28
Examination of witnesses
Fiona MacDonald, Nicola Rochfort and Teresa Strachan.
Q12 The Chair: Good morning and welcome back to the Built Environment Committee here in the House of Lords. As everyone knows, we have started a new inquiry into younger people and their role in the built environment sector. Last week we had a brilliant session on education: the role of the education system and the national curriculum but also skills through to employment.
We are moving on slightly today and are going to talk about younger people and their engagement. Does it matter how you do it? What is the best way forward? We have three very good witnesses before us. Perhaps you could very briefly introduce yourselves. Let us start with Teresa. Good morning.
Teresa Strachan: Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. I have the privilege of being a chartered town planner, which I have been for almost 40 years, working mostly in the north and north-east of England. I am passionate about the role that planners have in engaging young people in the whole agenda around the environment and communities.
I have worked across the public sector, in private consultancy, with Planning Aid England, which is a charity and part of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and more latterly with students at Newcastle University, researching and teaching skills for working with young people on planning matters. In my responses I will probably make reference to that experience. I am not necessarily representing any of those previous bodies, although my views might align. I look forward to the discussion today.
Nicola Rochfort: Good morning, everyone. I head up community engagement and insights at Grosvenor Property UK. Grosvenor is a global property business that has been making and managing places for more than 340 years. We work predominantly in London’s West End and our really diverse property portfolio means that we wear many hats, be that developer, investor, partner or steward of these amazing places that we have an important role in. We really recognise the role that places can play in people’s lives, and I personally am very passionate about how engaging with those communities can ensure that there is a positive impact on the people who live or work in the places that we manage.
Five years ago we published our first engagement charter, which sets out how we as a business will engage meaningfully and inclusively. Within that charter, we had a call for inclusive and meaningful engagement with people of all ages and backgrounds. That acknowledged that young people are routinely left out of conversations about the future of their neighbourhoods despite making up a huge part of the population and having so much to offer that we can all learn from. We have developed various tools, approaches and recommendations for how others can engage meaningfully, and I look forward to reflecting and sharing some insights with you all today.
Fiona MacDonald: It is wonderful to be here. I am co-founder and co-director—with my business partner Matthew Springett—of a youth engagement and architecture organisation called MATT+FIONA. In the past 10 years we have engaged nearly 10,000 young people in place on over 80 different projects across the UK in very tangible ways that enable them to see their ideas become manifest.
I originally trained in architecture but my whole career has been spent enabling young people to be involved in shaping their built environment. You heard from Dr Jenny Russell last week; I worked at the Royal Institute of British Architects to establish the National Schools Programme 10 years ago. Some 14 years ago I supported Open City—the home of Open House London—to develop the Accelerate Outreach programme, which is still running today and has reached many hundreds of young people. Thank you for having me here today.
The Chair: Thank you again to you all for being with us. We have a series of questions to ask you about different areas. All I would ask is for everyone in the room—the committee members and I but also the witnesses—to just please keep your answers and questions as short as you possibly can. Do not be afraid if you do not know the answer. If you want to write to us with more information, you are more than welcome to. The first area is with Viscount Younger and Baroness Miller.
Q13 Viscount Younger of Leckie: Thank you very much for coming along today. I thought I would start proceedings with some big general questions, if I may. How important is it to engage with children and teenagers to gain meaningful feedback on what they think about the built environment, their own environment and any changes that might affect them where they live? What do we really learn from them?
Perhaps that is a big question, which I know requires a huge answer. Can you break down in your answers any differences between the different age groups? We are talking about children and teenagers, perhaps. Finally, perhaps you could highlight any surprises in terms of the answers that you get from the different age groups. I realise those are big questions, but I hope it helps to kick things off. Perhaps we could start with Teresa.
Teresa Strachan: It is incredibly important to engage with children and young people, including teenagers. It is actually very hard to measure what that importance is. This is a world where engagement conflicts with other types of business and activities and the metrics do not really support the outputs or the whole organisation and ethos of what we are doing.
When we have seen projects run with young people, the outputs and information that local authorities and developers are gathering in terms of how those young people use and experience their neighbourhoods cannot be gained from any other place. It will change even across the group, depending on the individuals you are talking to.
Younger children—perhaps because of their age—will not have that independence that teenagers have but they can still emphasise the importance of open space and views and a sense of feeling safe in a place and perhaps highlight some dangers of what they are experiencing. Working with some teenagers on various projects in the past with our students at Newcastle University, we have found that they are very in tune with places that they are barred from, or they do not have places to meet others, and again there is a feeling of perhaps not being as safe as they would like to be. There is a huge value in this data that you cannot gather from books. You have to talk to the young people who know their place best, perhaps without their parents and within a context that they feel safe.
In terms of unexpected outcomes, we have often found over the years that young people value place as much as adults do, if not more so. They can envision the future clearly and perhaps anticipate how they want to live there in the future. They are very life-affirming in terms of the importance of that place to us. As adults we often perceive young people as wanting change all the time, and young people perhaps just want things to feel nice and safe and accessible.
Nicola Rochfort: Your first question was around what we can learn from young adults. It is really important first to acknowledge that young adults are really keen to get involved. This is an audience that is ripe for engagement and really wants to be asked those questions. We ran some research a few years ago that highlighted that 89% of young adults had never been asked their opinion about the future of their neighbourhood, despite 82% wanting to be involved. This is a really missed opportunity. With some clear action and people being supported in engaging young adults, we can really move the dial, and we are ready to speak to young people who are really keen to get involved.
In terms of what we can learn and the real value of engagement—as with any consultation or conversation with communities—by understanding what makes a place tick, how people use and interact places and what that local need is, we can create better, more resilient places. There is so much value for businesses to make sure that these places are sustainable for the long term.
In our experience—I am sure Fiona and the others will agree—young people are very honest and open and will tell you how it is. That means that blind spots, issues and opportunities can really be surfaced very early, which again means better business. It means that you are identifying those problem spots before you have gone too far down the road and it is more costly to change or amend them. That creates smoother delivery and lower risk, and you end up with a better product as a result. There is so much there that really speaks to this being a bit of a no-brainer, to be honest.
You also asked about any differences between young people; for example, different age groups. As with any community, there is no one community; this is about the multitude and intersectionality of young people, whether that is around different age groups, ethnicities, backgrounds, socioeconomic status, et cetera. We should not see youth engagement as one size fits all; a multitude of approaches is still needed there for young people of different ages and backgrounds. That is important to acknowledge.
On the any surprises point—this builds on what Teresa was saying—in our experience of engaging young people there are often lots of similarities with what you hear from other parts of the population. They value similar things: safety, green space and feeling like you belong. These are not things that are totally out there and unachievable. Often young people just want to be heard and to make sure that their views are considered. They might not always be that different from what you have heard from other people in the population.
The final point on this surprises question—it is something that I have personally reflected on—is the value of young people being part of that conversation alongside other members of the community, not engaging in silos and having your youth engagement over here and your older population engagement over here. By bringing people together and having that conversation in the round, others can see those different perspectives in one conversation. It builds a much more cohesive process and surfaces other opportunities that you could work together on more collaboratively.
