Description: Well-designed, accessible and pleasant living and working environments are one of the key requirements of creating sustainable communities, as set out in The Sustainable Communities Plan "Building for the Future”. Given the growth of the employment sector, it is important to get new development right. Poor planning and design risk a return to some of the mistakes of the past.

Badly located and designed places of work are not only bad for the wider environment. They are also bad for business. Evidence collated by and for CABE shows that poor workplaces are:

Bad for business productivity and efficiency
Bad for recruitment, retention and employee satisfaction
Bad for the balance sheet - they cost more over the lifetime of the building

As a challenge and inspiration to everybody within the development industry, this guide draws on lessons of success stories to show how the planning for our workplaces can be improved for the benefit of all involved