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What next for Design Codes?

Design Codes are still central to achieving high quality and beautiful new homes, but with a change in Government and a new consultation on proposed amends to the NPPF, what’s next for them? Head of Design, Stephen Taylor and Senior Urban Designer, Neil Harvie, explain the current situation and look at what the future might hold based on proposed NPPF amends. Our downloadable PDF provides a guide to current and emerging Design Codes across England.

Current situation 

The below downloadable plan illustrates the current and forthcoming Design Codes across England. This position will continue to shift and grow.

To develop a Design Code a significant number of authorities have received Pathfinder Funding from the Office for Place and some authorities are using other funding such as the Planning Skills and Delivery Fund. In addition, there are several authorities who have progressed creating design standards in various guises without further central Government funding. Each design standard is expected to be increasingly aligned with the National Model Design Code (NMDC) as the NPPF consultation points out the NMDC “… is now in widespread use”.

Pitfalls in preparation and adoption 

Many local authorities are experiencing protracted programmes towards adoption of Design Codes. Earlier this year we hosted a series of developer workshops with Office for Place to understand the successes and issues. Continuing this conversation with our partners and clients potential causes that have presented themselves are:  

1. Issues around local plan preparation and adoption 
2. Lack of resource to prepare the code and difficulty scoping something that is authority-wide 
3. ‘Biting off more than they can chew’ tackling a huge number of design possibilities that intersect with many different stakeholders and communities or insufficient collaboration between interests (such as the Local Highways Authority, Environment Agency, Historic England etc.) 

Writing good Codes

Writing design standards is not new, they have appeared in various guidance, development plan policies and supplementary documents, such as the Essex Design Guide or the London Housing Design Guide. What is new, is the invitation and impetus of the National Model Design Code to do so with clarity and consistency that fosters certainty and creates a level playing field within the planning and design process. On the flipside, this invitation is very broad and gives rise to some of the pitfalls that authoring a Design Code faces.

A well written Design Code is clear, with explicit design parameters providing certainty and consistency for development, and achieving a good understanding of the local context through consultation and liaison with stakeholders. Codes are good for design standards that can be consistently applied, but are not as good at dealing with variety.  

In short, a well written and targeted Code will speed up the route to consent and reduce friction throughout the process. We are putting this into practice on new settlement projects such as Langford Bridge with Persimmon in South Devon, part of a 1,500-home allocation. Here our Design team authored a Code which we subsequently used to quickly move from outline consent to breaking ground on the first phase. We are now working on future phases with more confidence on delivery. 

Proposed amendments in the NPPF 

The proposed revision approach in the NPPF consultation is to achieve sustainable growth in our planning system, and more specifically look at increasing housing supply. Design Codes are a key component to this with their potential to create certainty and a clear pathway for consent. The amendments are helpful to achieving clarity and avoiding pitfalls which are a challenge faced by Design Code authors.  

Beauty 

Whilst it may be possible to paraphrase an entire intellectual journey considering what is beautiful to ‘beauty is whatever is in the Design Code’, it is a lot more convincing to state that a ‘well-designed place follows its Design Code’.  

Beauty is a problematic concept for securing a policy position, previous revisions of the NPPF increased its use, the latest revisions have reversed it in favour of ‘well-designed places and buildings’ - it is much easier to apply a Design Code to that shared understanding of what is ‘well-designed’. 

Area wide to local  

There is a clear directive in the latest NPPF consultation:  

“Rather than district-wide design coding, we want to focus local planning authority efforts on the preparation of localised design codes, masterplans and guides for areas of most change and most potential – including regeneration sites, areas of intensification, urban extensions and the development of large new communities.” 

This moves the emphasis away from the district-wide codes identified in the Levelling Up & Regeneration Act. We welcome this as we’ve found that area wide codes often drift into character assessments and struggle to provide the effective design standards needed for a successful code. 

Density 

The December 2023 NPPF inserted a line on “significant uplifts in the average density of residential development may be inappropriate…” which has been dropped in a return to the emphasis for plans to seek a “significant uplift in the average density of residential development”.

Whilst density is invited as a Design Standard within a Design Code, density is increasingly specified within development plan documents such as recent Draft Local Plans proceeding in South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath & North East Somerset. They demonstrate increased willingness to challenge the past convention of 30/35dph and look to increase to upwards of 40dph, with higher densities in urban and highly accessible locations.  

Density will be an important factor when considering grey-belt land and its “high sustainable development potential” by local authorities. The use of density as a measure is growing but itself is not well defined with varied methodologies between RICS, local policies and different accepted conventions. We continue to navigate this issue in our work - particularly in the South-East in places, such as Guildford - bringing forward new communities following Green Belt release. Our Design Codes link local case studies, best practice examples, clear definitions and qualities to provide suitable density parameters. 

Our asks 

With the new Government promising to deliver 1.5m new homes over the next five years, Design Codes will play an essential role, providing a critical framework through which better homes and places are built. There is a spectrum of routes to take in creation of codes that could lead to ineffective Design Standards, but there is also a window of opportunity to foster certainty and clarity within the planning and design process.  

To foster this certainty and clarity we advocate: 

1. Local authorities must carefully consider scope and the vision of their Design Codes and select design standards that respond directly to those issues – this will enable constructive engagement, facilitate robust evidence gathering, be proportionate and enable them to adopt effective and practical policies. 
2. Continuing to invite developers and design teams to better inform practical and deliverable design standards on major development sites. This could be done in partnership or within a consortium to secure a pathway to consent. 
3. A revised National Model Design Code should: 
   a) Acknowledge Design Standards in general across all policy platforms, not limited to Design Codes, and where other policy instruments may be appropriate (such as the NDSS and Density in Local Plans). 
   b) Provide guidance on writing proportionate design standards that could range from more flexible guidance to stricter codes and the situations that different approaches work best for fostering certainty or facilitating a head start in the planning and design process. 
   c) Provide further clear guidance on the Levelling Up & Regeneration Act that an ‘area-wide code’ need not be literal allowing code writers the flexibility to focus on key issues. 
4. Better resourced local authorities to furnish effective programmes for the creation of design standards and understand how to create certainty in the planning and design process. Part of this will need stakeholder bodies to be encouraged to engage positively for holistic, realistic and successful Design Codes. This could entail code sharing and shared resources between different areas. 

Having recently completed a secondment with the Office for Place reviewing the first pathfinders and informing tools and processes to support Code creation, Stephen Taylor and Neil Harvie are expertly placed to help our clients navigate the planning and design process. Please get in touch for more information.

21 August 2024