Fiona MacDonald: I fully endorse everything that has already been said. I would look at this value through three lenses: value to the organisations—the developers, the local authorities, those who are making decisions about the places where we live and work; the value to the children and young people themselves; and the value to the quality of the places that we are creating within the UK.
In terms of the value to developers and local authorities, our work with a wide range of developers—such as Latimer, part of Clarion Housing Association, Urban&Civic, and Grosvenor—is really that these developers are future-proofing. They are working with the next generation and thinking about long-term visions, which is a hugely salient approach to take, alongside unlocking that local insight and wisdom.
Through proactively reaching out to young people rather than waiting for them to come knocking or banging on your door, you build trust, which inevitably leads to not just smoother planning processes but swifter ones. People are often concerned that these processes will take longer than not engaging with children and young people; actually, it is completely the reverse. And incredible social impact and value can be generated for those young people through concurrently involving them in that placemaking.
We heard in last week’s session about the incredible learning that comes from young people engaging with the built environment: technical skills around problem-solving, creativity, thinking from first principles, presenting your work and ideas to a room full of people—moving off the screen and engaging with the world. Beyond that, there is huge value in the well-being that these projects generate. To Nicola’s point, young people will tell you things as they are. There is a sense of hope for young people, of making them feel listened to, inviting them in, and recognising that their lived experience matters and that they are researchers on the ground.
Another point that I will not talk about at length—it was brought up last week—is around widening participation. Through real, engaged projects in places where change is happening, young people fully understand what these different roles mean: those of the surveyor, the engineer, the architect and the contractor.
Another interesting one that has been coming up on projects is around engagement and attendance. From teachers’ perspectives, we know that attendance is one of the biggest challenges for a lot of schools right now and that attendance leads to attainment. We have never yet had an engagement project that has not consistently kept that same group of young people involved from start to finish, because they recognise that they are being listened to and the input that they are having is going to have a direct output. Coming to Teresa’s point, it is extremely challenging to measure impact on young people but that is one metric that we are interested in and are exploring more with Dr Gemma Moore and her team at UCL at the moment.
Finally, there is the value to wider society. We would argue that you get better-designed places and that is for a few key reasons. By listening to young people, they are looking at the value of space and place. They are not yet seeing place through the lenses of property and finance. When they are feeding back on what makes a good place what we need in terms of parks, open space, nature, schools and spaces for young people, they are speaking truth to power because it is not filtered through that sense of seeing the built environment purely as property.
On future-proofing, I was shocked to read in a recent report that came out in the Buildings & Cities journal that the average lifespan of a building in Europe is 65 years. Those buildings being demolished are not being demolished because they have come to the end of their material life but because they are seen as no longer relevant. We need to be thinking about our built environment in the long term.
Q14 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: That is all really positive. What I would like to know is how you make sure that the expectations that you might be raising in the young people when you are consulting them are actually achievable given how tight resources are.
Nicola Rochfort: I am happy to kick that off. A similar principle would apply when you are engaging communities of all ages. It is important to be transparent, open and really clear about what is and is not in the scope of influence and up for debate. There are various ways that you can do that. One is just being really clear in your communication about why something might already be predetermined. There might be planning requirements or constraints about what is possible in that building or in the operation of a public space, for example, but being open from the start about what is and is not on the table is a clear way to do that.
When you are engaging communities of any age, the benefit of starting early is important. That means that your scope of influence is much broader because you have not missed the opportunity and things are still up for debate and discussion with communities. One way that we have been working to achieve that at Grosvenor is by having conversations about a neighbourhood at a broader place level before discussing more at a portfolio or single property point of view.
You can really then surface what those broader priorities might be that are not just down to a single building unit or about an individual property that might be being redeveloped. That is where those broader ambitions that young people might have about their neighbourhoods can start to come to light, whether that is around somewhere that they want to feel safe or somewhere that they feel that young people belong specifically. That means that you can deliver on what they want to see come through.
Another tool and approach that we have found really useful when engaging young people is ensuring that there is something tangible that you can show them in the course of engaging with them. Everyone in the room will acknowledge how long some large-scale development programmes can be; they can be over 10 or 15 years. At that point the young person that you started engaging with at school is going to be off studying elsewhere and may have moved out of that part of town that you have been consulting with them on. Being able to show some quick wins, a meanwhile project or something that comes to light in the interim—before that large-scale development might have got planning or has been delivered—is really beneficial.
That is actually how Grosvenor worked with MATT+FIONA on a project in Mayfair called Grosvenor Square. We worked with the MATT+FIONA team to deliver a meanwhile seating installation, which came to light in the six to eight months that we were speaking to the young adults; whereas the Grosvenor Square redesign was actually delivered within several years. It was something that the young people could feel tangibly proud of and actually see come to fruition within a year of the programme, and that was really beneficial.
Teresa Strachan: This is commonly levelled at people who want to do engagement—about the cost of the programme and getting people to deliver. On reflection, I feel that this is a situation where cost should not necessarily even come into the equation. We are talking about children’s rights and the right to have a say in their environment. Unfortunately, the planning process has not been fully incorporated within the children’s rights agenda or vice versa.
Children’s rights came from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 and England is one of the few countries that has not incorporated the full set of children’s rights across the whole legislation. I feel very strongly that we not only have this lack of power at a higher level but the perceived cost of it might make it prohibitive. When we see the advantages of even the smallest engagement exercises—the buy-in at local level, the growth in confidence of those young people, and the skills that they are developing through it—it feels like cost does not really equate to what they are getting out of it.
With that in mind, we still have to justify it to the stakeholders—maybe planning officers or other organisations that want to run some engagement. On reflection, time is the most expensive factor in delivering, setting up, making sure that things are running smoothly and reflecting on how a programme has been progressing but also maybe having to review that process. The time factor is quite costly but there are ways we can be clever in maximising resources and perhaps minimising the cost if we are looking at that.
There are a lot of organisations doing other delivery through social services and schools and we have to team up across those different organisations. At the end of the day we are all saying the same thing. We want to hear about young people’s experience of their life, where the difficult areas are, where the opportunities are, and how that impacts the local community.
We have to build the capacity through training others that we are working with. It is nice to feel that you are the local expert but that is no good in the longer term. We have to get others, such as the students I have found working at Newcastle University, to develop those skills so that every time you are doing engagement, you are bringing in people to train them and build that workforce. It is also important to use the experts who are already working with young people, which is the same sort of idea as joining forces with other service deliverers.
Last week’s discussion was perhaps focused more on the curriculum but there are huge opportunities approaching with the review of the national curriculum, perhaps the reduction of the voting age to 16 and embedding democracy even at primary school level. The bigger framework is one of minimising cost through exploring opportunities to work with the framework that we already have.
Fiona MacDonald: I have one point on cost to do with social value frameworks. A lot of developers are already making huge commitments to social value, which is fantastic. What has certainly come as a surprise to me over many years of working in this field and is a real barrier and something that would make a huge difference if we could change it is our experience is that most social value frameworks grossly undervalue working with and engaging a school-age audience.
