been really exciting in Glasgow is that we have worked with Arup, which has written the Cities Alive report; you may be aware of it as an organisation. We commissioned it to come to the council and give gender competence training to all heads of service in every department within the council from parks to roads to social work, and that challenged the status quo thinking within the council and the day-to-day-ness of this. That could be used with the task force to ensure that everyone on the task force is gender-competence trained, ensuring that everyone you work with in terms of developers and designers are gender-competence trained and have access to these toolkits.
I want to go back to consultation. We have talked a lot about co-design, and it is so great to hear such positive feedback; that rarely happens. In councils a lot of people feel like their voices are never heard or not meaningfully and actively listened to, and then for change to happen if, say, a proposal is not fit for purpose. A person I would like to highlight who might be of interest to you is an academic called Dr May East, who has written a book called What if Women Designed the City? She worked in communities in Scotland, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Perth, and consulted meaningfully with women by taking them for walks in their communities. The women designed the route and were in charge of that consultation. They went for a walk in their neighbourhood and pointed out things that were strong about the neighbourhood, that they enjoyed and felt safe in, but they also pointed out things that were wrong and that needed to be repaired or re-looked at. That links to other things such as safety audits of places that cities such as Barcelona have looked into. That can obviously be done for areas that you are regenerating; maybe not for areas that you are building from scratch, but there is still history there that can be looked into.
Baroness Andrews: Because we are very short of time, could you send us the reference and any other references on things like that?
Councillor Holly Bruce: Absolutely, of course.
The Chair: That would be helpful, brilliant. Very quickly, Viscount Younger.
Q59 Viscount Younger of Leckie: Absolutely, and just to say it has been fascinating so far. I am following up on the question from Baroness Andrews actually, because what we have really heard, from nearly all of you anyway, was the need for looking at accessibility and inclusivity to take account of everybody’s needs. We all buy into that when we are focusing in on new towns. My question is actually for Holly. I have to say I am very struck by the important agenda that you are pushing, and the successes that you have had north of the border, which is great.
Would you recognise that there are lots of other groups that need to be taken account of, and therefore how does your agenda in terms of pushing gender geography interrelate or fit into the needs of all kinds of other groups? It could be disability groups, which we have been hearing about. It could be the question of young white males, where, as we know, there is a bit of an issue in many parts of the country. It is quite an important question because at the end of the day a new town has to be built taking account of everybody’s needs, including, if I may say, the women agenda.
Councillor Holly Bruce: Yes, I can answer that question. I feel like I have alluded to this earlier in the sense that designing cities, places and towns for women ultimately benefits absolutely everyone. There are five key themes that have come out of the research and the campaign that I have done. First, safety: as I mentioned, women face violence and harassment in public spaces and on public transport significantly more than men, and it is a problem that is pervasive globally. Secondly, accessibility, which overlaps with disability as well: we want to make our places more open for everyone. Thirdly, convenience: women often have to take many trips—trip-chaining is the term that is often used—in their city or town, and we want to make it easier for people to get around. Fourthly, affordability: women and people of all genders want to be able to afford to use the spaces that they interact with, so that really should not be hierarchical. Fifthly, isolation: we talk about young men and the male loneliness epidemic that we are seeing globally. Women too feel isolated in their homes because they cannot get about as they do not feel safe, so there is a shared interest there in building better community for everyone.
Groups coming together does not necessarily mean there is friction, but one example I will give is a project that I am leading on in Glasgow about having sensitive lighting solutions in a park so that women can utilise it in the winter months, in the evening for a run, or to commute. As a Scottish Green Party councillor I am very much for the environment and do not want to see our biodiversity depleting over the many years that we have left on this planet. But one thing that came up was that lighting can be impactful on biodiversity, so we had to think creatively on how to solve that. There is now a route designed for that park that avoids areas that would impact that biodiversity—mostly bats—but women will actively use in their day-to-day lives. That whole route is now going to be lit up in the park by solar-powered lighting, which will mean that women can commute and run, but the biodiversity in that park will not be impacted. That is a good example of showing that, yes, there can be friction, but there are always going to be ways in which we can live harmoniously together.
