The leader of the government’s new quango responsible for housing design standards has said the UK had been “confused” about planning regulations since the Second World War and called for a return to a Victorian system.

Create Streets founder Nicholas Boys Smith, who co-chaired the government’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission with the late Roger Scruton, said that “organic learnings” had been rejected in the post-war era in a drive to reject the pre-war past.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the future of housing at the Conservative party conference, he said: “For generations across cities we’ve been broadly getting this right and about 60 or 70 years ago a range of things sort of got us all a bit confused.”

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