Your recent news piece about the Accessible London: creating inclusive spaces webinar began: ‘The built environment profession needs to treat access and inclusion as integral to everything it designs’. Yes I agree, but what do we mean by ‘inclusion’?

Chris Watkins, of Arup said: ‘inclusive design is just about making things equitable in use, legible and easy, and offering that choice and flexibility’, but as Helen Taylor of Scott Brownrigg then pointed out ‘we're dealing with building regulations, typically when we're thinking about how we provide the appropriate technical standards for buildings’.

And that’s the problem. There is an inconsistency between policy or building regulations (often years old) and the growing acknowledgement that ‘inclusion’ is a much broader concept than ‘accessibility’. For evidence just look at the social and spatial inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We have no excuse now but to design places that are ‘inclusive’ in the sense that they afford people more control over their environment and opportunities to share fully in the social and economic activity around them.

So out must go the NPPF’s definition of ‘inclusive design’ as ‘designing the built environment… to ensure that they can be accessed and used by everyone’. Instead we could champion the new London Plan’s Policy D5: Inclusive Design, which states ‘the social factors that influence inclusion have a direct impact on well-being and are an important component in achieving more inclusive communities. Many factors that influence potential barriers to inclusion can be mitigated by ensuring the involvement of local communities in the planning policies and decisions that will affect them’.

ftwork took part in the Examination in Public for Policy D5 and discovered, in preparation, that Part 1 of the Equality Act 2010 deals primarily with socio-economic inequalities, with ‘protected characteristics’ just one of the ‘key concepts’ under the Equality heading. It states that an authority must exercise its functions ‘in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage’. We succeeded in pushing for a broader definition of ‘inclusive design’; in its final form the London Plan now focuses on inclusive neighbourhoods in this wider sense with, for instance, a new requirement to ‘provide high quality people focused spaces that are designed to facilitate social interaction and inclusion’. This is to be detailed as part of a new ‘inclusive design statement’.

“Too nebulous” I hear you say, and “not another tick-box statement!” Perhaps look at it another way. How is our sector to respond to the needs and inequalities laid bare by the pandemic? We learnt that people live parallel lives, so that health and life expectancy for those living a few streets apart differ hugely. But we also saw the mutual support and the potential within communities to bring about change for the better. If we accept the clear benefits of a more socially integrated city, then we must make inclusion - in this broader sense - a key driver of planning decisions.