Q60 Lord Cameron of Dillington: To some extent, my question has already been asked and very well answered. But perhaps bearing down on more of the detailed practicalities, how do you design interventions for special needs groups into new towns when the future children are yet to be born, the future aged are still probably middle aged, and the future infirm are still quite healthy, particularly when the local population is not local as yet? Bear in mind that some new towns will be in green and pleasant land, in a new landscape, while others will be add-ons to places that in themselves may not currently be ideal as communities. They may not have all the benefits that you might want. We have asked in turn, but, Holly, you are in the middle; you could start. Which women do you ask to get the ideal design for your local locality? Or are the answers just general, as you have already explained?
Councillor Holly Bruce: We need to ask all women. Earlier, I mentioned that it is important to have consultation from the outset. In terms of real-life examples, I have a list here that you will probably go into in further research. The first thing is play parks that are built for girls. We need to consult girls and teenagers on how to build play parks that they want to use and there is a great group called Make Space for Girls; I am sure Dinah has heard of them.
We need pedestrianisation to make our towns and cities better for mobility, walkability and cycling so people will be more mobile and frequent a place more often.
We need better street and parks lighting. As I have already mentioned, this will help women feel safer in areas so they will spend time there.
Women also want integrated and safe public transport and active travel. A lot of violence and assault happens on public transport. We need to make sure that transport is integrated and easy to use.
We need childcare provision embedded into housing schemes; we see that happening a lot in Vienna. There is a project in Edinburgh whereby an intergenerational designed home has 27 older people living in a new development with childcare provision on site, which is great for health and for the developmental outcomes of both children and older people.
We need simple things like statues and street names dedicated to women so they can see themselves in their communities. In Glasgow, we are commissioning an artwork of a breastfeeding woman in the centre of town. There is not enough representation of women in public space.
Earlier, we mentioned public toilet provision. Let me tell you: this has been the great unifier of all people, genders and every single person on this planet because we all need to use the toilet every day. It is a public health right. It is about social inclusion, and I truly think it is the missing link in our cities: we will spend more money in areas where there is access to a public toilet and we will be less isolated if we can use a toilet. I am pleased to say that in Glasgow we have the first ever public toilet strategy that has them free at the point of use. I am sure you have all at one time tried to use a public toilet that has been expensive. Changing places and toilets need to be accessible, so that we can change adults and children. It is about making sure there are enough sanitary products for women. The list goes on and on and on, but having public toilets that are accessible, convenient and safe is a gamechanger.
Dinah Bornat: As an architect, design is something we think about a lot. I have a few examples here which I hope will help illustrate the design point. We have worked with communities that have helped to unlock some issues, but this is an historic example. I took a walk about a year ago through Hampstead Garden Suburb. I do not know if anyone has been there, but it is a delightful place to go to think about the history of good design. I walk through residential suburbs an awful lot for my job because I like to look in the ways that my systems approach has taught me.
We took a turn down a side street, and I was intrigued as to its different quality. It was off the main road. It was a smaller-scale, inviting, convivial space. You could see how the front gardens were planted and how residents had put out tables and chairs. As we stood there, an older couple, a wife and her husband, came walking up the street. We started to talk to her and she explained to us that she was showing her husband the place where she grew up. We asked her what it was like when she was a child, and she said, “It was wonderful. We played out all the time, me and my friends, and went to school together”. I asked her, “What do you think has changed?” She said, “Well, one thing that has really changed is the height of the hedges. When I was a child here, there were strong rules about the hedges not being over three feet six inches”, which is about one metre. She was right. When I came home I looked it up and originally, those were the rules for leaseholders: front hedges should be kept at a maximum of three feet six inches. I looked at today’s rules, and they have changed. They now say, “the Trust usually interprets compliance with the covenants in the Scheme of Management as a hedge being trimmed at the side and top irrespective of height”. When you walk around Hampstead Garden Suburb now, the hedges are seven or eight feet high.
