In 1979, 49% of all qualified architects in the UK worked in the public sector, designing housing, schools, hospitals and parks, in the rosy days when local authorities still had budgets for such luxuries. Now that figure is just 0.7%.
The dramatic decline has been due to both the removal of councils’ powers to build their own housing, which ended under Margaret Thatcher, and the atomising of the planning process into specialist areas of expertise. Planning applications are now examined by officers responsible for heritage and highways, trees and bat welfare, but rarely is there someone with an overarching design vision for the place in question.
Councils have had their budgets slashed, but even those with resources are desperately struggling to recruit the right people: last year, in the east of England alone, local authorities spent £700,000 advertising 115 vacancies. Most are being forced to use external consultants and private agencies to fill the gap, which can cost twice as much as traditional recruitment, while eroding local knowledge. Often, these short-term staffers haven’t even visited the places they’re adjudicating over.
n 1979, 49% of all qualified architects in the UK worked in the public sector, designing housing, schools, hospitals and parks, in the rosy days when local authorities still had budgets for such luxuries. Now that figure is just 0.7%.
The dramatic decline has been due to both the removal of councils’ powers to build their own housing, which ended under Margaret Thatcher, and the atomising of the planning process into specialist areas of expertise. Planning applications are now examined by officers responsible for heritage and highways, trees and bat welfare, but rarely is there someone with an overarching design vision for the place in question.
Councils have had their budgets slashed, but even those with resources are desperately struggling to recruit the right people: last year, in the east of England alone, local authorities spent £700,000 advertising 115 vacancies. Most are being forced to use external consultants and private agencies to fill the gap, which can cost twice as much as traditional recruitment, while eroding local knowledge. Often, these short-term staffers haven’t even visited the places they’re adjudicating over.
A big obstacle to attracting new recruits is the stigma around working in the public sector. There remains a widely-held stereotype that planning departments are the realm of dusty, tweed-jacketed types, nested in their booths for the last half century. Williams says that when he started at Croydon, a colleague pitied him, assuming he had ended up there because he couldn’t get a job in an architecture practice.
“We need to challenge the idea of what ‘success’ looks like,” says Agrawal, a Cambridge and UCL architecture graduate who now works in the GLA regeneration team. “When you’re studying, the expectation is that you’ve succeeded when you set up your own practice. It would be great if it could be communicated that there are other, potentially much more fulfilling opportunities out there.”
One architect who has found such fulfilment later in life is Ken Rorrison, who recently left the architecture firm he founded over 20 years ago, Henley Halebrown Rorrison, to become design manager of the 95-person strong regeneration team at Hackney council, helping to deliver 4,000 homes across the borough.
“It sounds trite, but I felt there was another way of making a difference and getting more involved in the bigger picture,” he says. “As an architect, you’re driving up the quality of individual buildings, but what excited me was connecting these things together with an overarching view. I feel really useful. And there’s far more autonomy than you might imagine.”
Beginning with a cohort of 16 people, the Public Practice placements will run for a year, initially in London and the south-east, but with the ambition to grow into a national network. Potential applicants might be put off by perceptions of public sector pay, but the positions will have a salary of £30-50,000, a good deal more than many practices offer. “And you get to have a life,” says Rorrison.
The pressure for change is coming from the development industry too. Housebuilders have identified providing additional resources to local council planning departments as the single most important policy measure to boost housing supply – part of why Berkeley Group and British Land, along with the GLA, Peabody and others, are supporting Public Practice. Williams hopes the forthcoming 20% increase in planning fees will go towards funding more proactive planning too.
With many councils finally setting up their own house-building departments, and several thousand local authority-led homes already in the pipeline across the country, the initiative couldn’t come at a better time. Now is the time to attract the best minds to the public sector.
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