Letters: Kickstarting better housing design
Lynsey Hanley (Comment, 2 February) puzzles why Design for Homes has not joined in attacks on the Homes and Communities Agency's housebuilding rescue plans. She worries that the HCA awarded emergency funds to unbuilt schemes which scored badly in desktop reviews. These desktop reviews used a matrix called Building for Life, which I wrote in April 2002 so that housebuilding's many professions could have a common language for assessing how accessible, safe and welcoming a new-build development is. The matrix works well when visiting built schemes, but it can be very unreliable without a site visit supported by background knowledge. In 2008 Lynsey was one of several judges who honoured developments on the basis of Building for Life reviews. One of the "winners" is already reported in its local paper to be "a hub for antisocial behaviour a year after first residents moved in".
Building for Life is like a race meeting form card. It give you one person's calculation of the odds for success. But ultimately privileged knowledge of the track and the runners should guide your selection – which is how the HCA works with its local procurement teams. Design for Homes remains unconvinced that remote desktop reviews should be the overriding process for deciding how £1bn of public money should be wagered.
David Birkbeck
Chief executive, Design for Homes
• Your correspondents do not do justice to the Kickstart programme managed by the HCA (Letters, 5 February). While Building for Life assessments provide an important initial quality check, these are supplemented by our own local design teams. In fact we rejected 11 schemes outright on the basis of poor design quality. Kickstart is so far unlocking more than 10,000 much-needed new homes and maintaining capacity and safeguarding jobs in the housebuilding industry.
Bob Kerslake