What does that mean? It is a really subtle change. Along with the streets full of cars moving fast through the suburb, if you are a child, it means you cannot go outside and play. If you are an older person and you are feeling rather lonely, you cannot wave to your neighbours. To add another personal story, my parents recently moved from a leafy north London house to the Olympic Park, which Amanprit just talked about. I hope they do not mind me talking about them; they are probably watching me today because they are very loyal. They are in their 80s. It was not an easy move because they recognised that they needed somewhere that was accessible. I took them on a walk through the Olympic Park that had been designed with the Built Environment Access Panel and as a child-friendly place. I said, “Look, there are spaces here where you can be in nature in minutes”. In fact, what is really interesting is they come out of their front door, and right in front of them is a playground with no fences around it because there are no cars. It means that they know all their neighbours, which is useful for the moments they have needed to call on them. I am not very far away, but I am not close enough to be able to pad out in my socks and help my mum turn off the smoke alarm when it sounds and my dad is not there. But they have quickly started to feel part of that community.
When we think about new places, we like to go back to historic examples, but it depends on what we take from them. I like to remind myself that Hampstead Gardens Suburb was designed with this idea of neighbourliness. That allows us to create communities where women can feel supported by their neighbours. For our Family Voices Toolkit, we looked at affordable housing, talked to women with very young children and found that isolation comes out of quite a lot of standard design car-centred developments, which mean you are trapped indoors with your children. As one mum said to us, “I just would like five minutes of time to have a coffee and if they could be playing outside with their friends, that would transform my life”. I said, “Can you see how this development is laid out?” We were in Ireland at the time. The car is in front of the house; then there is the road; and then there is the playground. I said, “What would you rather have in front of the house, your car or your child?” I had not even finished the sentence, and she said, “My child”. We have to stop and think about those small experiences and the subtle changes when the boundary heights change.
I love to come home and see it as a place of retreat, but that might not always be the case in my life. We designed a very typical out-of-town small settlement with homes around a garden and the housing association, Peabody, asked us to evaluate why the scheme is so successful. They have low levels of complaints. It is because the neighbours know each other, particularly the mums but also the dads, because they support each other and have time to be able to get on with their lives while their children play out.
You are absolutely right: it is about playgrounds, but it is more about the very strategic way that we lay out these spaces so that the car is not the most important object. I cannot think of a simpler way of thinking about new towns than explaining that we are the most important people, and our children and the more vulnerable are the most important things. Obviously, the car still needs to exist and we need it for getting to work and for other situations, but we have to start moving it out of the way.
I listened to one of your recent panel meetings. My parents talk an awful lot about the need for the shops around the corner to provide for them; that is their daily life. They are not going to jump into their car and drive to the out-of-town shopping centre. If you need to do that, we have to think strategically about how we lay these developments out because I feel very strongly that business as usual is designing in loneliness, obesity and screen usage, and we have to stop doing that.
Amanprit Arnold: We talk about the removal of cars and encouraging biking in the city, but we also need to consider the use of mobility aids and create spaces and wider pathways to enable people to travel, including the visually impaired. Going back to Holly’s public strategy, I was going to say exactly the same thing: we need a whole toilet strategy. I refer to places like Westfield shopping centre, where you have clear signage to show you where you are going; there are sensory spaces for neurodiverse individuals as well and there is a multi-faith room. That is a good example of how a whole shopping centre has applied these ideas which could also apply to new towns. When you think about inclusive play, make sure you design accessible, disability-friendly equipment as well because it is also about the parents’ and carers’ mental well-being which allows them to leave their homes.
The last thing I want to say is that disabled people feel more connected to the world through technology and online devices, so I would think about incorporating that in the design of new towns in future. One example is NaviLens, which is an app that audio-describes your environment wherever you go. There are the BSL virtual relay services that help people communicate with society through an interpreter who is available live on demand. There is also the Sociability app, which has a map of wheelchair-friendly places. So do not be afraid to use technology rather than just focusing purely on design.
