Judges

Wayne Hemingway MBE (chair)

First gaining prominence with the fashion label Red or Dead, Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway established HemingwayDesign in 1999 specialising in affordable and social design. Their highest-profile project is The Staiths, an 800 property mass market housing project on Tyneside for Taylor Wimpey, in which they have been involved from the master planning and architecture through to landscaping and marketing of this groundbreaking project. The scheme won a series of high profile awards including a Housing Design Award (best large project) and Building Magazine’s “Best Housing-Led Regeneration Project” as well as a Building for Life Award and the highest rating of any large scale scheme in the CABE housing audit. HemingwayDesign have been involved in numerous other housing projects, including in Manchester, Basingstoke, Milton Keynes and the Thames Gateway.

As well as chairing Building for Life, Wayne has been a judge on several international design competitions including Europan and the Stirling Prize.

Yolande Barnes

Yolande is director of research at Savills and specialises in residential, development and regeneration issues.

She has 22 years experience in property research, having set up the Savills research department in 1989. She has been pioneering in a new area which she calls “placemaking research”. Her work informs master planning on all types of property and optimises value on large, sustainable, residential and mixed-use development schemes. Yolande provides consultancy services to a variety of private and public sector clients.

She also produces regular reports and articles on market trends and regularly appears in the national press, on television and radio.

David A Pretty

David Pretty CBE BSc(Econ) FRSA is one of housebuilding’s best-known figures. He retired as group chief executive of Barratt Developments PLC in October 2006 after 40 successful years in the industry, 27 of them with Barratt. He has also worked in North America, France and the Far East.

Mr Pretty was personally named the UK’s Regeneration Champion in the national Regeneration Awards in December 2006 In the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2007, he was made a CBE for services to housebuilding.

He remains very active in the housing sector through a number of non executive roles, including the Homebuilders Federation, Shelter and the Prince’s Regeneration Trust. He has, for many years, actively campaigned to highlight the causes of the housing shortage, the plight of first-time buyers and the need for more social housing. He contributes regularly to trade publications, is an occasional advisor to Government on housing issues and recently co-Chaired an independent review of the planning application process in England.

Jane Briginshaw

As head of design and sustainability at the Homes and Communities Agency, Jane Briginshaw leads on developing the strategy to ensure that the HCA delivers high-quality places with optimum results and value for money. This includes implementing a set of best practice standards.

Jane joined the HCA in April 2010 from Partnerships for Schools, where she was design director, promoting good design and sustainability through major schools capital programmes: Building Schools for the Future and Primary Capital Programme. Jane was head of design at the Department for Children, Schools and Families from 2006 to 2009.

Jane previously practised as an architect with GHM Rock Townsend Architects, Chemetov Huidobro Architects, Burrell Foley Fischer and Cedric Price Architects, and has lectured in architecture at University of Greenwich. She was also a local councillor, with responsibility for housing, in Wandsworth from 1998 to 2003.

Lynsey Hanley

Writer and journalist Lynsey Hanley was born and raised on one of the largest council estates in Europe, and subsequently lived for years on an estate in London's East End. Her first book, Estates: an intimate history, recounted the rise of social housing a century ago, its adoption as a fundamental right by leaders of the welfare state in mid-century, and its decline in the 1960s and 1970s. Interwoven with personal recollections of her life living on estates, it received widespread acclaim.

She writes for The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and the New Statesman.

Rt Hon Nick Raynsford MP

Nick Raynsford has been the member of parliament for Greenwich and Woolwich since 1997 (Greenwich 1992-1997). He joined the Government in 1997 and held responsibility for housing, planning and construction as well as being minister for London. He was Minister for Local and Regional Government in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005.

Nick is deputy chairman of the Construction Industry Council and a vice president of the Town and Country Planning Association. He is an honorary fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institute of Structural Engineers, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Town Planning Institute.