Building back better and building beautiful have to be grounded in ‘genius loci’ – the spirit and harmony of the places and localities in which we are creating well-designed homes and delivering the vital infrastructure to renew or create strong communities. Beyond homes themselves, the discretionary decisions made in local policy around the public realm cast long shadows in determining the character of places, potentially for generations.
Our placemaking workstream seeks to examine the role of housing and infrastructure in promoting opportunity and prosperity, the role of investment in leading renewal and the role of planning in creating successful and sustainable communities.
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The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 was first presented to Parliament a decade ago, enshrining in law the duty of public sector commissioning to pay regard to economic, social and environmental wellbeing when making procurement decisions. In this time, the incorporation of a social value element into the assessment of public sector contracts has […]
A group of ten Conservative MPs from the 2019 intake has today set out an ambitious blueprint for the future of housing to rethink the social and economic role of housing over the next decade. The proposals are contained in a post-Budget essay collection entitled “Valuing Housing, Improving Lives’ and encompass how housing policy and […]
Although its principles are now well-established and practiced, the full promise of a total place approach to area budgeting and comprehensive public service reformation in localities remains unrealised. At a time when ministers and officials are straining all means necessary to funnel billions of pounds from the health service’s 70th anniversary budget boost into shovel-ready […]
Productive businesses need prosperous communities to thrive and grow – prosperous communities need productive and profitable businesses. This report argues the relationship is symbiotic. However, the local economic landscape has changed and the relationship between major business and “place” must now be renewed if local industrial strategies are to deliver local economic success. Recommending that […]
The fight for cleaner air is one of liveability. What changes and investments are society willing to take for their place to be a more pleasant one to live and work in? How willing are people, businesses and governments to change the way they operate for a more sustainable economy? At what point do questions […]
The state of the public service market is much more precarious now than in the past, with a number of major government contracts being either cancelled or bailed out at taxpayer expense. With concerns over profitability mounting and contracting bodies seeking to meet stringent savings’ targets, margins for failure have become perilously narrow. As profitability […]
Skills reform is a political priority, a point acknowledged in the emphasis placed on it in the Government’s Industrial Strategy, which vowed to “put technical education on the same footing as our academic system, with apprenticeships and qualifications such as T-levels”. A critical component of skills reform is developing a robust further education (FE) sector. […]
Universities contribute to one in every hundred new business births in the UK . Across the country, there are pockets of excellence in supporting enterprise and entrepreneurship and there is an escalator of business support. But too many universities are doing too little. According to national research , 35% of universities did not contribute to […]
This report shows the disparity in robustness of England’s local labour markets. Looking at the vulnerabilities of local labour markets to the impact of changes to migration policy after Brexit, the automation of manual jobs, and the challenges of deficient skills bases and demographics, we see a country which is moving beyond the ‘north-south divide’ as […]
The number of homes bought by people aged twenty-five to forty-four with a mortgage has dropped by over 1.6 million in just over a decade. Over the same period the number of homes owned outright by people aged over sixty-five increased by over 1.4 million. What we are witnessing is the accelerated decline of the […]