To give you an example, if we look at one of the most well-known and widely used social value frameworks, first, there is no clear line for this type of youth engagement within place to sit. The closest would be to improve skills and promote local skills and employment, and there is a line on local school and college visits supporting pupils. To calculate the associated social value with that line, you take the number of staff hours spent on the visit and multiply that by £16.53. A two-hour workshop with 34 children is valued at £33.86—less than £1 per head. If we compare that to doing something similar with adults, we can use the line, “Improve skills for disadvantaged people through providing an hour of support to someone unemployed” and apply the calculation of £105.58 per person per hour. The same two hours with 34 unemployed people gives a value of £7,179.44.
I am not saying for one moment that that is not valuable; it is and it should be valued in the thousands. I would say we are grossly undervaluing this work with young people if we are saying that working with adults has a value that is 212 times higher than that with children. We come up against this time and again when developers and local authorities want to work with us but they have a social value budget that is completely caged away from this work and cannot be spent on it.
Actually, it would be no additional cost to developers; they are having to make that expenditure anyway. Instead, it is taking really foresightful developers such as Grosvenor, Latimer and Bywater Properties, who think in much broader terms and are able to invest in this work. People taking it at face value would naturally be turned against it. If we could change that and shift these frameworks, that would unlock a huge amount of activity at all scales.
The Chair: I might come back to that at the end.
Baroness Andrews: I want to follow up on that extraordinary statistic. Of course, it is difficult to do the metrics because it is difficult to measure impacts on motivations for learning and outcomes anyway. You are in the middle of that very complicated debate, in a way. It is really important that effort is made to get there, particularly in relation to bottoming out the difference in impact, as you expressed it, financially, but also in terms of the curriculum and in-school impacts. You mentioned attendance as a metric that you can show and which might read across into attendance in school. Is any work being done on metrics that also links back to what schools can be thinking of, such as PSHE or whatever bit of the curriculum?
Fiona MacDonald: It is a question that is prime in our minds. We have just instigated work with Dr Gemma Moore—who undertakes research around participatory evaluation—at the recommendation of Bywater Properties, which is a developer and organisation co-founded by Lord Walker of Broxton. Bywater’s head of research, Joe Jack Williams, has been incredibly supportive and observant of the challenges at play.
Unfortunately, these are drops in the ocean. In 14 years—I realise that pales in comparison with some others around the table—being asked to demonstrate the impact to young people through empirical data-led research is almost impossible right now, particularly when you are doing the delivery. If there could be more research done into this, that would be huge.
The anecdotal evidence we have from teachers is huge. Time and again at the beginning of a workshop they will have said, “Watch out for that student or that student; they have behavioural challenges”. At the end of the workshop, they will be taking us to one side and saying, “We’ve never seen that student so engaged from start to finish”. They will be waiting at the end with questions. That really suggests—I know it got talked a lot about last week—that we need to be thinking about broader ways of teaching and learning that are kinaesthetic, haptic and appeal to a broad range of learners, rather than narrowing down to things that do not appeal to the increasing range of people who have neurodivergences and additional educational needs or are simply not academic in the traditional sense.
The Chair: I do not know whether anyone has anything else to add. I was going to suggest we move on, unless there is anything in particular you wish to say?
Nicola Rochfort: I would just like to build on the conversation we were having around cost, capability and capacity among organisations. We can probably all agree that people acknowledge that this is the right thing to do but there are a lot of examples of the benefits of youth engagement to businesses, society and places. One challenge that we were aware of several years ago is that there is often a bit of a knowledge gap in terms of how to actually deliver this. To the point and question that was raised, there is also a knowledge gap around how to do this in a way that is cost-effective and will easily get signed off and actually delivered by organisations, many of which have various budgetary challenges.
To respond to that knowledge gap and be able to deliver youth engagement in a meaningful way, we worked with experts at the TCPA, Sport England and ZCD Architects to develop a free, open-source youth engagement toolkit called Voice, Opportunity, Power. It has six session plans that can be followed and adapted to suit a placemaking project or even another form of engagement such as an event programme, which organisations can use to run a process with young people of all ages.
It provides that necessary guidance and almost hand-holding for organisations that recognise that this is the right thing to do but do not necessarily know where to start. It provides a response to that cost challenge around people not knowing how much to invest in this and where even to begin. It recommends working with experts, whether that be local youth organisations or schools that have the aptitude and availability to support this type of programme. It also demonstrates how much can be done by engaging early and weaving it into a pre-existing design programme or public consultation. It is something that I just wanted to reflect on when we are talking about cost challenges and people maybe not knowing where to begin or having the capacity to deliver youth engagement meaningfully.
The Chair: That touches very much on the next area to move on to, which is about the cost and is led by Baroness Janke and Viscount Hanworth.
Q15 Baroness Janke: We heard from witnesses last week that they had to use quite a lot of ingenuity and creativity to get children to have the skills to participate in these sorts of consultations. Given the difficulty and challenges with the national curriculum and other things they have to do in school, how do you judge the effectiveness of your own consultation but also in terms of the end result? Do these one-off, big projects that you do need much more bolstering in terms of the acquisition of skills and experience of young people to be able to participate in these sorts of projects that you undertake?
Nicola Rochfort: I am happy to start on that question. There are a number of different ways that we would measure whether an engagement has been effective or not. The first principle is being data-led and that starts from even just seeing the sample of communities that you are managing to engage with.
That was actually one of reasons that we started working with MATT+FIONA on our Grosvenor Square engagement. We could see early on from our consultation data that we were not hearing from enough young adults. We asked people to fill out a form and let us know how old they were, when they were joining events and when they were feeding back on early designs and concepts. We were hearing from something like 2% of young people who made up that local population. The data was not lying but we knew that we needed to make a concerted effort to hear from young people and change our tack and our approach.
That was why we launched the Mayfair Youth Forum with a group of 25 young adults from Westminster who studied or lived locally. We delivered an eight-month programme of dedicated engagement with that cohort to ensure that their views were considered as part of the redesign of Grosvenor Square in Mayfair. How did we know that that engagement was successful? There are a number of different ways that we ensured that it was meaningful and representative.
We worked with local youth experts to recruit those young adults who would actually join the cohort. Once we had a group of maybe 10 or so young people who were really keen and engaged, we then leaned on them to get their peers and friends along as well. Obviously, they have their own networks and connections. That was really effective because we could hear from those people who might not have otherwise put their hand up or been involved in this type of programme.
We also ensured that the young people were getting something out of the programme beyond the privilege of giving us their opinion. We delivered a professional development course alongside the consultation to develop the redesign. That included some core professional skills that Fiona reflected on earlier, such as presentation, CV writing and interview skills. They were leaving the programme with those things that would really set them up for that next stage of life, whatever that might look like.
Importantly and probably most obviously, we also asked the young people whether they were happy with how we were engaging with them. During the process of the redesign of Grosvenor Square—it is one of the key principles within that Voice, Opportunity, Power toolkit that I mentioned—we worked with the young adults to create what we called a manifesto for Mayfair. This was a list of expectations that they wanted to see the redesign deliver on. Again, it was nothing totally out there but things such as somewhere they feel safe, somewhere with green space, places to sit, somewhere for young people to feel they belong. We made sure that throughout each stage of the design they were checking what we were doing against that and literally signing it off.
