Oral evidence - Built Environment

Members present

Baroness O'Cathain (Chairman)

Lord Freeman

Lord Inglewood

Earl of Lytton

Baroness Parminter

Baroness Whitaker

Lord Woolmer of Leeds

Baroness Young of Old Scone

_______________________

Examination of Witnesses

Professor John Worthington, Independent Transport Commission, and Esther Kurland, Director, Urban Design London

Q197 The Chairman: Welcome, Ms Kurland and Professor Worthington, to this evidence session of the Select Committee on the National Policy for the Built Environment. You have in front of you a list of the interests that have been declared by members of the Committee. A transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee website. You will have the opportunity to make corrections to that transcript where necessary. Could I begin by asking each of you, for the benefit of the transcribers, to briefly introduce yourselves to the Committee, please?

Esther Kurland: My name is Esther Kurland. I am a planner by background, but I have been involved in urban design, street design and suchlike probably for the last 15 to 20 years. For the last 10 years, I have been running a small organisation that supports all the London boroughs, TfL and the GLA on built environment issues—planning in housing, streets, stations and things like that.

Professor Worthington: Good morning. I am John Worthington. For the last 40 years, I have been both a practitioner and an academic. As a practitioner, I was a founding partner of DEGW, a global business that advises firms and organisations, including universities, on what to build and, more importantly, how to use it and manage the process of change. In the last 10 years, I have acted as a collaborative urbanist, working both as a director of the Academy of Urbanism responsible for learning through place, and as a Commissioner of the Independent Transport Commission, where I have been leading the Commissions review of High‑Speed Rail, although not necessarily High Speed 2, because it is a way of talking about High Speed 2 as a project.

Q198 The Chairman: The first question is mine. What are the challenges associated with integrating transport and other infrastructure into the built environment? Is there scope for better national policy in this regard?

Professor Worthington: Should I start on that and then Esther can come in? First, the challenge is the time taken over providing the planning and the impact over this long period. If you are going to do something like high‑speed rail, the time taken is at least 30 years when you take it from inception to the end. That is a huge change. How do we deal with that change? You are faced with two major issues: first, the disruption to the community as you are conducting that process—and that is just the physical disruption; and, secondly, blight, because false hopes and uncertainty are created. I would start with those as the critical issues.

Esther Kurland: As well as those practical issues, funding is obviously often an issue, as well as who is responsible for doing what and when. How can people justify their actions? That is a big lesson that we have learnt from Crossrail 1, which is going into Crossrail 2, and from the Thames Tideway Tunnel. The Thames Tideway Tunnel is the big sewer thing, so it is not transport infrastructure, but it is infrastructure. They both started with a very focused, “We deliver this infrastructure. It moves whatever it is around”.

The Crossrail one was very interesting. Once they started looking at the numbers coming out of these massive stations in central London, people started asking, “How do people move once they get out of the station? You are chucking another however many thousand people an hour on to this bit of London. How does that work”. There was a realisation that they have a responsibility to integrate their infrastructure into the built environment that it is serving. Crossrail at that point decided that it would undertake urban integration studies for all its stations. We were involved in design‑reviewing all those, which was absolutely fascinating. For the outer London stations, it said to the boroughs, “Here you go. We have done a study on how your station and your service should integrate with Romford town centre”, or wherever else it happens to be, “and it’s up to you to take that forward”. It is very interesting that TfL then found some money to help those to go forward. Abbey Wood in Bexley, for example, now has a £4 million programme to integrate the station into Abbey Wood and to create all the benefits that could come about for the local community, the economy and transport interchanges. That is being funded by Network Rail, Transport for London and Bexley Council.

Crossrail took it upon itself to take responsibility for those integration studies and start the ball rolling. It is not going to deliver all that work, but it recognised that it was important for it to do so. There is nothing that requires it to do that. You need political will to push the boundary and say, “Hang on a minute. We have a responsibility to go beyond what we are being asked to do”. There has been a suggestion that it might be useful, in national policy or whatever, to require infrastructure providers to have a duty to consider their influence on the surrounding area. That could free them up a bit more. Internally, the argument is actually, “We have a responsibility for this. We are allowed to do it, and national policy or whatever tells us that it is our role”. Otherwise you get the auditor, the lawyer or whoever saying, “No, that is not for us to do”.

Similarly, the Tideway Tunnel looked at where it is building out over the foreshore to create ventilation equipment. It is actually creating some new bits of public realm, which could have been dire but in the end, as far as I know—I have not seen the schemes for quite some time—it is coming up with some lovely ideas for new pocket parks and things that again integrate that infrastructure into the surrounding area.

The Chairman: That is absolutely fascinating, particularly the bit about more people getting to their destination and then being dumped on the pavement. That is happening at Victoria Station now, in effect. Should there be a demand by government that this is always taken into account, not just that some bright spark in Crossrail said, “This is not going to work unless we do something else”, and then it evolved? There is a great merit in allowing the contractors to do that, but there is also great merit in making sure that it happens.

