Architects have reacted with alarm to changes announced in the government’s Housing & Planning Bill.

They branded as “dangerous” the abolition of the requirement for planning consent on brownfield sites and office-to-resi conversions.

And they warned that any concern for quality appeared to have been ditched in favour of speeding up development. The much-heralded bill was finally published yesterday afternoon.

“I hope Richard Rogers is OK to put his Urban Task Force hat on again. It looks to me like we are going backwards fast,” said Sally Lewis, director of housing and regeneration specialist Stitch.

“Quality relies heavily not just on the housing but also on the environments being created – streets, activity, public spaces, amenity,” she said. “This new bill only addresses speed of delivery: short-sighted political gain at the cost of long-term quality.

“Permanent permitted development rights for office-to-resi and automatic planning permission for brownfield sites are dangerous moves that take away design criteria in the very places that need it most. It’s as dire as bringing back right to buy and dismissing the need for affordable rent homes.”

Julia Park, head of housing research at Levitt Bernstein who spent seven months advising the DCLG on its housing standards review, said the office-to-residential free-for-all had resulted in “terrible” homes including flats of 14sq m. 

“Bypassing all standards except basic building regulations is short-sighted and desperate, but under the bill, brownfield sites and starter homes seem set to get the same free pass,” she said.

“The NPPF has numerous references to the importance of good design – but nothing about this bill suggests it matters at all.”

She also took issue with the new “starter homes” proposals which councils will be required to support instead of “affordable” housing and other planning obligations.

“There’s nothing wrong with supporting home ownership, unless it comes at the expense of those who will never be able to buy their own home,” said Park. “Allowing starter homes to count as the affordable housing element will do just that.”

Darryl Chen, partner and leader of the urban design studio at Hawkins Brown, warned that removing the obligation for developers to build social rented housing could lead to the hollowing-out of London.

“What makes London distinctive as a global capital – its mixed communities – is at risk with this shifting around of tenure,” he said.

“It would be a great shame if we became like Paris or Manhattan, where a portion of society is excluded from whole areas of the city.”

He also argued that further deregulation of planning would be counter-productive.

“Business wants predictability, not another raft of changes which local authorities will have to scrabble around to implement,” he said.

“They want planning authorities to be able to deliver what they are statutorily required to deliver with the resources they should have. That’s what’s missing. If the planning system has been set up to fail because they’re under-resourced and everything changes every couple of years, what do you expect?”

James Rayner, head of masterplanning at Broadway Malyan, who broadly welcomed the changes, questioned how they could possibly deliver the government’s promised million new homes by 2020.

“It’s a drop in the ocean,” he said. “There’s no strategic thinking in there in terms of housing provision. That’s what’s missing to give it some real teeth, and that’s what puts us at odds with probably every other European government.

“We seem to be able to cross boundaries with infrastructure so it’s surprising we can’t do it with housing. Instead we’ve left it up to the smallest management component in our whole democratic set-up which is probably the least able to deal with it on a strategic basis.”

Rayner also welcomed the presumption in favour of planning on brownfield sites and was confident design quality would not be compromised because of existing “checks and balances”.

But he doubted the relaxation would do much to speed up development as planning was rarely the obstacle.

“If they were really serious they would have something to actually bring on brownfield homes,” he said, “like a mechanism for claiming back future value to help pay upfront for decontaminating land or demolishing existing buildings.”

His colleague Jeff Nottage warned there was a “real danger that local authorities will either rush to get their local plans ready for 2017 and end up with plans that are unsound and poorly evidenced”.