https://www.riba.org/work/insights-and-resources/professional-features/sole-practitioner-focus-competence/

 

I am a sole practitioner architect with over thirty years of experience, qualified in Germany as a Dipl.-Ing. and practising in Cornwall.

 

I found RIBA's recent article on competence and compliance and I am shocked — not because competence doesn't matter, but because I believe this framework will make things worse. And because nobody asked us.

 

RIBA announced this priority without consulting sole practitioners. We were told what the problems are. We were not asked.

 

This matters to me personally. In the mid-1980s, completing my alternative military service in Germany, I worked as a carer. The time required to care for residents and the time required to document that care were together greater than the hours available.

The records were completed to satisfy inspectors. The care was quietly compromised. I have watched the same happen to architecture ever since.

 

Over thirty years of practice I have watched bureaucracy increase and creativity decrease. The evidence is visible in our built environment — in the generic, risk-averse, less humane quality of what gets built. Architects need time for design. Every hour spent on compliance administration is an hour not spent thinking carefully about the people who will inhabit the spaces we create.

 

The parallel with VAR in football is instructive. VAR was introduced to eliminate error and increase accountability. What it produced was slower decisions, undermined referee judgment, and outcomes that were technically correct but humanly absurd — decisions only visible through expensive remote technology. The compliance framework follows exactly the same logic: costly, remote, and making things feel less legitimate rather than more.

 

The framework RIBA is imposing:

 

— Adds significant cost to construction without improving education or design quality

 

— Dilutes the protected title of Architect with pseudo-roles such as Principal Designer that anyone can in principle occupy

 

— Makes construction less affordable at precisely the moment when good design is needed more than ever

 

— Misreads Grenfell — which was primarily a fraud driven by cost pressure — by making construction even more expensive in response

 

— Consumes the time architects need for design with administration, certification, and compliance documentation

 

— Formalises professional communication to the point where raising a concern openly has become legally risky

 

— Accelerates the disappearance of sole practitioners — replaced not by better architecture but by agency practices processing compliance

 

— Serves the interests of insurers and lawyers as much as the public it claims to protect

 

— Was announced without any meaningful consultation with the sole practitioners it most affects

 

 

RIBA's own further reading links for sole practitioners include articles on run-off insurance and transitioning out of practice. These are articles about managing decline and exit — not supporting a thriving profession.

 

I have written a formal open letter to RIBA setting out these concerns in full. This petition is the next step. If you are an architect, a client, or anyone who believes that good design matters and that the people who deliver it deserve to be trusted and supported rather than administered — please sign.

Please sign to call on RIBA to consult sole practitioners, invest in education, strengthen the architect's title, and make construction simpler — not more arcane and much more expensive.

 

Architecture, like many other professions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Not to the administrators.

 

We can create high quality, meaningful, and humane architecture. But what we need is not more bureaucracy. We need more care, more responsibility, and better education — a profession that trusts its architects to do what they were formed to do.

 

The inflation of titles tells its own story. Principal Designer. Lead Designer. Building Regulations Principal Designer. Each new role adds cost, fragments responsibility, and dilutes the one title that already means something — Architect. A title protected by law, earned through years of rigorous formation, and maintained through professional registration. That title should be strengthened, not buried under a proliferation of pseudo-roles that anyone can in principle occupy and that none of us were asked to accept.

 

And consider the client — particularly the domestic client, the homeowner wanting to extend their house, the family trying to improve their home.

 

They do not understand what a Principal Designer is. They do not understand why their architect now carries multiple role titles with separate obligations, separate paperwork, and separate fees. They came to an architect. They trusted that word. The complexity we are adding does not protect them. It confuses and costs them. It makes good professional advice less accessible at precisely the moment they need it most.

The title says it all. Trust it.