Esther Kurland: It may not be the responsibility of infrastructure providers to actually do it but to consider and work with those who will. In the same way, if we were building a massive housing development somewhere, we would be looking at the impact that will have on the surrounding area, using Section 106 or whatever else it happens to be, not to mitigate but to manage those impacts.

Professor Worthington: You are absolutely right that we have to understand that we need to look outside the boundaries that we are given. We still have a very siloed way of working. I don’t think we are talking about more regulation or even more guidance; we are talking about changing our attitude of mind, the way we do things. It is very important. What we are going to see, first of all, is that you can no longer just look at your station; you have to say what is around the station and, even more important, what the secondary modes of transport would be. You cannot just think of one mode of transport; you have to think of the integrated forms and then ask, “What are the values that are going to be coming out of that?”.

We have a rather limited way of assessing value when we are building a railway line. With Crossrail 1 they looked at the wider area but then reduced the scope of what they could look at under the Bill, and afterwards they had to build back in the ability to get the real value, which is from all the other things happening around it. If you do not make a good place to come to and where people want to stay, you are not going to capture the full value of infrastructure investment. That is a critical point: you have to think beyond just the infrastructure.

Q199 Baroness Whitaker: Thank you very much, both of you. What are the current objectives of national transport policy? Should they be changed, and, if so, what to? What do the Government intend? What do they say the objectives are?

Professor Worthington: It is in flux in a way, which is good. We now have a National Infrastructure Commission, which I believe will be very important. The question then is: how far does that go back to change some of our policies?

Baroness Whitaker: Now, before the infrastructure has got going, what are the objectives of national transport policy at the moment?

Professor Worthington: They are not terribly well laid out. There are broad aspirations, but the detail of what we are trying to achieve is less well thought through.

Baroness Whitaker: That is what should be changed, you think.

Professor Worthington: I believe we need to look at it in more detail. In changing, you have to get the dialogue going about what you really want. There is change everywhere. We are talking about change in terms of devolution. There is huge change in which decisions need to be made centrally, which regionally and which locally. That will then change where you actually place the different policies.

Baroness Whitaker: Are the objectives of transport policy set out anywhere—road, rail, all of them?

Esther Kurland: The planning system is the only place where I know it has been set out. It is in the NPPF. There is a bit about integrated transport, sustainable transport, et cetera. It says a lot of what most people would consider are sensible things. The planning practice guidance that supports that focuses very much on the process of doing travel plans, et cetera. There is nothing wrong with that.

Baroness Whitaker: I would say that those are aims rather than objectives.

Esther Kurland: I think I agree with you. There is also very little on what “good” or “acceptable” looks like.

Baroness Whitaker: What is it for? That is what I want to know. Does it say what it is for anywhere?

Esther Kurland: Is it about moving more people, moving the same number of people quicker, moving people in a different mode, or all these things? I do not think it is particularly clear. It is more about the process of what to think through when producing a plan.

Baroness Whitaker: I will not hold up the Committee now. If you happen to have a blueprint of what you think the objectives ought to be, that would be very useful to us.

Q200 Lord Inglewood: In many ways, we have already covered most of the question I was going to put to you. You were talking about Crossrail. The issue, after everybody arrives, is: what happens next? Who should have responsibility for resolving these difficulties? Secondly, who should pay for the resulting changes that would be desirable?

Professor Worthington: The work that we are doing with the ITC now involves going to each city region and talking about what we have learnt from Europe and where we saw what happened. Of course, there is much greater devolution: something like 50% to 55% of the money gained is kept by those city regions, so they have a greater control over development. The big question is how we are going to make decisions about how the money is distributed, at a very broad level. Obviously Crossrail 2 is competing for resources against the Northern Powerhouse and HS3.

These very big decisions have to be taken centrally, and have to be very clear. At the moment, most local authorities have been used to putting in proposals to the Government with a five‑year time horizon. That is short term. They are now being asked, thank heavens, to think longer-term and to write about their aspirations as a city over a 20 or 30‑year period and what they want from that. That is a very important change. It means that rather than seeing that you are competing against other people, the very first thing you have to do is say, “We all have to collaborate to understand how to divvy up the money to make a better country, make whatever it is and then compete”. The notion of collaborating to then compete is important.

There are some good things that we are seeing ahead. The first is infrastructure. Originally TfL and now the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is taking that 20 or 30‑year view on infrastructure, and strategic planning, to a certain extent, is happening outside the statutory planning process. It is happening through the big transport authorities. This is really important and will be the driver. You have London, for instance, and the GLA with its 2050 infrastructure plan. That is more than just a plan; it identifies what we want, how much it is going to cost and where the money is going to come from. It does not just say that it is coming from government; it is going to come from us having to raise more money in different sorts of ways. The huge difference is that we are now beginning to think about how we create the wealth to plan in a way we want. If you have not created the wealth first, you cannot necessarily fulfil all your ambitions. Secondly, you have to create that wealth and distribute it equitably, which is where we come right back to the question about how we do it for London versus the others, and whether there is a grand plan for how to do it. It is a combination of all those things.