At the end of the programme we asked for really open feedback about what could be improved for next time and what we might learn from. Again, it is not rocket science, all these things are quite straightforward, but it is about treating young people with respect and almost how you might ask a consultant team whether they were happy with the process. It was the same principle applied to how we were working with young people.
There are various ways that we then go on to improve future youth engagement exercises. One example that we took from the youth forum was ensuring that we were hearing from a really diverse mix of young adults. We were probably still hearing from people who were slightly higher on the socioeconomic background. We needed to do a bit more to make sure that we were hearing from a more representative group. The young people had lots of suggestions about ways we might make the programme a bit more engaging, such as different food we could offer. They were not holding back on different ideas and suggestions, but again it was about treating them with respect and being open to the feedback that they might have too.
Baroness Janke: That was quite a select group of people you used. Across the board with children and young people, perhaps Teresa has more to say about the breadth and existence of skills among young people to be able to contribute in this way, other than through being involved in a big project such as Nicola described.
Teresa Strachan: We have always gone to work with young people assuming that they will have sufficient skills to start the ball rolling. It was never a requirement of, “This is what we need from the young people who we are going to be meeting”. They would be on that journey with us and the students, and this cross-co-learning that is taking place is a fantastic thing to see. The skills are a really nice output, and teachers and youth workers can see those developing as the programme continues.
There are really clear outputs that I am keen to share with you in terms of the effectiveness of that engagement in a planning process. It is quite difficult at the more strategic level but one is the tool of using a neighbourhood plan. We have seen that bringing a young person’s voice and the skills that they have demonstrated in sharing that voice into policy.
One case in particular is Wooler, which is a very rural town in the depths of Northumberland. A group of students who wanted to do some engagement with young people were called in to try to elevate and help the young people to have confidence in what their views were and to contribute to the discussion within the neighbourhood plan framework.
The steering committee of the neighbourhood plan had a real vision for the future of the town, where these young people would work and live. They wanted to have the young people say that for themselves so that they could evidence that as part of that planning process, which we helped them to do. It was not in the same written format; it was through presentations, doing a guided tour and identifying sites that they would like some investment in. They wanted to be attached to that and to be able to feel they could come back to that town to live, work and support their families after they had left to go to university.
In terms of demonstrating effectiveness, there is now a policy document that has triggered development on the back of these young people’s evidence. The skills that they used as part of that process were very varied. It was done within the school environment, with some additional walkabout tours as well.
Also on measuring effectiveness, and to come back to this whole idea about democracy and young people having a say and feeling they have a right to express their views and contribute to decisions made in their local area, in time perhaps we will see increased numbers voting in local elections, possibly in general elections. If the voting age is reduced, we might see those impacts even sooner.
We will also see them going into built environment careers. I know the Royal Town Planning Institute is doing a lot of work with schools to share education about the environment and say, “If you’re interested and want to have a say, you can work as a town planner. The UK is desperately short of planners, so everybody benefits”. There are different ways of measuring that effectiveness.
Fiona MacDonald: Just briefly, if your question is around whether young people have the skills to be involved, the short answer would be: absolutely yes. Is our current education system encouraging or teasing those skills out of them? That comes back to a lot of what was talked about in last week’s session, so I will not reiterate all those. Some fundamental ones are that of course they have the skills in the sense that they have the lived experience and that is why you want to engage them. You want to hear about their experience, which is unique and invaluable to placemakers in understanding that day-to-day experience.
In terms of knowing what they could be advocating for, possibly our current education system is not fully enabling that. Last week we heard about the number of young people who have not visited the religious building, museum or theatre in their own town. A lot of young people—when we work with them—maybe do not know the possibilities of what is there with design. We are not talking about expensive design, but they have seen such a limited lens of what is possible.
There is a huge amount of work that could just be happening in the background that would enable young people to have more of that knowledge of what they could be advocating for. You could argue that for democracy to work best, it needs to be armed with knowledge to know what you can be asking for.
So I would say absolutely, yes, they do. Maybe we are letting them down in that we are not giving them enough of those tangible, physical experiences. That is where—in any of these ways of engaging young people in the built environment—first-hand lived experience is important, taking young people out to see what is possible, to meet people, to use their hands and to think in three dimensions. For a lot of young people, this will be very new to them, so that can be something that they build as skills going through these engagement processes. It also makes it a much more transparent process in terms of what a placemaker is trying to understand and learn.
Baroness Janke: Would you say that it does not have to be a very expensive process to get young people to be able to participate—particularly at their own local level—in these sorts of exercises you have done?
Fiona MacDonald: Not at all. It often comes back to the simplest things and that is about seeing, experiencing, and feeling. They do not need to be mini-planners, mini-architects or mini-engineers. It is great if they develop a thirst or a passion for that—super—but it is really just about giving them an opportunity to experience the world and start to form opinions and be told, “You’re allowed to have an opinion. It’s not right or wrong; it is your experience and what works for you, and that’s what you’re advocating for”.
Q16 Viscount Hanworth: I am interested in the use of digital technology and digital resources in educating young people. Last week I mentioned a program called SimCity, which is a game in which players plan an urban environment. I also proposed that architects’ computer-aided design programme should be readily accessible to children.
Beyond that, I would like to offer a contention for your appraisal. I believe that the rules of perspective are easily taught to young children and that with this facility children would be keen to draw pictures of buildings with the same enthusiasm that affected Renaissance artists. Can you comment on that after your experience with the use of digital resources?
Teresa Strachan: I will kick off. I might not have as much in-depth use of a broad range of technology, but one of the most useful tools that young people see their environment through is actually a camera lens. We have worked with young people—60 at a time—where they just took out disposable cameras.
You mentioned perspective. We asked them to take a photograph of a place that was important to them. We had some architecture students demonstrate how to frame a shot and how to construct the view within the viewfinder. That was incredibly helpful as an exercise for those young people to come back and say, “This place is important to me and I wanted to set it in its importance and how I see it”. Perhaps they would critique the photograph that was produced and say, “Well, it doesn’t really look as I would see it, necessarily”.
That was a useful first step: starting to assess their local environment in terms of technology and how others might see it as well. Taking those photographs was a skill that we were able to encourage them to use and then we developed discussions about why those places were important to them. At a base level that was a good introduction to use of technology. I know that digital technology has taken things in a lot of different directions and I will let somebody else comment on that.
Fiona MacDonald: No doubt digital plays a really important part and is something that appeals to a huge number of young people. Next week’s focus will be more on the digital. We have yet to find a young person who is not playing Minecraft, which is often one of their first ways into thinking about the potential to shape their built environment.
I feel there is potentially a missed opportunity there if young people feel they can impact the world only in the digital sphere. If we are going to use digital tools with young people, we need to be showing them that they are tools that can be applied to the physical world. In an engagement process, you may use something such as SketchUp or a simple computer-aided design program to enable young people to design, alongside drawing by hand.
We often find that physical 3D model-making is one of the most transparent processes to enable young people to take the ideas in their imagination and demonstrate them to another audience. There is huge potential in the digital, possibly as a hook to entice young people in, but in our experience it cannot be the sole way to engage with young people. It has the potential to remove the transparency.
