At a gathering of the London Mayor’s Design Advisors recently, I sat in on a workshop about maintaining design quality. The debate centred on architect retention clauses in design and build contracts. There were clever people around our table who care passionately about how people should live, and the ideas flowed, but as I listened I realised that whatever they came up with in terms of ideas to implement the mayor’s policies to support good design, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way we procure design and then build, we are looking at a very long, slow, frustrating campaign that might never succeed.

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