Introduction

Current social and legislative trends within the UK and Europe relating to housing design and quality reflect opposing influences. While there has been an ongoing policy shift towards deregulation overall, reregulation has emerged and grown within two key areas: first, energy efficiency in terms of consumption and sustainability within the home; and, second, access in terms of the flexibility of housing to cater for the wider needs of a heterogeneous public, including older and disabled people (Karn and Nystrom, 1999). This chapter will focus on access. Considerable pressure from key interest groups to make the built environment more inclusive has challenged all those involved in housing policy and practice to rethink the traditional design and function of housing.

Given, on one hand, the nature of the existing stock of housing and pressures towards obvious marketability in new developments, and, on the other hand, the impetus towards implementing human rights, encouraging citizenship and increasing inclusivity, moves towards wider accessibility raise many issues. These issues include finance, quality criteria, flexibility, choice and appropriate levels of regulation. We examine some of these in this chapter and look at ways in which recent legislative and regulatory moves towards wider accessibility have been interpreted by various interest groups.

A key objective of our analysis was to review in depth the wider politics of the leading interest groups which represented different positions within the debate on the extent to which regulatory frameworks are necessary to ensure the development of more user-responsive housing. This debate begs a central question: to what extent is it possible to legislate for good ‘inclusive’ design which meets the widest number of people's design needs, without compromising the degree of design flexibility and choice necessary to achieve this goal? This reflects a major paradox within the ‘regulation versus deregulation’ argument.

In this chapter we begin by charting the developments in housing policy that have shaped the regulatory frameworks for housing quality standards, and we identify and chart the most significant socioeconomic and environmental influences to impact on access within the context of housing quality and design. We consider the evidence drawn from our own assessment of responses to the proposal in 1995, to extend Part M and Part T of the English and Scottish building regulations, with the aim of incorporating access standards in all new private dwellings.