Nine months into its first term, the Labour government remains under pressure to prove it can meet its flagship pledge: the delivery of 1.5 million new homes over five years. Planning applications are at historic lows, and despite a string of policy reforms, the housing pipeline remains stubbornly slow to pick up.

The scale of the task is compounded by the lessons of history. Previous bursts of rapid housebuilding left behind mixed legacies. Poor public realm, car dependency and inadequate social infrastructure have been recurring themes when design has taken a back seat to numbers. The question now is whether the current housebuilding drive can avoid repeating those mistakes.

For Jas Bhalla, an architect and planner who leads Jas Bhalla Works, the stakes are clear. His training spans both disciplines – planning at the Bartlett, architecture at Yale – and his current work includes private houses, major settlements and public realm-led urban strategies. “We are not architects who are interested in masterplanning,” he says. “We are planners who also do architecture”.

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