Does the National Design Guide promote collaboration or silo working?

On 1st October 2019 the MHCLG published the National Design Guide. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-design-guide. Firstly, let us say we think it is an excellent document providing a much needed shared point of reference for all of those promoting development in areas that do not have a Design Guide of their own. Its stated aim is to promote an integrated design process, but will it work? As a traffic engineers we feel our profession often lets the side down when it comes to the design of residential developments. The NDG includes clear advice on Context, Identity and Built Form. That is obviously not restricted to building design and planting species, but includes the principles of layout and the whole street-scene. The NDG says that good design should look to ‘local precedents for routes and spaces to inform the layout, form and scale’. The identity of the development should incorporate ‘character that suits its context, including the composition of street-scenes’. Most people will experience new housing areas from street level, not the aerial images we all pore over during the planning stage, so street-scene is critical to a genuine landscape led approach to design. It should go without saying that the street-scene is informed by the design of the buildings, but also the scale of the spaces, perhaps the front gardens and hedges, the gates, driveways and parking – but also, and critically, the design of the road itself. One of our Directors was (briefly) elated this week when discussing a new housing area on the edge of a village when the highway engineer tabled a copy of the brand new NDG. We were exploring whether the new layout should have footways and lighting given that the host village had neither. Unfortunately, the highway officer turned straight to the Movement chapter of the NDG to justify why their standard ‘anywhere’ road types (2007) were not only appropriate but necessary. Things went from bad to worse when we made a case for Context and Identity, and the highway officer said he had to defer to his planning colleagues on those matters. The planning officer then said they could not comment on road safety. We will not name and shame the authority but it’s worth noting they are Unitary! This may not be the fault of the NDG, it may simply be that more training is required; however, many of the principles of integrated design reflecting local context were contained in Manual for Streets over a decade ago. We remain hopeful that planning, highway and landscape authorities can work in genuine collaboration to achieve quality developments, but at the moment some in our muddy-boot engineering profession seem to have some catching up to do.