Lord Inglewood: It is always grand when the plan works out as hoped and anticipated, but every now and then plans do not.

Professor Worthington: I can say one thing here. We can be almost assured that the plan will not be what we thought it would be. We went around Europe. In Lille, for instance, we asked, “What did you want to achieve?”. They said, “We wanted to have international firms. Nobody was going to commute to Paris”, et cetera. We thought, “Oh my God”. I said, “What has actually happened?” They said, “People commute to Paris. We do not have international firms, but we have two national universities. We are now confident in our role as part of a major urban conurbation of 20 million people, which is northern France and Belgium through to the Ruhrgebiet and Randstad. We are a different sort of place”. That is what will happen if you think that you can set 20 or 30 years ahead and that it is going to happen exactly like that and that you will measure it like that. Do not do that. You need a way of adapting as you go along, which is the critical thing that we have here.

The Chairman: Then you could be accused of chopping and changing your mind the whole time.

Professor Worthington: You have to understand the layering of this decision‑making. You need aspirations that are always there. We might talk later about design quality panels. You are testing that you are not changing the big aspiration but adapting expectations. In other words, this is about the detailed brief. You have to be brave enough to say, “We need to change”. We have to build in the idea that you need to change as you go along. We are talking about behaviour change.

Q201 Baroness Whitaker: How important do you think infrastructure is in a national policy for the built environment? You have given us some very nice examples of how infrastructure has contributed to better place-making and some examples of good practice. What if you extended this outside the urban area—because infrastructure goes all over the country into the landscape—and what are your views on the training of highway engineers to accomplish this kind of aim?

Professor Worthington: Infrastructure is the driver in a sense, but it is also the supporter of what you want to do. Two things happen. Infrastructure starts to direct what is going to happen. When you put infrastructure down, it changes the relationships between places.

Baroness Whitaker: Between urban and rural?

Professor Worthington: Urban and rural is an interesting concept. The boundaries between urban and rural are increasingly blurred. Our cities are now urban conurbations, what we call polycentric cities. There is not just one place but lots of high‑density points within a region that work as a city region. I would argue that Greater London, as an economic entity, is about 20 million people, from Brighton up to Cambridge, out towards Bristol and eastwards to the Dartford Bridge.

Baroness Whitaker: You are saying that infrastructure has pushed this change.

Professor Worthington: It is driving it. Actually, it is infrastructure that crosses political boundaries, which is why it is such a very strong planning mechanism. TfL is now responsible for some of the overground and the Abellio services out to the east. It is going outside its political boundaries. What is happening is very important. In that sense, infrastructure is driving the way we think about planning and some of the political issues.

Baroness Whitaker: You are speaking mainly of transport, but there is other huge infrastructure. Can you add that in?

Professor Worthington: Yes, I believe that you have to do that. The other huge ones are health, living and education.

Baroness Whitaker: There is nuclear energy.

Professor Worthington: There is energy and the hidden one: the stuff in the air, the virtual—communications, in other words. Just take some of the big ones that we can see, which make a big impact on our built environment directly: roads, rail, et cetera. But there are also the indirect ones that service and are in the public realm: health, education and housing. We have to take those into account as well when thinking about the infrastructure of our environment in the broadest terms. Those are the big things that impact it.

Baroness Whitaker: What about the training of those who do transport?

Professor Worthington: I cannot really talk specifically about transport. My background as an academic involved designing environments for work and learning. Professional education in particular interests me. It is about cross‑disciplinary education.

Baroness Whitaker: Is it? Should it be?

Professor Worthington: It should be and it is coming. It is still not there, but it is getting much better.

Esther Kurland: Can I come in on this one? I have been doing this for the last 10 years. It is fascinating with highway engineers. When we started doing training on built environment issues and design quality, to start with they used to come in in high‑vis jackets, sit there and be like, “When can I go?” Now we find built environment professionals who take pride in their impact on the built environment, so you get planners going to technical highway training sessions and you get highway engineers going to quite technical planning sessions. Everyone goes to the landscape sessions. That empowers people to feel that they are doing something worthwhile, which is always useful when people are working to get them going. There is a big difference between what people may be learning more in silos, in universities, and what they may be learning in practice, where they find that a place is influenced by lots of different professionals and different groups. They need to understand at least something of where they are all coming from to be able to do the best job.

There are obviously lots of problems with training and people who do not understand things. I sent the Committee a couple of pictures of where people seriously do not understand tactile paving guidance, and it goes very wrong, which I can explain if you wish me to.

