Labour’s distaste towards ‘beauty’ risks undermining its drive to build more homes - Bartek Staniszewski

Last week, Matthew Pennycock, the Minister for Housing, announced the closure of the Office for Place. The spiritual heir to Roger Scruton’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, it was a quango set up in 2021 with the help of Robert Jenrick and Michael Gove.

Its aim was to make the built environment more beautiful and community-friendly: “evolving science of place” and creating the tools to support communities to create beautiful places. It was to serve as a foil against the faceless, everywhere-and-nowhere developments that are present across most English towns and inevitably attract public opposition, throwing gasoline on the fire of NIMBYism that is already suffocating the country.

Its closure is not symptomatic of Labour’s desire to reduce the size of the state by closing down quangos – rather, it is symptomatic of a lack of belief in beauty as something that matters, or even exists.

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Nicholas Boys-Smith, the (until recently) Interim Chair of the Office for Place was not expecting this move. He wrote recently that Pennycock “confirmed to the BBC that [the Office for Place’s] existence was secure,” only to inform Boys-Smith two weeks later that the Office will be closing. Indeed, Labour made nods to the Office for Place’s mantra of pro-development, pro-beauty back in Opposition. At last year’s Labour Party Conference, Keir Starmer promised to reform planning to encourage Georgian-style townhouse blocks – so-called ‘gentle density,’ a vision for beautiful development largely coined by Boys-Smith himself.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during her visit to a housing development. PIC: Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/PA WireDeputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during her visit to a housing development. PIC: Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/PA Wire
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during her visit to a housing development. PIC: Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/PA Wire

The closure of the Office for Place would be more forgivable if it was part of a general push for the reduction in the number of quangos – which are often instruments designed to expand the power of the state and intervene in things that would be better off with less bureaucracy rather than more – but few things are further from the truth. In early August, The Guardian’s Eleni Courea found that Labour had already announced 13 new quangos and similar public bodies. More have been announced since, such as the Office for Value for Money.

Closure of the Office for Place is nothing to do with a push towards the reduction in the ballooning size of the state, but rather is illustrative of Labour’s distaste towards beauty as a concept. Shortly before the Office for Place was closed, Labour’s proposed revisions to the National Planning Policy Framework – the document at the heart of the UK’s planning policy – removed from it all references to beauty. Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for Housing, defended the decision saying that “beautiful' means nothing really.”

But beautiful means a lot to the people who live near it – or who do not get that privilege. There is a reason why residents of London are willing to pay twice as much to live in Richmond rather than Stratford despite Stratford being closer to central London – Stratford is ugly, while Richmond is beautiful. Besides being a good in-and-of-itself, beauty also improves social cohesion and is good for the environment. If Labour succeed to build as many homes as they promise, it is all the more imperative they build them well rather than continuing the “soulless” development so common in Britain today.

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By pushing ahead with development without regard for beauty, Labour risks repeating what they did to onshore wind in the 2000s. Backslash against the proliferation of onshore wind turbines without regard for the locals who live near them led to an effective ban on new onshore wind developments being introduced in 2015. It was only abolished nine years later. We must not let the same happen to new homes.

Bartek Staniszewski is a senior research fellow at the Bright Blue think tank.

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