Andrew Taylor is a man on a mission: to change the perception of house building and heal the rifts within the industry. Here, he tells Housing View how Gove can fix the planning system with a single letter, the positivity of development, and his favourite door
by Ben Wakeling
Michael Gove could kickstart the nation’s planning crisis with a single letter, says Andrew Taylor; a simple note to all local authorities instructing them to approve quality development, and to have a local plan in place in two years’ time.
“It might be a bit longer than that,” Taylor adds, “but it’s about changing that narrative to say that he expects people to approve applications, he expects people to get a local plan in place, and if you don’t have the local plan in place, there will be consequences.”
Changing the narrative is one of Taylor’s key focuses as Group Planning Director for Vistry; whether it be altering how the public reacts to new development, how local authorities view central Government, or how developers work with local authorities.
It’s a refreshing perspective in an industry currently rife with fractures. We forget, says Taylor, that all parties involved in the housebuilding sector have one aim: to build homes.
“A home is such a basic thing that humans need for their lives, and yet it’s one of the most argued about things that we seem to have,” he says. “It’s a basic necessity, that human need for somewhere to be safe and warm, and bring up a family, yet it’s argued about all over the place.”
Back to Gove, then, and the planning system, which Taylor describes as “sclerotic”, mostly as a result of uncertainty at national policy level and a lack of staff and resources on the ground. The system itself works; fundamentally, it can deliver “fantastic schemes, if you have the right attitude from local councils or the right staff with the right experience”, remarks Taylor.
But it needs direction, it needs resource, and – most of all – it needs action. Taylor spends much of his working life in meetings at various locations, which he documents on his LinkedIn page in a series of photographs of doors. One day he could be behind the iconic black door of 10 Downing Street (“a fantastic place to go, but you’ll talk on theoretical policy for an hour and a half”); the next, he might be attending a meeting at a 1960s local authority office, or walking through the ornate fluted stone columns of Kings Chambers’ London headquarters.
The door which means the most to him, though, can be found at Vistry’s Acton Gardens development in Ealing. It’s a front door to one of the apartments.
“It’s the door to somebody’s brand new home, to completely change the environment in which they were living, and potentially also their life chances,” he says. Before Countryside Partnerships (now part of Vistry) broke ground on the site it was an area full of crime, where even locals would walk around it instead of through it. Now, it is a growing community which represents, Taylor says, “the ability through development to change the course of somebody’s life.”
For Taylor, this is what the housing industry is all about: the convergence of expertise from multiple parties to improve neighbourhoods, invest money in the area, and ultimately place door keys in the hands of those who have finally realised their dream of owning or renting a home.
But, in order to do this successfully, the narrative needs to change. “We’ve got to change that dial,” says Taylor, “change the nature of how we talk about development, from senior politicians all the way through society, because it’s always seen as a negative aspect.
We’ve got to change the nature of how we talk about development, from senior politicians all the way through society
“We have to do the right thing,” he adds, referencing Vistry’s motto. “If we have committed to do something through the planning process, then we need to be doing it. We need to be shouting about the benefits of development; every single site should have a big board saying: ‘We have delivered thirty affordable houses’, or ‘We have paid millions of pounds towards secondary school education’. We need to be continually talking about the positive nature of the industry.”
But this is easier said than done, when factions within the industry spend more time pointing fingers than collaborating on building homes, and Housing Ministers come and go with alarming regularity (“some are very focussed on doing a good job and delivering, some are on a steep learning curve,” remarks Taylor).
The planning system is also wrestling with a concept which has always been important, but has recently hit the headlines: beauty.
“I would always argue that we should be striving for good design,” says Taylor – but there is a balance to be struck. Building a hundred homes of good quality but standard design, he argues, is in many ways more beneficial in providing new homes for families who desperately need them, than building fifty magnificently designed homes on the same piece of land.
In addition, there is a tug-of-war between the concept of beauty and planning guidance. In April 2023 Michael Gove blocked a proposed Berkeley Group scheme in Tunbridge Wells for being “of a generic suburban nature”, criticising the standard housebuilder layout and design.
“That’s pretty much the entire market, isn’t it?” questions Taylor. “As planners we do respond to the context in which we’re working, but we do also have to meet current planning guidance regarding the amount of garden space, the amount of car parking space, back-to-back distances, and you naturally end up with a generic housebuilder design, because that’s how the planning policies are designed.”
I think most of the arguments are disingenuous, and people shout from their sidelines rather than actually unpicking
Yet more push and pull, then, in an industry which is suffering from a lack of cohesiveness and direction, focussed more on slinging accusations than granting applications. A common rhetoric is land banking by developers, who are accused of not building plots with planning permission until property values have risen.
Taylor has worked on both sides of the fence, spending nineteen years in local government before moving across to the private sector in 2016 as Head of Planning for Barratts.
“One of the biggest things I learned moving from one to the other is that I didn’t know an awful lot about the way the developer industry worked,” he recalls. “From a local government perspective, you’re granting all these consents in different places, and some of them aren’t getting built, and you are powerless to do anything.”
Cue further unhelpful narrative from both sides. “I think most of the arguments are disingenuous,” states Taylor, “and people shout from their sidelines rather than actually unpicking and saying: ‘Well, actually, we do have a problem on these fifty sites across the country and how can we collectively unlock those to actually get delivery happening?’”
The same can be said for arguments about Green Belt land, which hit the headlines on occasion. Describing it as a “fantastic but misunderstood policy”, Taylor urges common sense and levelheadedness when talking about such an emotive subject.
“You can turn to new development to say, ‘this piece of Green Belt land is not accessible, it’s not particularly beautiful’ – but if we have development here that is well designed, and we have a country park, you can actually enhance access to that area for new residents, existing residents and the surrounding area. You’re creating a much better use of that Green Belt space than just protecting a field for the sake of it.”
When he’s not attending meetings behind front doors or seeking ways to calm a quarrelsome industry, Taylor can be found supporting those who have chosen a career in planning, whether it be as part of the Royal Town Planning Institute (where he was Chair for four years from 2013 to 2016), or as an Advisory Board Member for Women in Planning.
“I believe any professional should give back as part of their role,” says Taylor. “We need more people coming through the talent pool for the development industry generally. You need to be able to support people and make it a welcoming environment.”
There may be some way to go to make the industry a welcoming environment for all; but Taylor remains optimistic.
“Fundamentally, we’re providing safe homes for people to live in,” he concludes. “And that should be really, really important.”
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