The Chairman: They are fascinating. I have already taken a look at those.

Esther Kurland: Do you want to know what is going on?

The Chairman: Yes, please.

Esther Kurland: I will not tell you where they are, because that is embarrassing for the places. The one where the two older people are walking down the tactile paving is a shared‑space town centre scheme, where all the intentions were right to create somewhere that was going to provide the infrastructure for social town centre activities. They decided not to have a kerb and to have pavement cafes and things like that. However, when you do not have a kerb, you have to support people who are visually impaired. One thing you can do is this type of tactile paving. It should be on the kerb line so that it warns people who are visually impaired that they would be walking into a carriageway, but they have put it in the wrong place. The kerb line on this picture is on the other side of the post, so they have ended up with horrible tactile to walk on down the middle of the pavement, where everyone is walking. That was just a total misunderstanding of the guidance. That is where training is really struggling.

The other one is a very large new housing development. Master planning causes all sorts of problems with infrastructure. The architects who are dealing with the master plans early on may not have the same understanding of street infrastructure as the highway engineer, who later comes along and looks at the detailing of that street to see whether or not they will adopt it. The adoption issue is really difficult for street design.

Baroness Whitaker: They should have got together much earlier on there.

Esther Kurland: They should. That is actually a cycle lane that is meant to be green. All that tactile paving is telling people that you are going on and off shared spaces, where there may or may not be cycles. It is all total gobbledegook. It does not help anyone, and you can see on this picture further up that a car has just parked in it anyway. That is what is going to happen. Following guidance without understanding it, and following rules and processes without thinking about the place that you are creating, causes problems.

Baroness Whitaker: You are talking about the need for early liaison, I take it.

Esther Kurland: Yes, early liaison, but there is also a need to empower the professional to think beyond tick‑boxing and to get a real understanding of the actual purpose of things like tactile paving.

The Chairman: Surely it should be the number one item when they first enrol for a course in this. I am looking at the university.

Esther Kurland: It is not.

Professor Worthington: What is increasing now is learning by going out and looking, and not just with one group of people but with different interests. In this example of looking at this master-planned area, we now see a group of people going out together—the architects, engineers and people from the maintenance department—walking around and sharing experience of what they are learning. Learning by doing, by looking and then feeding it back is some of the most important learning that we can get, and we are increasingly seeing that happening. It is often happening because organisations such as the Academy of Urbanism and Esther Kurland’s organisation are doing this sort of thing as one‑day courses, et cetera. That is where the learning is happening.

The Chairman: I do not want to introduce levity into this, but in the first street example of what has gone wrong with this tactile thing, did you ever try it out with women in high heels, seriously?

Professor Worthington: It is very serious.

Esther Kurland: Changes to the tactile paving guidance are actually out for consultation at this moment, with the aim of trying to make it easier for people who have walking difficulties. Not only is it very uncomfortable in high heels, but if you have mobility problems this stuff is a real barrier. It is about trying to balance the needs of different users. That is just one example, but it is always nice in a picture.

The Chairman: My heart sinks when I see these tactile pavements for blind people, but blind people wear high heels as well. You could break your leg on those things. Lord Inglewood, you want to come in, but not about high heels.

Lord Inglewood: No, that is right. Professor Worthington, you said, I am sure rightly, that the infrastructure networks are crossing political boundaries. Does it follow from that that we should change the political boundaries to accommodate them?

Professor Worthington: No. It is much better that we recognise that there is never a perfect fit between all the different systems, because things will change over time. It is much better to start to get an attitude of mind that recognises that we live in a fuzzy world, a world of contrasts, a paradoxical world. In the old days, it was either this or that. We sat as a political organisation as if we were two sides of something. Now, it is both this and that. This really comes back to the fundamentals of the built environment. The built environment is a continually changing and adapting place. How do we create that ability to have both things? That is why you need allow for these overlaps, rather than try to control it all.

The Chairman: It is all about accessibility, is it not?

Professor Worthington: Yes, but accessibility is not just physical; there is accessibility in the mind.

The Chairman: It is about being open to new ideas but not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Professor Worthington: That is right.

The Chairman: You see it so many times.

Q202 Lord Woolmer of Leeds: Turning now to local authorities and devolved bodies, do you think they have right skills, guidance and capacity to integrate infrastructure in the built environment? Does the national planning practice guidance adequately support decision‑making, and is any further guidance needed?

Professor Worthington: Can I say something and then Esther? It has been a fascinating experience for the ITC to be allowed to go to all the city regions, work with them for a day and see what is happening. First, there is real commitment there to want to change and do things, but there is a big difference in relation to what will happen when we have real devolved power. By “power” I do not mean that they just have the responsibility; they actually have to have the power of money to do things and to think in the longer term, “What do I want?”, rather than, “What do I think central government wants?”. I believe there is a gap in how we develop things. The red‑line idea is very much because people feel risk. They are always up against risk, because they do not have control. You draw a red line around something, and that is what I am going to look at, yet we have just said that we need to look outside the red line to do things. I believe there has to be a beginning to work on, which is happening quite fast, to change attitudes about things and how we look at them.

