While essential qualities of good housing and urban design do not necessarily cost more to deliver and can even reduce expenditure (e.g. building more densely with less space given over to vehicles) and while design quality can help to make markets viable in even the most challenging of locations, ultimately where budgets are tight and land values are low, every pound spent on construction matters.  A simple expedient is therefore to monitor specifications, procurement practices and post-permissions delivery carefully to avoid wasted expenditure while optimising quality within the available budget.  When this does not occur, or is not done rigorously, so that projects need to be crudely ‘value engineered’ late in the day, the result can cut costs but undermine original design intentions.   

Many of the stories involved some value engineering, often to the detriment of the quality of the final projects.  Some managed to retain a role for the original designers to monitor and perhaps influence on-site delivery which helped to resist this (e.g. stories 7, 11, 12 and 16), but the two stories in this route adopted a process of continual design interrogation to achieve similar ends (see also story 4).  The approach involved the refinement of projects with a dual focus on cost and quality across the entire design / development process so that during the construction phase, detrimental changes were either difficult to make or unnecessary.  The first – Oak Priory (story 17) – tied a carefully researched specification down contractually and the second – The Ridgeway (story 18) – minutely interrogated every aspect of the design in a proactive way, engineering for value from the outset.  Both involved clients with a long-term interest in the scheme and therefore also an interest in the long-term value returned, over and above their short-term costs.