Research shows public sector lacking in essential landscape skills

Public Practice spring 2024 cohort. © Benoît Grogan-Avignon

If the UK government is serious about integrating nature recovery strategies alongside ambitious housebuilding and infrastructure programmes, more landscape architects must be recruited and given meaningful roles across development, parks and regeneration departments.

Despite our famed love of gardens, the UK is one of the most biodiversity-depleted environments in the world. Since the introduction of the Environment Act 2021, it has been a legal requirement for every Defra-appointed responsible authority in England to produce a Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) to mitigate against biodiversity decline, address escalating climate change threats, and deliver improved natural environments for citizens.

But pressure on housing has driven the current government to declare an ambitious target for 1.5 million new homes, the construction of which threatens to undermine precious natural ecosystems and landscapes. Local authorities, whose planners will need to ‘have regard’ for the LNRS when preparing local plans, require the right skills in-house to make informed decisions. A UK-wide, 2024 Recruitment & Skills Insight Report¹ that we conducted with more than 400 public sector officers identified landscape architecture as one of the most needed, yet most lacking, skills, in public sector placemaking. Other gaps exist in ecology, biodiversity and environmental sustainability. Of 420 respondents, 69% identified landscape architecture as a skill their team doesn’t have enough of.

Public Practice is a not-for-profit organisation, founded to address the critical shortage of planning and placemaking skills in local government. In 2018, we launched the Associate Programme, a pioneering initiative that works with local authorities to place talented, mid‐career, built- environment professionals into public sector roles, for a minimum of one year. The success of the programme is evidenced by the many who choose to stay beyond that first year, and whose ongoing input has been welcomed within their respective teams. We have now placed over 350 Associates in around 100 public sector organisations. Over 80% of them had never worked in the public sector before, and approximately 75% remain in place two years after the initial 12-month contract ends.

The roles for which Public Practice recruits are wide-ranging, from architects working in town-centre

economic developments to engineers working on large-scale infrastructure projects. We have recruited landscape architects into roles ranging from steering county-wide LNRS strategies (see p35), to coordinating landscape and maintenance departments or advising within planning and regeneration teams.

With the right skills in-house, local authorities can confidently lead this change by engaging stakeholders, holding housebuilders to higher standards and embedding nature at the heart of policy.

There is, of course, variation in the level of support for, or understanding of, landscape architecture within each authority. Helen Sayers, for example, moved from a landscape team within a London-based commercial architecture practice (PRP) to join the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service. Helen is one of five landscape architects within her team, which works within a wider group of technical specialists in urban design, heritage and the natural environment. She says: “We work as an advisory service to planning officers, providing specialist landscape design and planning input on strategic sites, the emerging local plan and the landscape design elements of planning applications. A large part of the role is contributing, with colleagues, to pre-application discussions with developers.”

Helen adds: “Cambridge has always had this team, even when the two planning services were separate. Cambridge is economically thriving, with many interesting developments and infrastructure projects emerging, and the planning service is well resourced and well structured.” She is now a permanent team member.

Lee Heykoop is another Associate with a background in landscape architecture. She joined Tower Hamlets in 2021 as a regeneration project manager. She says: “Tower Hamlets had two different landscape and maintenance teams in two separate directorates. The excellent parks landscape team was a marked contrast to the maintenance team, who were driving down use and biodiversity in pocket parks and roadside green spaces.” Lee put together a strategy document to improve joint working between these services, and has since gone on to another public sector role, this time with Homes England, which carries the potential for even greater strategic impact.

However, even in the most enlightened planning departments, there are challenges. Helen cites a lack of understanding around how to implement landscape works on the part of both contractors and developers: “For example, in South Cambridgeshire, there are a lot of housing schemes that have a Section 106 agreement for open space and those are very poorly implemented… Developers and main contractors don’t have in-house expertise, and so planting often fails and has to be replanted.”

With pressure increasing on local authorities around the provision of new housing, and new requirements such as Biodiversity Net Gain and Strategic Development Strategies on the horizon, the need for landscape architects in the public sector has never been greater. With the right skills in-house, local authorities can confidently lead this change by engaging stakeholders, holding housebuilders to higher standards and embedding nature at the heart of policy. We are committed to bringing more talented and motivated landscape experts into the public sector and empowering them to have the broadest possible impact.