Councillor Holly Bruce: To come back on that point, designing for wheelchair use is also for prams, buggies and people who care for children. We need to consider that, especially on public transport. I know the Tube in London is a bit of a hard one to master, but we need to try. If we build new cities and towns, the transport networks need to be accessible. Train stations, bus networks, if there is a Tube link or a metro link, all need to consider accessibility.
Amanprit Arnold: Transport is probably ahead compared to the built environment, because you have TfL with its Independent Disability Advisory Group. As we see, the newer transport infrastructure, such as the Elizabeth line, is far more accessible than the older Victoria line. You can even refer to Heathrow Airport, which is almost a little city of its own. There is clear signage showing you where to go. You have staff provision so you can experience the place in the same way as would a non-disabled person.
Q61 Baroness Andrews: You are answering our questions faster than we can ask them. I am going to reflect on a few things. One is the universality of what you are talking about: the things that you recommend help everybody; they help specific groups, but ultimately, they help the healthy, integrated community. You have talked about integration, what do we do with cars, transport systems and roads stuck in front of houses when we would rather have playgrounds.
The other thing is the general use of space, which we have to organise now for our children. Growing up in industrial south Wales, I played in a terraced street, at an angle of about 45 degrees, in a matriarchal community. Women were not excluded; they ran things. Another reflection is: how can we identify the best of what made our organic communities work? Some were designed; some grew naturally, like the English village, where everybody, including what was then called the village idiot, had their rightful place. In a way, it is about looking back in order to frame the future.
Dinah Bornat: Even in the present, there are some very successful existing—
Baroness Andrews: I take the point entirely about there not being enough toilets. When I was a Minister in the environment department, I was responsible for a national toilet strategy, so I take the matter very seriously. That somehow seems to have vanished out of the national framework for policy-making, but actually it is a public health issue. There are all sorts of issues, in fact. Having said all that, we are looking for ways to do things so that we can say, at least to the task force contacts we have, “This is what works, and it can be scaled up. But you need more agency here, and you need to talk to these people and get them together”.
Everybody recommends design review, which is an old idea, but what role could design review panels take on? When are they best established? How are they best engaged with? In relation to the thinking that is now going on about how to get the new towns off the ground, what would be your specific recommendation and the role that you would like to play? If you could keep it brief, please, that would be great.
Dinah Bornat: I am a design review panel member—I am currently active in the London boroughs of Hounslow, Harrow and Brent—and I find them to be very useful tools. I would suggest having design review panels within all those new towns. It is really obvious but in my sector, or my industry, I often see a series of large- to small-scale presentations in design reviews. We start with a historic layout, move through to the current plan, and then explain pedestrian movement, cycling and cars. Usually, I sit there and I say, “How does a child get to school, and how do they play?” Children do not move like pedestrians. In terms of a pedestrian, we think about a moving adult, usually standing like the pedestrian crossing sign. But we do not think about it from a narrative perspective. I often say to the presenters, “Tell me how X type of person is going to move through this space”. It might seem like a really small thing, but when you ask a designer or a developer to present a scheme from the perspective of the people who are going to live there, they are often a bit challenged. It is a really small way of putting ourselves in the plan.
At a design review, which should happen very early on, you might engage with a community that lives five or 10 miles away and ask, “How do you get around? Where are you visiting? Where are you going to?” You have an expert adviser here who can talk about setting up design codes to be reviewed by panels. At a very strategic level, that would be ideal. You can talk with local people about movement, but you need to have the right conversations because perhaps we have gone down a rather stylistic approach to design review and talking to communities when we should be thinking beyond planning.
We have a highly developed engagement approach in the UK, which is maybe not always done brilliantly but compared to the continent, where I often go to speak and work, it is really quite sophisticated. The Earls Court Development Company has done something that is completely world-leading, not just in the UK but globally. The reason for that is our development system and the fact that the private sector has to take the risk. It is not the same on the continent, where big municipal plans are agreed by local authorities. To be completely honest, high-level thinking about gender planning—often from very sustainable principles—is rolled out without talking to people. Vienna is a great example of that. We could work with what we do well but think beyond planning.
