It’s the time of year when the UK’s schoolchildren and its MPs both take an extended summer break, content in the knowledge that their work assignments for the year have been completed. When this July’s summer recess approached, parliamentarians bore a resemblance to tardy schoolchildren handing in their homework at the last possible moment, as they made a stream of policy announcements just days before the house rose.

Many of those announcements came from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and are intended to shape the delivery of new neighbourhoods and the regeneration of existing ones, in accordance with the government’s priorities. One of those priorities is quality and beauty in design, which has been advocated in the updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the new National Model Design Code and the new standard-promoting body, the new Office for Place, to be chaired by Create Streets founder Nicholas Boys Smith.

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