Homes England Design Guidance
Homes England supports the delivery 40,000 – 80,000 homes each year. As the Government’s regeneration agency, it sets the tone for design quality across the country. Maccreanor Lavington led an inter-disciplinary team that prepared six research documents ranging from process appraisals, design guides and case study appraisals.
These publications include:
- Parking What Works Where 2 – a complete revision of the seminal car parking guide from 2006
- Delivering Quality: Local Centres – a flagship guide presenting a complete economic, governance and design model for successful local centres
- Delivering Quality: Mobility Hubs – a succinct guide to the components and types of mobility hubs that form a key tenet of sustainable transport delivery
- Vision-led Transport Planning – a case study appraisal and review of the challenges and risks to implementation of the ‘Design and Provide’ transport planning model promoted by the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF)
- Design and Access Statements – a new structure for Design and Access Statement evolving the format established by CABE in 2006
- Character & Context Analysis Guidance – a detailed process guide setting out how to actively conduct site analysis as an integrated part of the design process
ML Associate Director, Blazej Czuba: “Good policy and guidance must break silos and seek consensus across different disciplines and departments. What made this project successful was the extent of engagement. We worked with civil and public servants, with developers and consultants, with economists and engineers. The highlight for me was a workshop on Design and Access Statements with dozens of heads of planning from England’s Local Planning Authorities, which we organised together with the Planning Advisory Service. It was a powerful reminder to us all how different challenges are across the country, and that our guidance needed the right balance of flexibility and bar-raising rigidity to work in very different contexts”
Parking What Works Where
Car parking remains a persistent challenge, as highlighted by the latest National Housing Design Audit. This guide doesn’t dictate parking quantities—instead, it focuses on making parking smarter: efficient, attractive, safe, and multi-functional. Poorly planned parking can consume 25–50% of a site, so a key aim is to reclaim land lost to inefficiency. Done well, this unlocks higher densities and better-performing developments.
The guide contains Golden Rules for successful cycle and car parking, related parking strategies, example treatments, and detailed analysis of 19 case studies across the country.
Local Centres
New residential neighbourhoods in England, frequently at the edge of existing settlements, tend to be relatively low density. This combination of low density and peripheral location makes it difficult to deliver local centres. Even the award-winning successful developments struggle. Our research shows that delivering successful local centres is possible. This is especially true where they are considered as a piece of critical infrastructure in the same way as schools and open spaces, with the capital costs borne by the development as a whole.