Talking from my own experience within architecture, architecture schools are struggling right now with the use of AI. A lot of students are producing incredibly professional-looking drawings and thinking that their tutors will think they have designed a beautiful building. They are creating beautiful Escher drawings and the walls and the floors are not lining up. If you were physically doing a carpentry course, you would never imagine that you could float a piece of timber on something else, but they are producing drawings and not even noticing that that is what the drawing is showing. The digital is all well and good—it is brilliant, it is a tool—but you have to have the critical faculties alongside to understand whether what you are creating in the digital actually makes sense and holds up.
Viscount Hanworth: Nicola, have you had experience of teaching the rules of perspective to young people?
Nicola Rochfort: Using and leveraging technology throughout the process is something that we always routinely try to do, sometimes as a hook of getting people engaged in the first instance. That speaks to some of the principles of going to where young people are, be that trying to engage them in a school or youth club or trying to get them to engage within your consultation programme by having some sort of post on TikTok of all things.
TikTok is not normally the space that property companies feel comfortable in or have a presence on but needing to get out there into these youth spaces to speak the language of young people and make sure that they are hearing about the opportunities that you have available to them is something that we try to do more of. All that said, we would maybe work on that with a youth partner that would have the skills and expertise of how to make a TikTok ad look good and engaging.
I agree particularly with what Fiona was saying around needing to use and leverage digital tools, with that caveat and acknowledgement that you still need the tangible and physical alongside it. We have used a number of digital platforms, such as Commonplace, which has a really helpful neighbourhood mapping tool. We would go out with young people and tour their neighbourhoods, find out places that they liked and did not like, and then tag them on the map as we were walking through the urban sphere with them.
That is a really nice example of how you can translate something physical into something digital without losing sight of how beneficial these analogue engagement methods are. Whether that is 3D modelling, getting out and sketching buildings or encouraging young people to use their hands in other ways of placemaking, it is so valuable and often slightly more novel these days to young people, who spend so much of their time online.
The Chair: That was a good warm-up act for next week, as you said, Fiona. Next, we are moving on to current engagement, which is led by Baroness Griffin and Lord Bailey.
Q17 Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Fiona has answered this question but I want to dig a bit deeper. Does current policy sufficiently encourage robust and meaningful engagement with children and young people? I think not. What policies or guidance could be changed to create greater impact? Fiona has talked already about the social value matrix, but can we do more? What are the other examples that we can hold from there? Do you have international examples of good practice?
From a Theresa to a Teresa, you talked about neighbourhood plans and engaging with social services and schools. This was partially covered last week but there is an issue of resource and time, especially in our challenged schools. Teachers do not have the time. How do we do that? How do we engage hard-to-reach and disabled young people and children meaningfully? I have spoken about clean and green, but how do we scale this up?
What was great about last week was hearing the fabulous examples of good practice and you are talking about really good examples of good practice. Campaigning across the country, I am aware of where it does not happen at all. How do we take, advocate and influence your sectors to reach further geographically and to our children and young people?
If I may end on an example, I am dealing with two pieces of casework—yes, Chair, I probably should not pick up casework—where I am working with the relevant local councillors and MPs on a housing development that is three years old and has no safe crossing to the local primary school. That is in the Midlands, not the north-west.
I have another one in the Midlands at the moment that is an older school, and we will solve this but there is no safe crossing from where children live to go to their primary schools. I do not mean to be doom and gloom. What I am really interested in is how we take what is good and scale it up, who we have to influence in terms of policy, guidance and law, and who we have to resource. Teresa.
Teresa Strachan: Thank you, Theresa. I will look at the policy side. I do not necessarily have the international examples but in terms of a statutory duty to include young people and children in the planning process, there is no such statutory requirement in England. Scotland has that statutory requirement; it was introduced in 2019. I am sure the evidence will probably come into this committee, but it will be interesting to see how that has been working in Scotland as part of that process and whether that has made a difference. It would certainly help to have that national requirement.
As we have seen, there is excellent engagement going on despite there not being that requirement at a national level. I have been able to trace back how English planning policy has dealt with community and young people’s engagement over the last 50 or 60 years. To be honest, it has found it very difficult to come to terms with what it needs to do. It has never made it through into legislation and is just starting to emerge at local authority level.
I spoke earlier about the lack of incorporation of the children’s rights into English legislation. The closest we got in terms of planning policy in England was in 2020. We were talking about digital engagement previously, and the White Paper—Planning for the Future—actually heralded the digital age as being the way that young people would be involved. We were looking to see how that would then develop into legislation or policy, and it did not. All we have in our National Planning Policy Framework now is a requirement for effective, proportionate and early engagement. It does not specifically require any particular members of the community to be involved.
At local authority level, councils are required—under their statements of community involvement—to set out how they think consultation and engagement will take place across their communities. This varies from one council to the next. Even when it is spelled out in terms of placing young people or different minority groups as a priority, quite often it does not actually deliver tangible work on the ground. It is relying on other organisations such as Planning Aid England to deliver that engagement.
There is a willingness among the 13 local authorities that we studied in the north-east: 10 had very strong priorities towards involving young people and children in the planning process. As I said, the resources were just not there to deliver it. In that context, I wonder whether having it at a national level will actually create the resources to deliver it at a local level. It is a constant fact of life that that is going to be a challenge.
Coming back to the last point we were talking about, all engagement is valuable and it can be very cheaply done. Given the local authority’s priority, if there are ways of working out how it can deliver an across-the-board way of getting young people’s views on a particular development proposal or the local community and visions for that area, it could be done quite easily. I suppose people will say, “Is that effective?” So we are between a rock and a hard place. The resources are very restricting in terms of people to do the engagements, and the policy could be better.
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Nicola, how do you scale up the good work that you are doing right across the Grosvenor estate, including the north?
Nicola Rochfort: There are a number of different policy examples and processes that Teresa reflected on that can be bolstered to make sure that this is something that we see more consistently across the nation. We heard about the statement of community involvement processes needing to talk to how consultations have been meaningful and appropriately early. What is missing there is how representative they have been. That also picks up your point around how we can ensure that young adults from different backgrounds or with different abilities are also given the chance to share their views.
Requiring an inclusive engagement statement within SCIs is one way that we can see this get some teeth and requirements. I have talked to some frameworks and processes that we have developed and used, but mandating those existing frameworks such as Voice, Opportunity, Power and requiring schemes to follow that process is one way that we can really make sure that this gives some teeth to the process.
Another point that would just be quite an interesting and leading-by-example exercise is involving young people in the actual development and rollout of this bolstered policy process. There are some fantastic youth councils out there that no doubt will have some brilliant ideas on how we can see this come to fruition. Actually involving them in the rollout of this is just testament to how we can lead by example and make sure that young people are part of the solution.
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Fiona, how do we achieve not having “No ball games” signs on estates that have families on them?
Fiona MacDonald: It seems that if your example of the safe crossings had been explored and a young person had been consulted on what was proposed, they would have spotted that in the first five seconds. In terms of expenditure, that could have been good expenditure—if that had happened—in terms of then preventing what has happened further down the line.
