Cutting bureaucracy: Smash the system!

When listening to any politician’s speech there’s a test you can apply to see if what they’re saying is memorable. Just ask yourself if anyone could, conceivably, say the precise opposite.

So when a politician delivers tells you they’re in favour of economic growth and social justice just ask yourself if they would ever speak out in support of stagnation and blind prejudice. Most political speeches are designed not to challenge, provoke and persuade, but simply to establish in the listener’s mind what a good bloke the speaker is. And that’s done by the politician showing that they share the values of their audience. So blandness rules. And platforms resound to pious declarations in favour of equality, liberty and fraternity. Which make one almost yearn for a spirited call to arms in support of hierarchy, slavery and enmity.

There are, of course, exceptions. JFK challenged the audience at his inaugural speech by inviting them to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country. It’s a cliché now, but at the time it was a powerful counterblast to the prevailing current of 20th-century political thought, which regarded the expansion of the state, not the strengthening of civil society, as the answer to life’s woes.

Similarly, when Winston Churchill told the British people that all he had to offer was blood, sweat and tears, he was breaking with the tradition of the previous 20 years when politicians had promised to keep people cosily safe. Churchill’s predecessors had pledged to give the electorate the opposite of what he promised – they had offered a balanced peace, wise negotiation and statesmanlike compromise – but the result of such softness was not security, but strife.

Pious declarations in favour of equality, liberty and fraternity make one almost yearn for a spirited call in support of hierarchy, slavery and enmity

There are parallels today, in all too many areas, from the Middle East to our own prison yards, but there is a parallel also in the attitude we take towards construction.

Just as Churchill realised that the pendulum had swung too far in favour of appeasement, so more and more people are realising today that we have become too averse, as a society, to risk and adventure. Just as appeasement was an understandable reaction to the horror of earlier wars, so our current risk-aversion developed in reaction to the excesses of modernist brutalism and the slipshod practices of yesteryear’s sites.

But this has become an over-reaction. A generation ago a call for greater attention to health and safety would have been seen as a challenge to unscrupulous employers. Today anyone asking for a tightening of the rules should be kept away from most people in the property world for the sake of their own health and safety.

I have lost count of the number of businessmen in my own constituency who’ve told me they are operating at the margin of viability because the burden of regulation has increased as the volume of their trade has diminished. And it’s not just health and safety protocols that inhibit growth. It’s a culture of conformity and compliance, policed through building regulations and planning rules.

Can I speak up for an architecture that isn’t safe? Can I ask for a whiff of danger to be put back into building?

The scope for for genuinely risk-taking development, for architectural distinction, for creativity in our built environment, has been squeezed out by a system that is so complex that only the volume builders, with their off-the-shelf constructs from the pattern book, can find their way through.

Just think, in the land of Lutyens, Vanbrugh, Wren, Pugin, Barry and the Adams, how many genuinely original architects today are making a big contribution to reshaping our landscape, with works of maverick genius that change how we see ourselves?

So can I speak up for an architecture that isn’t safe? Can I ask for a whiff of danger to be put back into building? Can I, in particular, ask for the deregulation of the landscape on which we wish to see innovation develop?

How about, for starters, lowering the barriers to entry for new builders, with a more flexible approach to the policing of health and safety, the removal of some of these silly use class order boundaries, the scrapping of so much of the prescriptive detail in the building regs, the end of all the rules on sustainability that prevent small settlements expanding properly and a myriad other planning pettinesses?

It’s only by making the business of building cheaper, and unleashing the innovation of new entrants to the market, that we’ll ever get the boost to our economy, and the advance for social justice, which more houses would mean. And while that may not be a memorable or brave thing for a politician to argue for, it still certainly beats the opposite.