Management

David Birkbeck has led this small social enterprise since its incorporation in 2000 to campaign for new homes to be better designed and produced in greater volumes. With that focus, David first helped initiate and was then the only private sector judge for John Prescott’s £60k/house competition in 2007, the fruits of which were spoiled by the credit crunch.

David is both director and a judge for the Housing Design Awards, a unique partnership between Government and industry since 1948 to research the best new-builds and honour them. The Housing Design Awards library is now the largest of its kind in the Anglophone world, hosting tens of thousands of images and more than 100 instructive films about award-winning developments. No other awards programme explains winners in such detail.

David wrote the Building for Life design toolkit in 2002 and has since regularly updated it, beginning with a version for the era of the National Planning Policy Framework. From 2017 onwards the NPPF has recommended planning authorities use BFL12 to raise quality. In recent years Homes England has incorporate BFl as a KPI in its corporate plan while Lloyds Commercial also lends at discounted rates to companies who show evidence of applying BFL12 criteria.

David was an NHBC councillor and design advisory board member at the Homes and Communities Agency. One of his proudest moments was as part of the team that developed the HAPPI report recommendations in 2009 to make developments designed for seniors at least as appealing as general market-sale homes.