It comes back to how we value this work and thinking about long-term custodians of place. It is not a coincidence that some of the most powerful and impactful pieces of youth engagement that are happening right now are coming from developers such as Grosvenor, housing association developer wings such as Latimer, or developers that have a long-term stake in that community where they really see that if they do not get it right, they will be the ones paying the price in five, 10 or 20 years, as opposed to developers working in different modes. Having a policy that demands more from developers could help to rectify that.
It does not need to cost developers more. Looking at those frameworks, there could be funds that are already put aside for social value that could go towards this, so it would not increase the bottom line for developers. It would just mean re-proportioning where their expenditure goes, which is a really important point. We have been told about how the London Borough of Newham has a requirement for statements of social value. That could be another requirement that would be put in that would take things beyond the current situation with statements of community involvement, where this youth engagement often just sits as an appendix. It should not be an appendix; it needs to be front and centre.
Q18 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Thank you for coming this morning. I am going to be slightly more contentious than many of my colleagues just because I feel that way. Let me start with the idea that it will have very little to no cost. That means there is something that a developer is paying for now from which that money will have to be taken away. Will that loss not be keenly felt by that project or work that is no longer being funded? Is that not a tension here if you include some work that you are talking about now?
Fiona MacDonald: That is a really good point. I cannot and would not talk about developers’ particular budgets; I do not have that oversight. We work very closely with some construction skills centres and there is a huge amount of levy payments that contractors are paying that are not being used. I do not know the details of why they are not being used but it has to do with Section 106 payments that are required to be made. There is then no uptake on using that fund, so those funds are going back into the system. There are definitely areas where there are funds sitting but they are not currently accessible to the work.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Nicola, let me come to you. The comment was made earlier that some developers develop and leave so they do not have the same sort of motivation, let us say, that you might have to consult with a community. You are a unique developer, if only because of the size and financial muscle that you have. How do developers that do not have that financial muscle do the same sort of work that you are doing?
Nicola Rochfort: There are a number of points there. First, I would say that we are seeing the model of placemaking change in that there are many more developers taking that more estate-wide neighbourhood approach, whether that is the likes of Argent, which developed King’s Cross and now Brent Cross, or Delancey. There are many more that are not seeing development at an individual building or portfolio scale and are thinking more about that placemaking.
There is a trend that we are seeing more and more people moving into the model that Grosvenor has been in for hundreds of years. There are obviously still individual developers and people who are changing places at a much smaller scale. It is important to acknowledge that there is a requirement for even those smaller-scale developments to consult with communities.
Why should it be that those young people within those communities do not fall into that requirement? This is where that policy argument comes in so importantly we need to ensure that the requirements and what is asked of developers are totally watertight and that they cannot not consult. It is something that is required of them to develop, even at the smallest scales.
I guess it is also about cost and smaller developers that might not necessarily have an engagement team, as Grosvenor does. We are seeing more and more skillsets and capabilities around consultation being something that architects are increasingly upskilled in. This does not necessarily need to be something that people see as an engagement or a consultation expertise job. This is something that is going to become more and more routine and that we will see architects, surveyors and maybe planners becoming more and more skilled in. It will not be a separate, dedicated cost but something that is woven into the life cycle of a development project.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I am going to say something that is slightly complicated and may be perceived as slightly mean, but would this development model not suit the likes of you and Argent? It would then mean that you have an additional supposed social good to gain extra sites because other people would not be able to do it given that they do not have a development team as you do. One of the biggest problems we have in development across the piece is that we have only a few large developers and that is a very poor economic situation for us as a country. How do we avoid the tension of making things even easier for you as large developers but also raising the quality of what those smaller developers are bringing along?
Nicola Rochfort: It highlights the benefits of placemaking at a neighbourhood scale when you can take that long-term approach. We should not shy away from that; it is a benefit that is highlighted here. Through the availability of open-source tools and frameworks—such as the toolkit that I mentioned, which is making this available for free for developers of any scale—there is no excuse. It is being able to be really clear about what the expectations and requirements are from a policy point of view and ensuring that those frameworks, guidance, tools and resources are available to people so that they can deliver it at a smaller cost.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Teresa, let me come to you now. I am not sure that you made this comment but lived experience is not a skill; it is an experience. I am a youth worker of some 35 years’ standing and I come from a very poor community. If we harp on too much about people’s lived experience, we then deny that community to develop saleable skills that they can then build careers and jobs from. That is my little starting point.
How do we then use this whole conversation in proportion? I am a school governor and have been for years. To my mind, we are having a conversation that largely you could ask schools to deliver. How much of this work should be delivered by developers, bearing in mind their social good is to provide homes? Anything that gets in the way of that—homes and places—should be frowned upon.
Teresa Strachan: If we are honest with ourselves, we probably would all have different motivations for our engagements and that is the world, I am afraid. If you have to get the resources to run that engagement, you have to tick boxes—including schools in the curriculum—to say that you are meeting the aims and objectives and that this is going to meet the requirements of the organisation you are working with. If it means that developers get a slightly smoother ride through the planning process as a result of that engagement with young people, so be it.
All engagement around the environment is good, skill development is good, and if we are encouraging young people to look at potential careers in the built environment professions, that longer-term benefit is one that we should perhaps be focusing on as much as anything. When young people realise that they can influence a decision—say, in a mock planning inquiry that we have run—and they say, “Wow, I contributed to that discussion; the outcome of that decision did actually take my views on board”, they start to feel that they have some buy-in to decision-making. They might have been nurturing an interest there in how their local area looks and the design that might go into it.
Even if we are cynical about the motivations, we must not underestimate the potential for young people to emerge with really useful professions and trades, and we should support the Government’s apprenticeship schemes through all engagement. I tend to just take the view that it is all good and the more contact that young people have with professionals around places that are important to them, it can be only for their longer-term good as well.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I happen to agree and I am just asking you difficult questions because this is a cost. There is no other way of wrapping it up; it is a cost and therefore you have to be able to justify that cost. There is a tension there because there is always some good place that money can be spent.
Fiona MacDonald: Could I just come back? It is really important that we do not pit developers against young people or communities; our experience is that this is not what is happening at all. We have worked with small developers that want to do this work. They often see that it can support what they are trying to achieve because young people tend to be more open to forward-thinking or progressive modes of thinking about community and place, low-car neighbourhoods and higher-density living. Those are things that perhaps certain older audiences will just automatically say no to because it is a change from what they are used to.
Actually, it is where the industry wants to be going. We have examples of developers reaching out to us that recognise that those young people are going to be supporting a lot of the change that they are trying to make and that makes the community and the world a better place. It can often be blocked by those demographics that most typically turn up at our current consultation events.
Actually, if we are trying to achieve a better built environment, it is cost-effective to involve young people who are thinking about the fact that they will be inheriting climate change and issues around social justice. They tend to be talking from a very different perspective—coming back to that point of seeing the built environment in its truest terms as place and space and not property.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I accept what you are saying but it strays into a territory of using young people to justify other professionals’ views of the world, which I see happen quite a lot. My last question is about scale. Ultimately, I am very interested in the idea of the development of tools that smaller developers can use. I agree; I happen to be a smaller developer, and we are very interested in using other people’s tools to lower our costs and the like. Nicola, you said quite explicitly that Grosvenor has developed these tools and is pushing them out. Do you push them out just among community groups or is it something you provide to the industry and other developers?
