Building the case for permanent in-house design culture

At Public Practice, our aim is to create a better everyday. We believe the way to achieve this is by supporting local government to build its placemaking capability by embedding design culture and expertise.

Many local authorities have experienced significant challenges in housing delivery in recent years, with the step-up particularly pronounced in places that had seen relatively little development in previous years.

In North Herts, adoption of the new Local Plan in November 2022 increased expected delivery from around 300 homes a year to a planned 13,000 over the next decade. “That’s a real step-change,” notes architect Sohanna Srinivasan. For the council's leadership, this massive increase in scale created an urgent need to upskill and diversify their team.

Through Public Practice, Srinivasan was brought in as the third Associate to join North Herts. She is an architect with a wealth of public-sector-focused experience from her time in practice. Her placement is a story of how working together can embed a lasting culture of design quality. She has fundamentally rewired the masterplan approval process, steering six major strategic sites to Full Council endorsement. Through weekly ‘design surgeries’, she is building officer confidence, and she is leading the creation of the district-wide design code, replacing an outdated document from 2011. Her impact has provided a compelling case for investment, convincing leadership to double its in-house design capacity and lock in specialist skills for the long term.

The leap in housing targets placed significant demands on a planning system built for small-scale infill. The adopted Local Plan 2011-2031 translates national housing need into specific allocations, which meant that the very small developments that North Herts were used to would no longer be sufficient, and six strategic site allocations of 500+ homes would be required to fulfil its targets. Suddenly, officers and councillors were grappling with large masterplans and a wave of strategic green-field development and introduced substantial additional workload across the directorate.

This was not a surprise to the council’s leadership, however, who understood the scale of the task ahead. As Nigel Smith, who was Srinivasan’s line manager in his former role as Strategic Planning Manager before a recent promotion to Director of Place, explains,

“We were identifying lots of sites for development which were of a different scale and quantum to anything we’d done for 25, 30 years in this district. So we knew we needed to build that capacity.”

The council's leadership recognised that the priority was to strategically augment its skilled team, equipping them with the resources needed to meet a massive increase in growth while safeguarding quality. This was alongside building capacity in other specialities. The design team was not the only area of focus; after a period of austerity in the 2010s, the council had been rebuilding its specialist capacity since 2020. This included appointing a new transport officer, a rarity for a district authority, and starting recruitment for a landscape officer. As Smith explains, these were roles that had been “whittled away” over the years, and the council was now consciously “going back the other way” to bring those skills back in-house.

She arrived with a unique professional perspective from her time at Karakusevic Carson Architects (KCA), a leading architectural practice known for its specialism in high-quality council housing and community-led regeneration. As an Associate at KCA, she led extensive community engagement for significant regeneration schemes like the Selby Urban Village in North London, experience that meant she already understood how councils work and make decisions. Crucially, this background meant all of her previous clients had been local authorities. As she explains,

“There was just a shared understanding that everyone wanted to do the best they could to create good places.”

Her new role at North Herts presented a stark and difficult contrast: for the first time, she would be negotiating directly with private developers whose motivations, she notes, were “completely different.” Bridging this gap required a specific skill set, one she had honed through her passion for teaching at Kingston University. As she explains, “teaching makes you really good at communicating quite complex things in digestible ways to different types of audiences.”

One of Srinivasan’s earliest priorities was to address a subtle but critical challenge within the planning team. Many officers wanted more confidence discussing design and a shared vocabulary for explaining why something might not be working. The existing team had good instincts but needed upskilling to challenge applicants effectively. There was an opportunity here for officers to build skills and confidence and to create consistency across the team, in order to raise design quality from the ground up and allow everyone to shape better schemes, earlier in the process.

Her solution was a weekly design surgery; a dedicated, informal drop-in session held on Monday mornings where any officer could bring a live application for a “friendly chat.” By making the forum casual, Srinivasan removed the pressure of formal review, creating a safe space for colleagues to test ideas and ask questions. The goal was to build a shared design vocabulary across the team, empowering officers to spot and articulate design issues themselves long before a scheme reached the committee stage.

Smith described this as a process of natural, team-wide learning. He explains that once a specialist is in post, there is a period of “dissemination and osmosis, where everyone just benefits from having those skills and those viewpoints in the room and they just kind of absorb it and start applying it themselves.”

Under North Herts’ Local Plan 2011–2031, masterplans are required for the six Strategic Housing Sites (the 500+ home allocations at Baldock, Letchworth, Hitchin, and on the edges of Stevenage and Luton) and for other significant developments (normally 100+ homes). Strategic Planning leads this process through a governance route, with a requirement for these strategic sites to have their masterplans formally endorsed by Full Council. This high-stakes process aimed to lock in the design ambition early, creating a powerful policy document to guide all future detailed applications. However, Srinivasan’s first experience of this process revealed a major disconnect. “It was a learning moment,” she recalls. “It was very clear that we weren’t all starting from the same understanding of what a masterplan was.” In the formal, broadcast meeting, some details—such as access arrangements—were unclear, and procedural rules limited officers from clarifying in real time.