Baroness Andrews: Can I just stop you? What you just said about the development corporation and the model that it offers is really interesting. You say the private sector has a lot more capacity for social innovation than sometimes we give it credit for. In these new towns, which will be run by development corporations, we should challenge the private sector to tell us what their highest ambitions are for those inclusive designs that you are talking about. But that is very optimistic. Shall we move on to Holly?
Councillor Holly Bruce: Thank you so much, and thank you for your remarks at the beginning; I feel like you should be sitting here. You are very much singing from the same hymn sheet. To the panel question, it is really important. I mentioned Dr May East’s work earlier and how she has helped to repair and design areas. Those panels are not a talking shop; they have real, meaningful, tangible actions that change the look and feel of cities. So that consultation is hugely important.
In terms of the three types of development in standalone settlements, we have talked about car-dominant culture. In terms of my experience living in Glasgow, a lot of satellite towns have sprung up over the years in the 1970s and 1980s around the city, and they are very car-dominant places that can be very isolating with no places for belonging. We have touched upon a lot today, but we have not talked about libraries and community centres that are often the heartbeat of a lot of communities. We need to make sure that they are not just square, uninspiring boxes that the community does not want or need. We need to think about places for belonging, which is important for community cohesion and integration.
There is a beautiful building that sits within my ward called Langside Hall, which was removed brick by brick from the city centre to the south side of Glasgow in the early 19th century. It is a beautiful heritage building, but the cost of upkeep has meant it has been sitting shut for 10 years. Thankfully, there is a change in the air and we have managed to secure some funding. But I have spoken to many people on the doors and in the community that say they need a place that is free to use, warm, and somewhere they can take their children or somewhere to host a karaoke night or anything like that.
Baroness Janke: They can get help with using computers.
Councillor Holly Bruce: Yes, it can be multifaceted. The opportunities that those places can provide are endless. In terms of urban extensions, that is another one where transport links and connectivity are super important. Again, Glasgow is a classic example where, in the north of the city, there are communities that are completely shut off because there is no rail network. The bus services were not profitable enough so there is no bus service to take you into the centre of town. We need to think about transport links with the extensions.
Regeneration is another point of interest that I can share from a Glasgow perspective. There was an area—you may be familiar with it—called the Gorbals that had lots of tenement housing. It was completely bulldozed, and later a new community sprung up there. It was considered slum housing at the time but I would challenge that now. We should be looking at repairing our cities. If there are viable buildings, we should preserve and retrofit them as much as we can. A lot of carbon is emitted when bulldozing buildings that are fit for purpose but just cost a bit more to re-retrofit.
Another example of regeneration in Glasgow is the push to create the city centre as a place to live—not just to shop—frequent and spend time in. There are good examples of development happening within shopping centres that are redesigned to be multi-use and for housing. You mentioned a great example of a shopping centre; they can be for housing, office space and shopping as well.
Baroness Andrews: That is fine. I am going to stop you there.
Councillor Holly Bruce: Yes, sorry. I could go on and on.
Baroness Andrews: That is fine but let us turn to Amanprit.
Amanprit Arnold: All new development—whether it is a settlement or urban regeneration—should follow an inclusive design framework, which I mentioned earlier, that sets the tone and expectation for accessible new towns. To help with that, I recommend the role of a dedicated leadership chief accessibility officer, whether in a development corporation or Homes England, who would champion inclusive design from a strategic level but also make sure that it is implemented into projects throughout different stages. They could also oversee the access panels because the danger is that inclusive design frameworks get diluted as you begin to work with several teams and deprioritise accessibility through a lack of expertise and knowledge. It is quite common practice in larger technology firms to have accessibility roles. We should consider that in the development of new towns.
Q62 Baroness Janke: My question is to do with barriers to challenging provision for marginalised groups; you have talked a little about those. There are existing examples of good provision, and maybe some challenges are to do with attitudes as well as physical barriers. Dinah said her parents did not need cars; they had everything they want on the spot, but I know lots of elderly people in their 80s that depend very strongly on cars. So although we need to get cars out of streets where it is dangerous for children, there needs to be the recognition that, for older people, a car can be a very liberating thing.
