In my last column I wrote of the lessons from a roundtable of urban designers, planners and developers convened by HTA Design when we shared experience of delivering design codes in the context of the recent NPPF requirement that local planning authorities must publish authority-wide design codes as part of their local planning process.

There was scepticism among experts around the table that coding built form should amount to anything more than broad design guidance at an authority-wide scale. There just is not the resource for detailed coding over the entire plan area.