The Byzantine oddity in stylish world of its own

As what seems to be one of the last surviving outposts of the Byzantine Empire, the Royal Fine Art Commission is a fascinating oddity, an exquisite and maverick survivor in the world of modern town and country planning and value-for-money government. The role of the publicly funded commission with a brief to criticise new building schemes throughout Britain has been under scrutiny for many months by Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield, a senior civil servant. It is now under attack.

Sir Geoffrey, in the leaked report, accuses the commission of being too elitist, too remote and, at pounds 800,000 a year, far too expensive. Lord St John of Fawsley, chairman of the commission for the past 11 years, and with three years to go, is criticised for driving around town in a brand- new car, costing nearly pounds 30,000 a year to rent. The commission is decried for acting in an "arbitrary and inconsistent manner". The report, commissioned by Stephen Dorrell, former secretary of state for National Heritage, even condemns the pounds 23,000 paid each year to a part-time public relations assistant. It is as bitchy and as biting as those it seeks to admonish.

But the fairness, or otherwise, of Sir Geoffrey's sweeping criticisms, must turn on what use the commission is put to and what value the taxpayer gets for its money rather than on Lord St John's personal style of chairmanship.

Lord St John has a better eye than most architects", says Paul Finch, editor of the Architect's Journal.

"The decisions reached by the commission are no more and no less arbitrary than the proposals made by developers to change our towns and cities. Unlike local planning authorities, who are banned from making aesthetic judgements of new buildings and may represent local prejudices, the commission is a free agent, able to take a lofty, independent and aesthetic view which is otherwise denied."

While it can praise or condemn the look of new buildings, the commission has no statutory powers to do anything about a project it believes to be ugly or out of place.

Set up in the Thirties when planning laws were modest in scope and power, the commission was a useful brake on the visual excesses of rampant commercial development in the years leading up to the Second World War. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, however, gave teeth to a new generation of nationwide planning authorities and these made the RFAC all but redundant.

"The commission has been overtaken by the strengthening of planning laws", says Dan Cruickshank, the architectural historian and conservationist, "and, today, no one needs or has to listen to what it says. In any case, the commission today comprises a rather extraordinary group of people who are unable to reach a consensus on developments of national importance".

It does seem odd that Modernist architects such as Sir Michael Hopkins and John Winter should serve on the same committee as the classicist Quinlan Terry and Sophie Andrae, the former head of Save, the highly active heritage lobby. In theory, this polarity may suggest the commission's healthy willingness to take on board a wide range of views; in practice, it means that the commission is often in no position to speak with a clear and influential voice.

Sir Geoffrey's report does not give praise where praise is due. Whatever anyone thinks of Lord St John's pompous personal style of management, the commission has often been a force for the good behind the scenes.

It was the RFAC, for example, that put a stop to the building of a hideous new headquarters for the Inland Revenue in Nottingham. The building that was built, a handsome design by Sir Michael Hopkins, was a small triumph for the commission's byzantine style of behind-the-arras lobbying. The fact that the Nottingham commission went to one of Lord St John's advisers did, however, leave the RFAC open to accusations of self-interest.

The RFAC is, in many ways, a curious anachronism, and yet it does leave open a door for criticism of new buildings based on expert analysis rather than on the wholly mechanistic rules of Britain's complex and weighty planning system.

However, unless the RFAC reinvents itself and learns to behave in a less foppish and arbitrary manner, it will find itself, like the Design Council, slimmed, trimmed and reduced in stature.

The message seems to be, strip away the "Royal" frills, buy a second- hand Jag (excellent value because of massive, yet unwarranted depreciation), and do not hand out jobs so blatantly to the unpaid commissioners who turn up each month at the commission's headquarters at 7 St James's Square, in London, to bring the aesthetic element to bear in an otherwise soulless national planning system.