Housing quality, permitted development and the role of regulation after COVID-19

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought the issue of housing quality into sharp relief. For many people, home before the pandemic was a place to return to after work, school or a holiday: one of a number of spaces in which life is played out. But COVID-19 has focused daily existence on the home. It has suddenly become more intensely multi-functional: a workspace, a classroom and a leisure space all bundled into one (it was always these things, but never to the exclusion of everywhere else). This situation will not last, but individuals’ and households’ perceptions of the required utility of home may have changed irrevocably. Housing quality, and how to support and achieve that quality, is a perennial debate in planning and housing circles. Regulation and good design feature as answers or antidotes to the worst crimes of largely unfettered speculative development in the UK, the most heinous of which have often been committed by developers of the conversions of commercial buildings to residential use, under deregulated permitted development rights (PDR) in England. In this viewpoint, we bring together past research on regulation and design innovation to provide a brief commentary on likely future debates in this area