The announcement this week by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook to shutter the Office for Place echoes a regrettable pattern in the treatment of bodies dedicated to improving the quality of the built environment. Pennycook framed the decision as a matter of efficiency, arguing that the office’s role could be more effectively delivered from within the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG). Yet, as Nicholas Boys Smith, the Office for Place’s interim chair, remarked, this decision risks “ministers marking their own homework” on housing design.