In terms of children’s playgrounds, they do not need to have lots of equipment. Certainly in my area—I live in Bristol and have had experience of playing out as well—there are squares. It is a very green city. Children actually welcome the more wild environment rather than very intrusive playgrounds with brightly coloured bits of equipment. In fact, the local residents in my area, mums included, came out to protest against sticking something like that in one of the old squares; they much preferred using the existing facilities. I can see that there are sometimes conflicts between the interests of different people and between certain facilities, such as transport and open space, and having the right facilities for pushchairs, prams and wheelchairs. How do you see those particular conflicts in terms of the new towns and barriers?
Dinah Bornat: That is a really good question. It has ever been thus because if we recall our childhoods, there was the grumpy neighbour who was not happy with us playing out and making lots of noise. They will always be there. Recently, I have seen projects where things went wrong, where children cannot play out, or communities are angry with the way they play out. When I got involved, I realised that happened because it was not thought through from the beginning. So we have to unpick all these issues.
You are absolutely right: cars are still essential for people to get around. But it is not so much about getting rid of them; it is about putting them in the right place and having conversations with people about what is important. In the communities where we work, we go back to mapping, where we talk to people and ask, “What works in your area? Which spaces do you enjoy the most?” Things are incredibly nuanced when you start asking the right questions. A playground has become a place where you go with your children, often to meet other parents and for your child to experience the equipment and so on. But the kind of play that you have closer to home does not need equipment most of the time. You are looking for play with your friends and your neighbours, and it might be quite low key. It might be a bench or just a swing. It might not be anything at all. Successful places that we have designed and analysed often have no equipment at all, and they are quite natural; or they might just be tarmac, which I know is not great from a biodiversity perspective. But we need to talk to people about these things, have these conversations early and think about layouts and use good research to see what works.
The barriers are slightly different; a lot is tied up with land value. Unless we are clear with developers who might buy parcels of land on big sites and not fully understand what we are doing, it will be business as usual. You will get the lowest common denominator, which is the Highways Agency tick and no challenge of anything being done differently. If we are to build for the next 150 years, we have to put all this in the mix and take communities on a journey together.
I speak to local authorities and housing associations where they are quite clear that children playing out is not antisocial behaviour but people still complain about it. We must have the exact conversations that you just raised but at the beginning before things start to go wrong.
Baroness Janke: I would also highlight the importance of stewardship. We all agree about toilets. I used to be a councillor, and when there are cuts to the council budget, the first thing they want to do is to cut the toilets because it is an expensive facility. If we are to have good toilet provision and ones that are maintained and kept well, that really needs to be part of the stewardship plan for the future. Do you have any thoughts about stewardship and making sure that these places do not degenerate, so that open spaces do not suddenly become places where people dump rubbish, and streets turn into places that are unfriendly to children for other reasons because they are not well looked after and so on? Do you have any thoughts about that?
Councillor Holly Bruce: I will quickly come in. You have hit the nail on the head in terms of what happens after the new towns are built; maintenance is such a big issue. As you said, even though it is a public health right, a lot of toilets can be cut. We need to look at designing our places with a lot more care and build in more longevity. It is definitely not an add-on having a public toilet in a place.
To your point about play and how it looks, I would love to see it expanded not just for children but for adults too. A lot of our lives, we are far too serious as adults. We need to embrace play with our children as adults too. That could be small interventions as well. You said it does not cost a lot of money for people to dwell in and have nice public spaces. To use the example I gave earlier of Langside Hall: it is shut, but there is a public square that is used by so many different members of the community. There are nice benches where you can speak to each other. Urban skating happens informally on the pedestrian side. You have a market for food and drink at the weekends. Children hang out there—there is a school just down the road—and it is a very bright place. We have to think about these things. These interventions do not have to cost the earth. We need to think creatively and see examples from elsewhere too.