Esther Kurland: The question is whether we have the right skills to deliver good infrastructure. It is incredibly patchy. Some places definitely deliver it. Other places do not. One of the challenges is to balance that out, because the need does not necessarily follow the resource. Interestingly, the GLA did some research recently on the number of people working in certain built environment areas, such as housing regeneration, and the number of houses that they were meant to be working on. They just did not match: the places with the most housing need did not have the staff, and the places without very much housing need had the staff. It is absolutely fascinating. That happens a lot with streets and highways as well.

A huge amount of luck is involved in local infrastructure, which may be the new local school, a doctor’s surgery, street improvement or something like that. It comes down to individuals, political leadership and how that political leadership will empower one or two people within an authority. A lot of the best schemes that I am aware of have had one person behind them who drives them. They allow others to develop the skills, or ensure or push others to develop the skills, and make sure it happens. Without that leadership, all the skills in the world in that authority are just not used and they dissipate.

As well as skills, motivation and support are needed. There is a scheme, which I did not show a picture of, in Leonard Circus in Hackney. There is a video of it on our website, if you are interested. It is an absolutely fascinating transformation of an incredibly boring crossroads into a local park, with everything going through it. There are new lunchtime cafés with loads of people in them. There are still cyclists going through it, people walking their dogs, big lorries going through it and everything. That cost £600,000. It was really cheap and it was done almost entirely by one officer working in that local authority. They had really good political leadership. They have gone now. They found it too much hassle working or did not want to continue with that type of work, and they have gone to do something different in another part of the country. That skill, experience and ability have gone. Those jewels, those individual people who know how to do it and can pass on that information to others are really important.

We are talking about a massive country, with thousands of people working on different schemes, but it just takes a few as a catalyst. Things bubble up from there, and people can get skills and develop. Just this week, we gave certificates to the first 20 people who finished a new course in cycling infrastructure so that they do not make the sorts of cycle lanes that were on that picture. They are all working for local authorities and they have committed to spending time coming to training and then doing an exercise that was checked by a university. They have passed, and now they are much more skilled at designing junctions for cycling. It can happen, but it needs the push and the will and empowering people to just get out and do it.

Lord Woolmer of Leeds: There are two kinds of infrastructure levels. You have touched on what I would almost call the micro level, which is very important. The professor talked about high‑speed rail, highways, new hospitals, major schools and so on. They are big infrastructure considerations. Do you think that local authorities are able in practice to take account of the need to integrate those kinds of significant infrastructure projects into the place of the communities where they are located and serve?

Professor Worthington: The will is there and the ability is potentially there at the top. There is very good leadership and mostly really interesting young people coming through. What is going to be critical, though, is how you transmit down through that leadership, the message that you are allowed to be pro-active. As mentioned, a lot of this is about giving people the sense that they can go out and do something. This is not just within your local authority; it is also recognising that an important thing is to work with what I call civil society. That is not exactly the same as localism, which was the neighbourhood, but it is those people who have civic pride in their city and city region, of whom there are a great number, often in organisations and the universities themselves. That is a big area that we can use in this. That is going to be important. There is a feeling that we do not have to control what they are doing; we just have to go and work with those people and give people permission to do things.

The head of the architects department of Copenhagen City Council told all her department that when somebody rings up you do not say, “No, you can’t do it”. You have to say yes to start with and then find out why it cannot be done. That is a simple idea, but that is what I believe this is about. It is not that the people are not willing; we have to change the mind-set.

Esther Kurland: Also, do not forget that not all the work has to be done by people in local authorities. They work very well in partnership with architects, planning consultants or developers. Where those partnership work, a whole range of skills which the authority might not need to use that often so would not necessarily want in-house all the time can be developed.

On the skills and capacity side, there is another interesting thing coming out of the GLA and the Farrell review of the built environment about planning first or having a cohort of built environment experts who can be seconded into different bodies for six months. The GLA is trialling that now with a few local authorities in London. If you need somebody who knows a lot more about schools, town centres or something, and you do not think that you want to or you cannot employ someone, even on a fixed‑term contract, there is a list of people who do want to do this who may not be from the public sector. You can second one of those into your authority for six months to help you do that. Every time that fleet‑of‑foot movement of skills happens, lots of learning is going on within that organisation. That sort of thing is a good way of getting things moving.

Q203 Lord Woolmer of Leeds: Professor, you have been to the new combined authorities. There is an issue with the scope and reach of the combined authorities and of the underlying local authorities. Outside Greater Manchester, do you feel that the balance of where the approach to infrastructure is taking place and the resources are is at the appropriate level? In other words, are the combined authorities covering these large areas going to have the skills and resources to develop and follow through the aspirations?

