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0,9% fee for Stages A-H on a housing scheme is an outrage - as much as the no-planning, no-fee clause. Anyone can do the sums on an envelope for a medium-sized scheme and see that it is impossible to have the time to do anything more than take a pre-existing house type and copy-paste it onto a new site, jiggling around for an afternoon until the site's maxxed out and everyone can get to their garage. By any measurable metric, quality cannot be delivered.
But as long it looks like architects are wingeing in their corner alone for their vested interests, it will be difficult to change this kind of attitude. There has to be real top-down pressure from government. Since Housing associations get at least 40% of their capital from central government, the HCO has a lot of skin in the game. It is their responsibility not only to see that affordable housing is built, but that the frameworks in place to deliver it contain mechanisms to guarantee quality outcomes. It is actually the HCO's job to hold the feet of folk like this to the fire and tell them they won't get their grant money with such an dreadful procurement procedure. This is how quality is guaranteed in other European countries in analogous situations.
The fact that such an absurd situation can happen at all is the result not only of a rogue housing association, but a housing policy which measure success only in numbers delivered rather than quality.

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