In response, Srinivasan completely rewired the process. She introduced member training sessions explaining the purpose of a masterplan, issued ‘good design cheat sheets’ with key questions and things to look out for, and established pre-briefing sessions a week before each meeting. In these informal forums, she could present visuals and bring in technical experts to answer detailed questions, ensuring councillors arrived at the formal debate fully informed. The results were transformative. The quality of debate shifted from arguments over parking to strategic discussions about policy. As Smith notes, councillors began “reflecting back some of those learnings … and asking the challenging questions the right way.” After this overhaul, the next four strategic masterplans sailed through on their first attempt.

Empowering officers and councillors was only half the battle. The greatest challenge lay in negotiating directly with private housebuilders, who had financial motivations that differed from the council’s ambition for placemaking.

To get results, Sohanna had to be pragmatic. She quickly learned that to secure design quality, she had to translate its benefits into the language of commercial value. This meant framing arguments for non-negotiable principles like walkable block lengths or active street frontages not just as civic improvements, but as strategic decisions that could add value, improve phasing, or unlock delivery efficiencies. By doing so, she could hold the line on quality while demonstrating a clear understanding of their commercial realities.

As she puts it, “You can’t just say, ‘this will be a nicer place to live’; you have to make the case for good design… from a financial perspective. You have to really just speak their language.”

Srinivasan’s most significant long-term project is the creation of a new district-wide design code, a task made urgent by the fact that the council's last piece of design guidance was adopted in 2011. This project carries a profound sense of legacy, as it is being developed while North Herts faces a potential merger into a larger unitary authority. Smith explains the strategic thinking behind this: even if the council, as it currently exists, is dissolved, the design code will be inherited. He sees it as a critical tool that will “still have a lifespan and be an influence” on the new authority for years to come.

To ensure this legacy document was robust and reflected local identity, Srinivasan initiated a deeply collaborative co-creation process. This involved site walkarounds where officers and members used scorecards to critique existing developments, and "hot and cold wall" workshops to build a visual consensus on good design. To capture the public’s vision, she facilitated a residents’ design forum where participants created collages expressing what they wanted to see in their future neighbourhoods.

The ultimate goal, for Srinivasan, is to “capture the ambitions of the members, the public and the officers… so they don’t get diluted” in the future.

The true value of this co-created evidence base lies in its day-to-day application. For Smith, the goal is to flip the dynamic from a reliance on specialists to an empowered team. The code, he explains, will equip officers with “the knowledge, training, and confidence to go out and apply a bit more of [these specialities] directly themselves.” This creates what Smith calls a “greater level of consistency” for developers and residents, so that “they know what the rules are before they start.” By codifying a shared local vision, the design code turns aspirations for quality into clear standards that can be applied with confidence.

The success of these initiatives improved individual schemes and, crucially, provided a compelling case for sustained investment in the council's own design capacity. This expansion addresses a chronic recruitment challenge. As Smith explains, for a council on the “London fringe,” it faces “lots of competition” from other local authorities and private-sector companies based in London. For Smith, partnering with Public Practice has “really helped us cut through some of the competition to secure some good people.” He also made it clear that the Associates were not there to rescue a failing team but to complement existing skills. “It’s as much they've been complimentary to the posts we've had, rather than we were sort of floundering around in the dark and they've sort of come along and shown us the light,” he explains.

Srinivasan was the third Public Practice Associate to join North Herts, building on an established relationship. During her placement, the design team has doubled from two to four. This expansion includes the recent appointment of a fourth Associate, Rob Hamilton, who also brings substantial housing-design experience.

For Srinivasan, the decision to reinvest is a “testament to the fact that they have seen what good design can do, or they can see the point of it.” This creates a robust, peer-learning model that locks specialist spatial skills into the Authority for the long term.

The tangible results of this new approach are clear. Most notably, all six of the district's strategic masterplans have now been successfully endorsed by Full Council, with four passing on their first attempt after the new process was implemented.

Srinivasan’s placement offers several transferable lessons for other local authorities facing similar growth pressures. First, training councillors on high-level design principles can shift the debate from parking to placemaking. Second, small, informal interventions like design surgeries are highly effective at building officer confidence. And third, translating design ambitions into the language of commercial value is essential for negotiating effectively.

Ultimately, Srinivasan's work proves that bringing in specialist skills raises the bar on projects while building the case for a resilient, permanent in-house design culture.