Olga Turner Baker from Ekkist reports from NLA's latest Expert Panel on Wellbeing.

The panel met in London on 10/05/22 and the session started with Olga Turner Baker from Ekkist presenting on what a standard for London might look like. Outlining areas of health and well-being that the built environment typically impacts highlighted the importance of this topic to public health: from cold or damp buildings to overheating and heat stress, poor access to daylight or poor quality electric lighting, to insufficiently mitigated noise, to poorly planned spaces and loneliness and social isolation. This brought into question how a London-wide standard could address these issues, and where building regulations and planning requirements fall short vs the aspirational requirements of voluntary health and well-being standards, such as WELL, Fitwel, HQM, Air Score, and CIBSE Guidance. The various benefits to the NHS and wider population health were discussed and attention was drawn to the work that the APPG on Healthy Homes and Buildings is already carrying out in this area. The presentation was concluded by questioning where this new standard would sit in its aspirations and what the priorities should be for London. 

 

Jamie Anderson from Buro Happold was next to present, and discussed firstly what we can define as well-being and how various international standards and benchmarks address this. He talked about the MPWB (a global index for well-being) and how various cities around the world are interpreting health and well-being and creating their own interventions. Attention was brought to Paris’s 15-minute city concept and Glasgow’s ‘Be Well’ campaign, as well as initiatives in Manchester and the Healthy Streets toolkit. Jamie stressed that a Londin Standard would need to have some real substance to it and not just take a ‘candy floss’ approach to have any meaningful impact. 

 

Rory Olcayto provided the perspective that there is already a lot of measuring in the industry, but not much is ‘getting done’, and that ultimately, “it’s legislation that changes cities and places, not architecture”. He made suggestions for improving the built environment from both a health and sustainability perspective, including taking a retrofit first approach to estates to prevent gentrification, focussing on creating an ethical supply chain in the public procurement process, and replacing the M8 based on success from other global cities. 

 

Nivenne Powell spoke about the need for more community involvement in the design process and the role that co-design has to play in creating successful places and communities. The end user needs to be considered much more than is currently the case and government data needs to draw much more on community feedback. She is currently championing a social value framework. 

 

There was discussion of whether there should be a separate statutory consultee focused on health and well-being and a formal agency set up to realise this, with general support for the idea. 

 

Heath Harvey brought an interesting example to the forum of Sport England moving away from physical deliverables in grant allocations to instead focus on outcomes, and how we should take inspiration from this approach. To drive more impactful change.

 

Romy spoke about Nordic culture and their holistic approach to health and well-being, green space and green infrastructure, which the UK could learn a lot from.

 

The panel agreed that there needs to be more focus on educating developers in this area and potentially having a legal requirement for developers to set health and well-being goals and monitoring benchmarks. 

 

The panel ended by discussing whether a ‘carrot or stick’ approach was right, with merits to both, but acknowledging that to move quickly and address the pertinent health and well-being issues that society is currently facing, that the stick may be the required approach and greater legislation required.