Professor Worthington: The two that are way ahead of the game are Greater London and Greater Manchester. Birmingham is a slightly different issue, because of course it had the West Midlands, but it needs to include the Black Country as well, which it is doing now. The thing that made the breakthrough in a way was Midlands Connect, which was not yet a transport authority. That is now putting it together. The latest growth thing last week, in which they have 20 or 30‑year money that has been put forward for what they can do, is very important. They are going to learn from what London and Manchester did, and Europe, which is very important to look at. They will learn why we need to collaborate to do things.

It would be difficult to answer in relation to each phase, but I would say that not every place is exactly the same. This is the old thinking from the top that one policy fits all. We start from places now and work backwards. The question you just asked me is very difficult to answer, but I am hopeful, and I have looked at what is happening.

The Chairman: Can I ask a question that we do not have on the list about leadership? “Leadership” is a word that is bandied around, but nobody really analyses what they mean by leadership. It is the ability to be risk‑taking and the ability to communicate, particularly with those on the same level as you, overseas, or even with the bosses or the Ministers. It also means—this sounds awfully cuddly and lovely—trying to encourage awareness of the fact that each person working for you or working in that area has a brain that has been underused. What is your idea on this? Do we need this in this area?

Professor Worthington: The Academy of Urbanism looks at great European cities. The biggest thing that comes out there is leadership. Leadership there is very interesting. You become Prime Minister of France, and then you go to your city, which is an even more important job, to be mayor. Alain Juppé is the mayor of Bordeaux. That is a big change. In the Netherlands, leadership is very interesting. The equivalent of what we call a lord mayor is positioned by the state, and the chief alderman is what we would call a mayor. It is about bringing the two things together, but in all cases these people have become the real leaders because they are looking at more than their little piece. When I look at the best people here, they are prepared to look across even their new regional boundaries to see what is going to happen between the regions.

Esther Kurland: I agree with your list of what a good leader could do, but this also relates to your first question about what we are trying to achieve and whether we know what “good” or “acceptable” looks like. A leader can set those objectives, and that is what we have seen in London. I am talking about London because I work in London, so I know it much better than anywhere else. We are trying to declutter streets and to improve bus networks, journey times or whatever it happens to be. Decisions about what your job is come down from the leadership and filter through whole organisations, which allows those organisations to work together and not to fracture. It is much more efficient. That is one of the less exciting bits of leadership, but it is absolutely vital. You have to make sure that it is clearly understood by everybody, is consistent and is in place long enough to actually matter.

The Chairman: That is very interesting.

Q204 Lord Freeman: My Lord Chairman, may I declare a rather modest interest as joint patron, with Lord Adonis, of the Independent Transport Commission? Professor Worthington will confirm that I have played no part in his distinguished work for the commission, for which we are all extremely grateful. My question is to what extent we can predict changing trends in transport, principally demand but also use. How can such forecasts help policymakers to plan for future impacts on the built environment?

Professor Worthington: First, I would just say that your role as a patron of the ITC is wonderful because you are looking across all modes of transport, which is what we are trying to do. I am one little piece of that.

On this issue of how we look ahead, we cannot predict exactly what lies ahead. What we can do, though, is look ahead and suggest scenarios to help us understand better what we should do now to move forward. If we think—and this is what frightens me—that we are going to build for something in 30 years’ time and will have 25,000 jobs and X million of turnover, that is still aspirational. It is nice to have an aspiration. That is what we would like, but we are not necessarily going to get there.

What can we do? First, we can be very prepared to look backwards. In everything that we are doing, the city is just a continuous process. What I have learnt in the work that I am doing on cities for the Independent Transport Commission is that each city has a legacy over the last 30 years of things that they started doing but is still unfinished business. We suddenly get a new thing coming in such as high‑speed trains, as if it is a whole new thing. You have to build on what you have already, work through it and see how that supports you. You need to understand where the big changes are going to happen that might change what will happen, and then start to model them. The work that BIS and the Government Office for Science are doing through Foresight on the future of cities with Sir Alan Wilson is absolutely excellent. That is something that we should continue and that should come back into our infrastructure thinking.

The Chairman: It is continuing outside the big cities, because the smaller cities are very often left behind in these things, and then become despairing and depressed. You see lots of pop‑up shops and things like that.

Professor Worthington: It is the whole integrated system.

Esther Kurland: There could be an answer to your question about the prosaic and the local as well, if you are interested in that. It is about the way we model predicted outcomes from changes to infrastructure at quite a detailed level. I am never convinced of how good that industry actually is, and I challenge it to recalibrate itself at times. We do not really understand cycling, for example. All the models for future transport use, either with a change or without a change, involve assumptions, and we do not necessarily always go back and test those assumptions to make sure that they are up to date. There is an industry involved in this and it may be worth looking into in more detail, because the outcomes from those models are very persuasive, numerical and influential. We should take them with a pinch of salt sometimes.

