Ahead of Grand Designs Live at the NEC Birmingham, we grabbed a chat with Kevin McCloud to get his thoughts on a landmark year for the show, and what he’d like to see in the upcoming budget. And, pleasingly, he was in fearlessly outspoken form...
Grand Designs Live is a quite a big one this time around: twenty-five years of the show…
Yeah, and it's a nice opportunity to celebrate it. We produced a special programme .We've done the book, which is very exciting. We’ve got a new series out. Channel Four hosted a very lovely party for the team. And I've designed a commemorative tea towel! We should be selling the tea towel at the exhibition. I don't know why we're not doing that. It’s a limited edition tea towel, but I think it's got huge commercial potential!
Obviously, we've got the autumn budget coming up at the end of this month. Do you have any hopes or predictions around house building and property?
So here's the thing: this government, like all previous governments, is obsessed by numbers. Politicians make this classic mistake, in my view, of confusing quality with quantity. They demand enough numbers and somehow expect the market to respond by delivering those numbers.
Actually, the whole house building market, and model, is broken. It's entirely organised around profit and the return to shareholders.
It's all about the numbers, and I just wish a government would turn around and say we believe in delivering a quality of life, a quality of service, the quality of experience in architecture.
I think that civilization can be judged on four counts: education, social care, health care and housing. By which I mean, you know, affordable housing.
If we are going to try and drive quality in education and quality in care and in the NHS, through reform and through analysis and through careful consideration of what quality means - and already Wes Streeting has said on health care, we're going to move from curative to preventive health care, to start improving the health of the nation, that's a lovely qualitative ambition - and I just wish they would do the same with housing.
I think it would manifest itself in the saying something like the Scottish government have said, that is: let's move towards passive housing. Let's demand that every new home is built to a really high environmental standard. Let's move towards increased space, better storage, and the use of more architects in the social housing sector.
Let’s give local authorities the power to improve and demand better from builders, with building standards over and above those set by national government.
This is something that I made a series about last year for Channel Four: The Great Climate Fight.
My contribution was to talk about this exact thing how we get government to conform to its obligations in the 2008 Climate Act, which is to allow local authorities to set building standards higher than those in national government standards and subsequent to the 2008 Climate Act.
In 2016 Eric Pickles, and in January of this year, Michael Gove also said, actually, no we don't think local government should be allowed to do this. No, not at all. In fact, we're not going to allow it, even though the 2008 Climate Act says they can.
And there's no sign as yet from this government that anything is changing.
So that's what I'll be asking for. I'll be asking for quality.
You’ve said before that you think lobbying should be banned. How do you feel about the current scandal around donations?
I think lobbying should be banned. I think it's an anti-democratic process. It's very simple. Why should a few powerful elite individuals running global corporations have the ability to manipulate and sway government policy to the detriment of the needs of the rest of us?
Back to the question of whether 1.5 million houses are realistic: do you think that it shouldn't be done on the numbers at all?
Well, it's irrelevant.
You have a housing market which has moved from a position in 2009 where it was trying to deliver against government targets to one today, where profits on the average new home have jumped from £6000 per new dwelling on average to £65,000 per new dwelling on average.
And in that time, by the way, costs have remained static and land values have remained relatively static. For these developers, the focus has shifted from delivering against government targets to delivering profits to shareholders.
Persimmon to March 2022 turned over 4.4 billion pounds and made a 25 per cent profit of £1.1 billion. These are rough generalised figures, but in any other industry, 25 per cent profits would be seen as obscene.
That goes to shareholders. It's just as simple as that. That's what the focus is.
So it doesn't matter what government targets are set, it's irrelevant to that industry.
Does that industry want to deliver against government targets? Does it really want to deliver a surfeit of housing or to deliver against demand? Why would it do that?
Because that creates a basically a situation where you've supplied everything that's demanded of you. In which case, prices start to come down. No one's interested in the industry and prices coming down. They want prices to go up.
It's a simple rule of simple laws of supply and demand. If you create a restriction in the supply, prices go up because things are in short supply, people compete for them.
I think we're already seeing the result of the poor quality with the ongoing cladding scandal.
What we're seeing there is 40 years worth of lack of training and investment in professional standards within construction. Nobody was prepared to take accountability. Nobody was prepared to take responsibility. Everybody was hoping, praying, cheating, ignoring and it's a scandal which is waiting to be repeated.
We have a supply chain which has been deskilled over 40 years, and professionals have been effectively emasculated. They've been removed from the accountability and the verification processes within the supply chain. So engineers have been replaced through processes like design and build. Instead, you've got managers in development companies trying to value engineer schemes down in price and a supply chain which is interested in helping them and obviously just making a sale.
I've just watched it happen over 40 years.
Grenfell was a huge and terrible, terrible thing involving the loss of great life. And it was a tragedy on a national scale. And every day there are smaller construction problems which beset industry. And they don't get written about so much, but who knows when the next big one is?
More positively, what do you think to RIBA’s Neave Brown Award (for social housing) and all the interesting council housing projects?
This is something that we talk about a lot at Grand Designs Live. A question which often gets asked is, how come all this tech that we see on Grand Designs isn’t on my local housing. How come they're still building putting radiators into homes?
And my answer is, I'm afraid that that tech leapfrogs the private sector and goes straight into the social housing sector. So the one area still employing architects, where you see underflow heating, infrared heating, air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, solar panels, new tech and established good tech, is in the social housing sector, where landlords take a really long term view about the wellbeing of their occupants and their tenants.
And consequently, you get, the Neave Brown Award which is lovely. Neave is such a worthy architect to remember it by. I visited some of his schemes which are just beautiful, even at 40-60 years old. Just so good.
So I think, yeah it's a really thriving sector. And if the government wants to look anywhere…
I mean, it's frustrating to me because if you want to understand what really good housing is, you don't need to go to Germany, you don't need to go to Sweden, you don't need to go to Holland. You can just go and visit the local housing association and see the passive housing they're building for their residents.
And it's ironic, isn't it? That we end up building bigger homes with better standards to a higher level of performance to give people more comfortable low carbon and low cost lives in in the UK, and it's in the social housing sector.
I visited so many schemes here which showed that you can do it at scale and you can make profits and you can do it all.
That's what the great climate fight was about. I went to Sweden to look at social housing and then visited some amazing examples in the UK.
And I found this extraordinary thing, up in Lancaster, a wonderful passive house scheme of 40 new homes built by a local developer for a local housing association. And he made profit. He made about 12-15 per cent profit on the thing. He was happy. Housing Association were delighted. Residents were super delighted because they got these super low cost homes. And it was just as the heating crisis was really beginning to bite. They were living in homes with 1/10 of the size of bills of people living in conventional homes.
And all across the country, we found local authorities fighting the government to try and set their own building standards. I mean, fighting really hard. Michael Gove was supposed to come to Leicester to look at housing with us, but he reneged on that.
That's the frustrating thing. They can do it here. You can do it anywhere.
