Repeal, reserve, regulate – but is it only half an argument?

I recently attended the RIBA president’s round-table to hear Chris Williamson and board chair Jack Pringle set out their “Repeal, Reserve, Regulate” campaign, a proposal to replace the Architects Act 1997 and its regulator, the ARB, with a competence-based framework overseen by a new Built Environment Council.

The core argument is pretty compelling. The ARB protects the title of architect, not the activities of one. Anyone can design a building, submit a planning application, or sign off building control documents, they simply cannot call themselves an architect while doing so.

The ARB has processed several hundred complaints in the past couple of years and issued zero fines. It has undertaken no prosecutions. It is difficult to defend that lack of action as meaningful protection of clients and the public.

The alternative that is being proposed would reserve a series of defined activities, such as the submission of planning applications and building control sign-offs, to competent chartered professionals, regulated by a single body. There is a clear logic to this, particularly in the post-Grenfell world in which fractured accountability across the industry has been identified as a structural failure. A single regulator with joined-up oversight of professions, products and buildings addresses that directly.

At the round-table, I put a question to Pringle: from a client’s perspective, doesn’t this risk looking like protectionism? The current open market allows clients to go to the lowest bidder for planning submissions. Reserving those activities to chartered professionals raises the floor, but does it demonstrably raise the value?

We currently train architects to be generalists, a similar model to GPs. What we get is professionals who are competent across the board but specialised in nothing in particular

Pringle’s answer was that competence regulation guarantees a standard of service. I understand the argument. But at present I don’t think it fully holds, for one reason: the education system.

We currently train architects to be generalists, a similar model to GPs. What we get is professionals who are competent across the board but specialised in nothing in particular.

In today’s market, most serious clients don’t want generalists. NHS trusts commissioning hospitals go to the handful of practices with deep healthcare expertise; hospitality developers want sector specialists and so on. While the GP model serves domestic architecture reasonably well, it serves very little else.

If the reform agenda is serious, it needs to address architectural education in parallel so that chartered professionals have the skills and expertise that clients really need.

A compressed foundation programme that establishes core competence in building safety, compliance, and design fundamentals, followed by structured specialist qualifications in the areas where practitioners actually work, would be faster, cheaper, and more relevant than the current seven-to-10-year route to a generalist qualification. It would reduce the financial burden on young people entering the profession, improve diversity, and produce practitioners whose certified expertise is genuinely legible to clients.

The reform will only deliver its stated purpose, better outcomes for clients and the public, if professional regulation and education reform are treated as a single, integrated programme rather than sequential steps

The sector-based model that now dominates serious practice makes this point concrete. Large firms such as Broadway Malyan operate through specialist teams – high-rise residential, international hospitality, healthcare – each with deep embedded knowledge and the digital tools to match. In that context, a long, arduous education designed to cover all bases is not merely inefficient, it is a poor proxy for the competence clients need and recognise.

Without that, “Repeal, Reserve, Regulate” risks being an attractive proposition for architects and an invisible one to everyone else. Protecting the activity of submitting a planning application, for example, is only meaningful if the person doing so can demonstrate specialist competence relevant to the brief – not simply that they completed a long and expensive general education.

The direction of travel is right. The government is moving toward a single construction regulator, with a call for evidence expected this spring and a full professions strategy due in 2027. But the reform will only deliver its stated purpose, better outcomes for clients and the public, if professional regulation and education reform are treated as a single, integrated programme rather than sequential steps.

Half the argument is in place. The second half needs to catch up.