The Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities
About this book
Published in April 2004 by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, "The Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities" is a government-commissioned report produced by an advisory panel chaired by Sir John Egan. The review was initiated at the request of the Deputy Prime Minister, who charged Egan's panel with identifying the skills required to realize the vision set out in the UK Government's Sustainable Communities Plan of 2003. That plan represented an ambitious commitment to building new housing, regenerating deprived areas, and revitalizing communities across England — particularly in the South East, the Midlands, and the North.
The central question posed to the review panel was straightforward but profound: what knowledge, capabilities, and professional behaviors would practitioners need to plan, build, and manage communities that were genuinely sustainable over the long term? The report begins by establishing a working definition of sustainable communities — a concept that, at the time of the review, was widely used but inconsistently interpreted. The Egan panel defined sustainable communities as places that meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, support a high quality of life, and provide opportunity and choice, while making effective use of natural resources, enhancing the environment, promoting social cohesion and inclusion, and sustaining economic prosperity.
To give this definition practical traction, the panel organized its attributes into a framework — sometimes visualized as the "Egan Wheel" — comprising seven interconnected components: governance, transport and connectivity, services, environmental sustainability, economy, housing and the built environment, and social and cultural dimensions. These components were not independent checklists but interdependent elements of a systemic whole; improving one dimension in isolation was unlikely to produce genuinely sustainable outcomes. The report's most substantial contribution is its analysis of the skills gap facing the professions involved in community development.
The Egan panel found that practitioners — including planners, architects, engineers, housing professionals, surveyors, landscape architects, and community development workers — typically had strong technical competencies within their own disciplines but lacked the cross-disciplinary and collaborative capabilities needed to deliver integrated sustainable communities. The review drew a sharp distinction between specialist technical skills and the generic, transferable skills that cut across professional boundaries. Generic skills identified as critical included: the ability to lead and manage change in complex organizational environments; the capacity to collaborate effectively across professional, sectoral, and community boundaries; skills in community engagement and participation, enabling residents to shape the places where they live; an understanding of sustainable development principles as they apply to physical design, social planning, and economic development; and the capacity to think in long time horizons, balancing the needs of present residents with the interests of future generations.
The report also examines the mechanisms through which skills development is organized and delivered. Egan and the panel found the existing professional training landscape fragmented, with each discipline operating its own training frameworks and qualifications without adequate cross-pollination. Academic institutions, professional bodies, and employers were not working together to produce graduates and practitioners equipped for the holistic demands of sustainable community building.
In response, the review recommended the creation of a National Centre for Sustainable Community Skills — a body that would convene the relevant stakeholders, develop shared curricula, promote interdisciplinary learning, and track progress in closing the skills gap. This recommendation reflected a broader argument in the report: that structural reform of professional education and training was just as important as reforming the planning system or the development industry itself. The connection between this report and Egan's earlier work, particularly the 1998 "Rethinking Construction" report, is explicit and deliberate.
Where "Rethinking Construction" addressed the efficiency, quality, and client-focus of the construction process, the 2004 review extended the frame to encompass the communities that construction creates. Egan consistently argued that the construction and development industries needed to see their outputs not merely as physical products — buildings, roads, utilities — but as the social and ecological fabric of human habitation. Quality of place, long-term liveability, and the capacity of communities to adapt and thrive were presented as outcomes for which developers, planners, and construction professionals bore shared responsibility.
For green building practitioners, the report is significant in several ways. It articulates an integrated vision of sustainability that encompasses physical, social, economic, and environmental dimensions simultaneously — resisting the tendency to reduce sustainability to energy performance or carbon metrics alone. By centering skills development as a strategic lever for change, it makes the argument that sustainable outcomes depend as much on the capabilities of the people designing and managing communities as on the technologies and materials they employ.
The report remains an important reference point for understanding how the UK's approach to sustainable development has evolved and for anyone working at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, community development, and environmental policy.