Amanprit Arnold: Going back to your point about the conflict of tensions and interests between different groups, that also happens in the disability community. Lots of disabilities conflict with others. For example, I need bright light to be able to lipread, see where I am going and communicate with people, but that may clash with a neurodiverse family or an individual who does not like bright lighting. The GLA ran a scheme on safety in public spaces for women and girls and gender-diverse, where we had these principles and tested them on 10 live projects throughout London. One involved a co-clienting project with a group of teenage girls. With an access panel, they could co-create the brief. Together, they can come to a consensus on what should be considered and understand the trade-offs. It comes from a place of understanding and empathy, which is included in the brief right from the beginning, as opposed to seeing these issues happen much later.
Q63 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Can I take you back a little to the post-war period of the new towns? Which elements of new town development worked and which were failures? We need to learn from one and see if we can emulate the others. I suspect, particularly in terms of access for disabled people—I will ask Amanprit to answer this first—the record of the early new towns was fairly dismal, but I would like your view on whether you think that is so. Have we learned enough lessons from that with the new programme?
Amanprit Arnold: I do not have much expertise on looking back at how planning was done then for disabilities. Accessibility and inclusive design has only become a big topic in the last five years. As you say, it is not just about equalities impact assessments or meeting the requirements of the Building Safety Act; it is so much more than that. It is quite hard to find examples of inclusive design whether on a small or big scale. The only best practice example of an urban extension that I can give is the Olympic Park, but that was also designed with the Paralympic Games in mind. I would be quite happy to go back, have a look and provide a written response to that question.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: That would be really helpful, thank you. Holly, do you think groups that you are so passionate about today had a decent deal in the earlier new towns?
Councillor Holly Bruce: No, unfortunately they did not.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: I thought that was going to be your answer.
Councillor Holly Bruce: Back then, women were not in a lot of lines of work. They were the caregivers at home, and cities and towns were built for men to commute to work. In terms of building towns and cities, a common theme today is not isolating people in their communities. Mobility and movement, whether that is walking, cycling, driving, dwelling, need to be considered. We need to be mobile in our communities because ultimately that helps with employment and spending money in the local economy. It helps with belonging and community cohesion and educational opportunities. Mobility really is social infrastructure, and it should be considered that way.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: It should not be car-dependent. Would you agree?
Councillor Holly Bruce: No, it absolutely should not be.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Again, that is a lesson to be learned from the 1950s. Dinah, do you have a view on that?
Dinah Bornat: I have a view on the post-war new towns. We have to be really careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Post-war development takes a lot of blame, which is not helpful. If you speak to communities that live in any of these places, they will tell you what works. If we do not listen and find out what works, we will never repeat the things that work and will start again from scratch. Interestingly—there needs to be an exhibition on this—a lot of women were involved in landscape policies around the time, and so there was an active emphasis on making places where women would want to have children. Whether or not that was correctly rolled out, there were forward-thinking ideas about increasing car ownership, which happened, but also a separation of pedestrians and children playing from cars because they recognised that they were not safe.
Lots of interesting things happened. We could go back to the adventure playground movement and Lady Allen of Hurtwood, which is fascinating. Lots of things that went wrong. Sally Watson from the University of Newcastle did an interesting PhD on the Byker estate looking at how tenant groups worked in good and bad ways as the development was rolled out. We have to be very careful not to sweep it all to one side. Developments were quite monocultural; we have different family structures now. New towns ought to borrow all the best bits from Hampstead Gardens Suburb and from the developments after the war. Communities can tell us all the bits that work. I can give you a copy of my book, if you like, which explains that there is something underlying the way in which we design communities that goes back to this idea of the space between buildings and how important it is to get it right.
Amanprit Arnold: One thing that just came to mind is the lack of accessible homes. We place a lot of weight on sustainability and affordability, but not much is said about accessible homes. Habitare is a specialist housing association provider that said that developers are not meeting the minimum requirement of 10% of wheelchair accessible M4(3) homes. People probably think, “Oh, it is purely for wheelchairs”, but these homes have to be adaptable, flexible and fit for purpose for future use. I would encourage co-design with specialist housing providers in new towns as well.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: There are lots of disabilities which are not as obvious as people in wheelchairs.