Nicola Rochfort: Definitely the latter. That said, the tool that I mentioned—Voice, Opportunity, Power—is an open-source tool that is designed for developers, planners, design teams and sports professionals, given that it was produced also with Sport England support. It is for anyone who wants to involve young people in placemaking and managing but does not really know where to begin. I would encourage people across the board to look at it.
Q19 Lord Bassam of Brighton: This is a social good that you are describing and it often seems that the planning processes are an obstacle course for developers and development. How do we avoid what is obviously a social good falling into that mindset and way of thinking? How much can best practice play a part in overcoming some of those obstacles so that it does not feel like an obstacle course for planners and developers?
Nicola Rochfort: Reflecting on the successes is a really good way to build that advocacy and buy-in for this type of work. That is something that we continue to do—working with others who are here on the panel today—to really highlight where this goes well and what we can learn from past engagement exercises that we have carried out.
One method that we have found really effective—unsurprisingly—is having the young people who were part of that process be part of that reflection and almost communication and promotion of the process. I have mentioned the Mayfair Youth Forum with which we worked on the redesign of Grosvenor Square. We have built some really strong working relationships with that group. When we were speaking with them about the project, they were from 14 to 19 years old; many are now in their early 20s and are joining me on panel events like this one to talk about how important the youth voice is in placemaking and managing.
That is just one example of how we can really raise the profile of how beneficial this is. It should not just be developers speaking about it themselves but young people who have gone through this process and can speak from that lived experience of being involved meaningfully.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: There is one small question I forgot to ask: what do you ask young people that differs from what you ask the oldies? What is it you say that makes it age-appropriate or do you not need to change the content of your questions?
Teresa Strachan: With any exercise that I have been involved in with whatever age, the first question is asking about what the place means to them and what is most important. It is not necessarily focusing on the negative but just trying to tease out this relationship that they have with their place and open space. Then you can start—in a building block form—focusing on common issues but very much being led by the young people talking about how they experience their local area.
We did a lot of work with hot food takeaways as an engagement exercise and because every young person—everybody—likes a takeaway, it was relevant. It was another way of looking at the local area and the impact it was having on the community. This came out of a conversation with the young people about the litter that was gathering around the local hot food takeaways in the shopping street.
From that, it was quite a natural development of, “Okay, if we had a community strategy around trying to control and understand what the issues are, how would we do that?” Just from discussion, you soon pull young people’s perspectives out about how they feel: that there is a lack of investment because there is a lot of litter and that must mean that they are not worthy of having that investment. There are all sorts of layers of how they perceive their local area. I am not trying to pursue a consultation around a particular development, but it is about trying to nurture something that is quite organic from where those young people already are.
Viscount Hanworth: In the latter half of the 19th century much of London’s domestic architecture was built in reference to pattern books at a time when there was an enduring aesthetic consensus. What I would like to know is to what extent you see your role as stimulating a debate about architectural aesthetics.
The Chair: Who are you going to on that one?
Viscount Hanworth: Whoever.
The Chair: Come on, Fiona.
Fiona MacDonald: That is a fantastic question. I get delighted when young people are talking about the built environment as something that they can have an opinion on because it is within the realm of something they can actually change and have a say in rather than something that is happening to them. Combining both your point and Lord Bailey’s in terms of what you are engaging young people in, it comes back to the aims of it.
We can decouple it from planning. It is not just young people being asked what they think in terms of planning; it can be in the broader sense of what they think generally about their neighbourhoods and neighbourhood plans, through to very specific co-design exercises. We have created a youth engagement overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work, which shows that young people can be involved at every single stage, whether their neighbourhood is going through no change whatever through to whether there is something happening and that is at the earliest stage of visioning, brief, design or even physically building that space.
A really important part of that—it comes back to an earlier point—is about first encouraging young people to look at the world and recognise that there are different styles and different types of buildings and to start to form an opinion: “How does it make me feel? What do I like?” If we are in the visioning stage of working with a placemaker that is thinking about what these buildings should feel like, we put examples in front of the young people to get a sense of what it is that they like. This is only in instances where the placemaker is in a position where they are going to be able to listen to those young people’s responses.
Across the board here, everybody understands that the number one thing is to be managing the expectations of young people and never going into a room saying, “You can have any of this”, when in fact you can only have this. It is doing real due diligence—whether you are a local authority, placemaker, developer or planner—to understand what agency we are willing to give over to the young people, framing the conversations through that and ensuring that they appeal to that wide range of learners. You are going out, seeing buildings and getting the opportunity to draw and make. You start to understand that everything in this room and in any room that you are in has been designed, made and thought about, and that opinions and decisions have gone into that that then have an impact and knock-on effects.
It is not necessarily a pattern book but it is about showing young people the range of possibilities of what is there, and arguably for all people being consulted with on built environment. Maybe we need to be moving the conversation from statutory consultation to participation and enabling people to not just respond yes or no to a question or even just to have information shared with them. We need to respect that they have opinions and knowledge that are worthy of being considered alongside that professional expertise and that will actually have value in the built environment that is ultimately created.
The Chair: That is a good tee-up to the next area, the final area of questioning, which is led by Lord Ravensdale and Baroness Andrews.
Q20 Lord Ravensdale: We have already touched on this idea of a statutory duty but I wanted to dig into that in a bit more detail. You can view the story of our planning system over the past decades almost as lots of well-intentioned changes that have gone into the system and it has built up and up. Now we are in a situation where it is actually very difficult to get things built in this country. We have some really aggressive targets, such as the 1.2 million homes, the huge infrastructure pipeline, and of course there is a lot of thought going into the planning system as to how that can work more effectively.
I am interested in whether a statutory duty would create further delays in the planning system, in your view. If so, how could some issues with that be thought about and mitigated? Maybe through that you could think about whether there is any experience you can bring to bear on how this has worked in other jurisdictions; I think Scotland was mentioned. Teresa, you mentioned this before. Perhaps you could start us off on that, please.
Teresa Strachan: It has to be a multi-pronged approach. It would be wonderful to finally get that statutory duty into planning legislation and policy but, as you say, it is a challenging time to be a planner. I know the Royal Town Planning Institute is constantly making the case that we are thousands of planners short.
In terms of processing planning applications, there are not enough people in place to do this, and we then add that extra layer of the engagement that is required. It depends on whether you are looking at it as being an advantageous layer or one that is going to be a hindrance and time-consuming and costly. There should perhaps be some kind of guidance as to what that across the board layer of engagement should be with children and young people.
We need to have a really positive rhetoric about the planning system and what planners are trying to do and doing very well. I have personally been in planning for 40 years. First, I was not encouraged to go into planning because I was a woman, which is really hard to believe but that is going back to the early 1980s. Now the planners are damned if they do not hurry up with their planning decisions, but if they do they are still damned because they are not doing consultation properly. So we need a much more positive narrative.