Lord Freeman: I wonder if I could ask one brief supplementary. Clearly there has been an improvement in central and indeed local government in looking at the impact of the built transport infrastructure, for example, roads and rail in particular, upon the local environment—towns and cities—and on daily life and commerce. Do we have further progress to make in analysing the impact of the built transport environment in particular?

Professor Worthington: First, we are saying look backwards to look forwards. Secondly, do not just look backwards. Try to understand what we said we wanted, what has actually happened and, more importantly, understand all the things that have come out of it that might not have been things we could have dreamt of.

Esther Kurland: The other side of that potentially is not to set things in stone, assume what the outcome of something is going to be and build for it without giving some wiggle‑room. We have seen quite a growth in trialling stuff, such as straw bales and the wonderful parklets, which are basically like B&Q decks. They get put on a couple of parking spaces for a couple of weeks, with some seating and stuff on it, to see what happens. If it causes a problem, you take it away again. Doing that kind of assessment and learning from those activities is obviously hard to do with a huge station, new train line or whatever, but it helps us to understand impacts, because people behave in ways that we do not expect and they adapt. Assumptions of what is going to happen, economically and physically, do not always work, so building temporary testing time into these schemes is potentially very useful.

Q205 Earl of Lytton: As you may know, I am a chartered surveyor, so I have an interest in some of this. My question relates to the planning policy in England and the need for what you have described as a strategic longer‑term approach, particularly in transport. You have talked about leadership and that sort of thing, but leaders come and go, elected members come and go, and bodies change their political colouration. Over the 30‑year period that you, Professor Worthington, were talking about, how do we harness that? We obviously need something like this, but how do we get it, or are we looking at the wrong bit of the equation?

Esther Kurland: Is it planning policy that you really want to drill down into? Planning policy as it is at the moment is slightly different from infrastructure investment plans.

Earl of Lytton: You explained earlier that infrastructure almost sits alongside planning, yet the infrastructure must take account of people actually wanting to use that, so there is a planning dimension there. How do we bolt these together so that they actually work, if not seamlessly, then rather less disjointedly than they sometimes seem to?

Esther Kurland: PTALs, public transport accessibility levels, are one element of the way planning looks at infrastructure. We have a feeling that we build more densely where PTALs are higher. They have been a key planning policy for the last 15 or more years, which is great, and are about the efficient use of land and the transport resources, but they are simplistic. They do not consider the capacity of that public transport infrastructure, its cost or the range of places that you can get to when doing that from that spot. It is just about getting on to the public transport system. There is that relationship between that form of investment in infrastructure and planning policies on what we build, but it is simplistic, and there is quite a lot of work going on to change that at this point. When it is changed and minds have been put to it, it needs time to bed down and to be accepted across the industry in the way the PTAL density concept has been accepted over the last 10 or so years.

The other element is the ingredients that make up a good neighbourhood, the things people need to go alongside housing in particular. I do not think we are particularly sophisticated in how we do that, not only in our understanding of what is needed where. The spatial dimension is often left out. Are those facilities somewhere where people can easily get to or not, compared to where the homes are being built? There is also the timing. It is a chicken-and-egg thing: we tend not to be hugely good at getting the infrastructure in before the people who need it. We wait until the people who need it have a problem before we do something about it, which gives planning a really bad name and probably leads to people not wanting anything to happen in their areas because they have seen this happen before. This is a well-known issue. The front‑loading of infrastructure provision is incredibly difficult to do in financial terms, but it is very important in order to get planning working.

Another element is incremental change. Where you have areas with lots of incremental change, the overall impact on infrastructure needs is not considered well enough. We have these master plans—I prefer the term “master path” rather than “master plan”, because they never end up as they should—for huge areas, where everything is planned together, we get a new school, new sewers and whatever else. On the back of that, the area next door sees massive change on individual sites. The cumulative impact on infrastructure need is not necessarily taken into account well enough. There are a lot of ways in which planning could be improved, but they probably all have resource implications and reasons why people have not done them and have not taken them forward. I hope that answers your question.

Professor Worthington: The question at the central level is the big infrastructure planning that you are talking about. We are seeing some interesting things happening. Essentially for five years the Cabinet Office, with Greg Clark, in the last Government was doing a lot of this on cities, and it is now shifting to DCLG. We are seeing the beginnings of bringing these two together. If one wants to see more than an experiment, you have to look to the Netherlands, which disbanded its department of the environment and communities, a quite extraordinary thing to do. It has gone into the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. They have a tradition there. The common thing that brought them all together was water, and the municipal water boards. Infrastructure is playing an equally important role in the UK now and over the next 30 years. It is the big integrator between everything. That was a very interesting move. We do not know exactly what is happening on that, but they were the leaders on physical space and planning. Their five‑year spatial plans were absolutely tremendous and they are still carrying on with that.