Amanprit Arnold: Yes, but it is a regulatory requirement that 10% of new developments must be wheelchair accessible M4(3). We are not meeting that standard, so that needs to be looked at.
Q64 Viscount Younger of Leckie: It is quite apt that we come to this final area and try to do a wrap-up on what type of new town might be best for accessibility and inclusivity. You have touched on this before, but I am trying to do a more of a deep dive. We have heard that retrofitting is hugely expensive. On the other hand, you have the question of building new towns from scratch, which has its advantages, particularly in terms of maintenance, as Holly mentioned. You probably have lower maintenance costs because, funnily enough, you think about that as you build it. Bearing in mind the groups that we have talked about and focused on today, what is your opinion and advice in terms of what type of new town is going to be more suitable for the groups that we are talking about? I might start with Amanprit. By the way, you spoke very well on technology. That was very helpful. But let us move on from that.
Amanprit Arnold: For new settlements and urban extensions, it is a blank slate that provides an opportunity for the UK to showcase how to design an accessible and inclusive town from the ground up, with clear visions and statements that make the whole place culturally and socially accepting for disabled people. However, if these settlements are poorly connected to larger urban areas, it limits access to health services and jobs. Regeneration and gentrification projects provide an opportunity to highlight what is inaccessible through an accessibility audit to upgrade the current infrastructure. However, you might be limited by the streetscape, the building fabric and the land value possibly making accessible housing unaffordable. On the other hand, because of its density, it could make amenities quite accessible for disabled people because they are quite close together.
Councillor Holly Bruce: I might have answered this pre-emptively earlier, but I want to look at regeneration, as you mentioned the cost of that. There is also the cost of the environment and the amount of carbon emissions that it takes to bulldoze down certain buildings. I am not aware of the specific regeneration towns that we are looking at. In Glasgow, we have a lot of historic and listed buildings that are beautiful and hold a lot of history. There tends to be a reluctance to preserve them due to cost. We need to have a hard conversation about that in terms of cost versus environment versus history. I would urge the task force to look at repairing rather than bulldozing them.
In terms of urban extensions, you mentioned links and connectivity, which are important to have. In Glasgow, for instance, we have the city but also the region. We know that the region spend a lot of time in Glasgow; they either work there, use the local gyms, or go and have recreational fun times in the city centre. We need to make sure there are links to allow them to use public transport. We want to try to not have a reliance on cars. So transport links are so important with urban extensions to ensure that it is safer, cheaper, less stress on the road with less traffic and just a bit more connected to other areas. I have already spoken at length about the standalone settlements and the feeling of places for belonging. That is super important.
Dinah Bornat: I worry sometimes that when we do not think from an intergenerational or a completely inclusive perspective and we think about types of people and pockets, we get it wrong straight away. Children grow up so fast. A baby is going to be a teenager in 10 or so years, and that community will completely change as people get older. So if we are thinking about products and types of people in certain areas where they will live, they are not going to stay that type of person.
At the moment, London is experiencing a huge drop in numbers of children. I was speaking recently to the economy and skills committee of the GLA. There is a crisis: we do not have enough families in the capital. We have to think really fast. Affordability is the biggest reason, of course. We have to be able to attract and keep people as they change. You know when somewhere works because people will stay and hopefully adapt their homes. So I would urge us not to think of types of people because that is very much a sales perspective and we need to think beyond that.
The Chair: Thank you. Viscount Hanworth?
Viscount Hanworth: I am afraid it is almost 12.30, and I have to go.
The Chair: That is fine. I am afraid he has another meeting.
That is it. Genuinely, thank you very much for everything that you have given us this morning and into this afternoon; I really appreciate it. It has been a fascinating conversation and to hear your experience as well. If there are points you would like to follow up, please do, specifically with examples of where things have gone well but also where they have gone wrong and where there is room for improvement. But with that, thank you again. The meeting is closed.