It is not just about policy; it is about resources, having people to do it and bringing the next generation along. Particularly if an additional statutory duty is introduced, we might not see those changes immediately. We have to think about the next generation, bringing more planners through the apprenticeship scheme and making conditions such that they do not want to leave the workforce. Some 20% of current planners are thinking that they will leave the profession in the next three years, according to a survey done by the RTPI. We are not even replacing that number; the situation could potentially just get worse from what you have described there.
I cannot really speak with authority in terms of what Scotland has done to overcome that and how it feels that that is emerging. I understand that the RTPI is looking at the impact of that on resourcing and that might come out through written evidence.
Lord Ravensdale: Very briefly, you talked about a multi-pronged approach. Do you still think a statutory duty is part of that?
Teresa Strachan: We need to catch up with other countries. Basically, a lot of other countries worldwide have done so much more, not only in planning but planning being regarded as part of that engagement with young people. There is a much more integrated approach to involving young people in the decisions that are made locally in Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, the United States—the list is endless. We could look at examples, although I do not have a case study in detail that I could share with you.
Because it has been integrated much earlier since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, service provision has been much more joined-up in those other countries. Now what we are trying to do is play catch-up and make it cost-effective and efficient at the same time. It is important but we also have to resource the people who are going to do that.
Lord Ravensdale: Nicola, what are your views on this from running a property portfolio?
Nicola Rochfort: In principle, a statutory duty could be very effective; it is important that it is framed and positioned appropriately. We do not want this to become something that is just tick-boxy; it needs to be accompanied by really clear expectations around what good looks like, what is expected of developers and what we touched on earlier around how local authorities are handling that at their different levels.
That might be around ensuring that inclusive engagement is also picked up as engagement that is early and meaningful. To the point that I have raised throughout this conversation, also linking it with resources and standards that are available to people to help them on the way is going to be really key to ensuring that this is actually delivered and that it is seen as something that leads to better outcomes rather than a hurdle that people have to overcome.
Fiona MacDonald: I agree with everything that has already been said. I wonder whether the statutory duty should apply to schemes at a certain scale and, alongside that, could become proportionate to the scale and the scope of developments and how much impact it is likely to have on young people, so a slightly more nuanced approach. I completely appreciate how challenging it is to get things built right now but our experience with the developers we have worked with is that the youth engagement process has not slowed it down.
If anything, it has kept it to its targets and helped to bridge those relationships with the community. We need to stress the importance of that guidance and break down that it is not rocket science; it is really straightforward. It is not something for developers to fear doing and the gains that can be made are huge on all sides—for the young people, the place and those organisations.
It seems that there is a real challenge around joined-up thinking across the board when we are talking about the built environment, coming to those pipelines of talent and people coming in and understanding what it means to work in construction or the built environment. Martyn Evans, creative director at Landsec, made a salient point that I am sure everyone in this room is familiar with: the built environment has no single voice in government and that makes it extremely challenging to ever join up strategy.
Martyn Evans said: “Architecture is filed under ‘creative industries’, construction under ‘infrastructure’, engineering under ‘manufacturing’, and property under ‘real estate and finance’. But, when you step back, it is clear that all these activities are part of one continuous chain, from conception to completion to operation, united by a single purpose”. I would argue that if you are trying to introduce children and young people in the next generation, you are bringing in the Department for Education and it gets even more complex.
Re-establishing something like the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment would really support that. That was around in the early days of my career and felt like it was part of a more joined-up approach to thinking about the built environment and to connecting voices and showing that actually a lot of people are looking at the same challenges but in silos. I do not know whether that is something that you all in this room would have the potential to look at: both top-down as well as what is happening at the grass-roots scale at the moment.
Lord Ravensdale: To pick up on your initial point, you mentioned development size. If there were a statutory duty, would you be concerned about the impact on SMEs, for example, rather than larger developers?
Fiona MacDonald: Yes, but we find that smaller developers engage in these processes. Bywater Properties is one of those. In fact, they are not engaging at planning stage. It is completely decoupled; they are engaging with young people wherever they are proposing to develop, from that social value perspective where they have very high environmental targets. They also see those social targets as being part and parcel of what they do.
Coming back to that point around the relatively short lifespan of a lot of our buildings, if we are doing this big push in building it feels incredibly important that we get it right. There are cases now that we have all heard of—not just in the UK but internationally—where a building is being demolished before anyone has even stepped foot in it because it is no longer relevant to the ways that people are living. This should all be seen as constant research-gathering and information that can support the industry as a whole.
Baroness Andrews: Just very briefly, I completely agree with you about CABE; we should definitely bring it back. There is a bit of tension here, is there not? If you take the Scottish example and look at the way children are involved in those specific developments that involve play or space for children, there would be an argument for saying that in those situations there should be a statutory duty to have children involved.
In a way, what you have also been saying is that there is one conversation. Many of the issues that young people raise are exactly the same as would be raised across the board because everyone wants safe spaces, green spaces and so on. I ask this specifically of Fiona because she has developed this. Would you suggest that we go for a limited model along the lines of the Scottish proposals or that we put it into the NPPF as a specific requirement—without it being in the highest statutory provision—for children to have an explicit role in every development? What do you think would work best?
Fiona MacDonald: Definitely the latter. We all in this room have a huge amount of respect for children and young people and we know that their opinions go beyond just play or spaces that are seen for children. In our work we see that what they offer to thinking about long-term housing, education, transport and environment is impactful across the board.
Exactly to Nicola’s point, my main worry with it becoming statutory is whether it becomes a tick box where it is consultation at best, information-sharing at worst, and no agency is given to young people. Actually, taking more of a policy framework that offers guidance and shows a myriad of different ways of doing it at different stages could be much more potent.
Baroness Andrews: Could you provide some international examples? Teresa mentioned the international examples in the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the way European countries have gone further than us. I wonder whether you could think of any international examples where children have been incorporated in the statutory process of consultation and the impact that that may have had on the nature of the quality of place. You also spoke about the way young people can contribute to a vision of the quality of place because they live in the place and are not making judgments about who owns what. That would be very useful, as well as anything else that you have on the metrics.
The Chair: It would also be good to have examples of not just where it has gone well internationally but where it has gone badly. Anything you have on that that you could provide in written evidence after this would be good. We touched on it a little last week but if there is anything you have about the role that parents and the wider family or carers can have in this process and how it can be brought together, that would also be helpful.
The third and final thing—just channelling my inner Lord Bailey—is from a developer’s point of view, obviously Grosvenor has the assets and we talked about the rights of a child and the longevity of a site. If there is anything you have that would demonstrate the tangible, immediate uplift for a site commercially, that would be useful. We can all agree that this is good and worth while but are there any examples or case studies of where this has gone well from a financial point of view? If a developer is strapped for cash or has a lot of other pressures on it, we can say this is good but is there some financial uplift in the immediate vicinity?
With that, that is the end of this session. I am very grateful to everyone from the committee who took part, but especially to our witnesses for your time and your experience that you shared with us. Yet again this has been a very interesting and vital debate, and I am very grateful to you for giving up your time. Please write to us with anything else you have and stay in touch with us. Thank you very much.