Baroness Whitaker: That is interesting. Very quickly, are you arguing for the concept of place-making to go much broader than the place that the authorities are actually thinking about? It should look at the impact on the neighbouring places, and national infrastructure and big infrastructure in particular must be integrated even into local place-making.

Esther Kurland: Of course.

Professor Worthington: That is it, all the time.

Baroness Whitaker: We do not have that.

Professor Worthington: No. Each time you do something, you must think outside your red line. Even someone who is just given a house to do has to think outside their red line. Each time you are given a red line, almost the first thing you think is, “What is happening outside it, because I am part of that, as well as what I do?”

Baroness Whitaker: Our planning structure does not reflect that.

Esther Kurland: Look at schemes like King’s Cross, where it does.

Baroness Whitaker: There is no counsel of perfection?

Esther Kurland: It may not be perfection, but there is also the question of how the area inside the red line pays for the infrastructure, whereas the areas just outside it do not. It is about capturing the value from those, which may very well benefit from the investment. CIL helps with that. Vauxhall and the Northern Line extension, for example, are big areas, but a lot of investment needs to be funded from one red-line area.

Q206 Baroness Young of Old Scone: You have probably almost answered this question. It is about the educational needs to get development and maintenance of resilience into the system. You have talked a lot about multi‑disciplinary education, but is there anything further, particularly in terms of this issue of resilience?

Professor Worthington: Education on the way you think and the way you work together is critical. That is the starting point. Resilience comes, of course, from a state of mind as well. I try all the time to think how I can adapt in the future. How do I ensure that value is based not just on looking at the cheapest thing now but on having built in enough slack in the system to allow me to change?

Baroness Young of Old Scone: How much do you reckon that happens at the moment? Is it hardly at all?

Professor Worthington: It is not happening sufficiently, because we assess projects much more in terms of value engineering and what we can cut out rather than value management. What do we need to do to ensure long‑term success?

The Chairman: Do they ever do a post‑audit four years after a new development?

Professor Worthington: What we call a post‑operative evaluation is critical. It has to be done not as an audit but as a learning process.

The Chairman: That is what I mean—using it as a learning process.

Professor Worthington: You are allowed to make mistakes. If we never made mistakes, we would not move forward.

Esther Kurland: The other side of education is that we need content to be able to educate people. That is about learning from what we have done, but we also need very clear policies and some research. When you talk about resilience, I guess you are talking more about flooding and such.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: I am talking about resilience in terms of demographic change and future technological change.

Esther Kurland: It is the ability of places to flex to respond to the demands that are being put on them at a time. We do not have fabulous content. It is not that we do not have the experience, but we do not have much policy on that.

The Chairman: It is interesting, because we are in the lead for scientific research and medical research, but in things like this, which have just as much impact on every man and woman in the country, we are not.

Esther Kurland: It is actually quite frightening how poorly we assess the impact of tall buildings on microclimate, for example. It is not that the science is not there; it is just that the requirement to do so, the processes and therefore the understanding are not there.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Could I just ask you one other thing that you talked about? You talked about resilience in terms of water, floods, climate change and stuff like that. How well do you think those elements of resilience are taken account of?

Esther Kurland: Again, it is very patchy.

Baroness Young of Old Scone: Do we need more guidance there?

Esther Kurland: We definitely do. The issue with floodwater and SUDS—sustainable urban drainage systems—which are a form of infrastructure, I am guessing, is that the local authority only really got the responsibility to manage this last April following a new Act. I cannot remember the name of the Act. There has been very little good practice in how they do that. It is about the attenuation of surface floodwater and the quality of that surface water. We desperately need some research or work to understand what best practice looks like here and how it can be delivered and paid for.

Q207 The Chairman: You were not present at the beginning of the last session, when they all seemed to have lists of 10 points, seven points, four points or three points. It was very helpful. I would love to ask you, if you have a spare half hour in your busy lives, to put down the things that you think are fundamental to the inquiry that we are doing on policies for the built environment. That would be very useful.

Professor Worthington: Is that in terms of change?

The Chairman: Yes, exactly. If somebody said to you, “Draw up a plan”, what do you need most to get it right? While I am on that, thank you very much for these pictures. We do not have time to go over them, unfortunately, but do you think you could give us a commentary, just a few one‑liners, on what we should be looking for in these pictures?

Esther Kurland: I certainly can, yes. There is also a book. I have brought a couple of copies. It has lots of before-and-after pictures of different street schemes, so this is the street element. It is not big infrastructure, but you might find them useful.

The Chairman: We would probably have to mention the copyright.

Esther Kurland: It is a TfL document.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for giving up your time and for being so engaging in your answers.