I never cease to be amazed at the way blinkered bureaucrats ignore the obvious.

Their ability to deny common sense truths simply because there is no published evidence is astonishing.

For instance, can any reasonable person still argue watching too much violence on television does not dull sensitivities to what real physical and mental suffering is all about.

But just because someone has yet to produce an official report linking cause and effect, it therefore cannot be true.

And putting violence on television is big business. Governments are reluctant to interfere when so much money and so many jobs are at stake.

Remember how many years, how many reports all over the world it took to make them acknowledge smoking was dangerous. It was simple common sense that inhaling all that smoke into the lungs could not be good. Yet it took decades of argument and fighting the tobacco industry to force governments to take any action.

Which, forgive me, is a rather long-winded way of getting round to a new, NHS report which has taken four years to complete. It is all to do with the simple, common sense premise that good hospital design and well-designed wards can help patients recover more quickly. It seems so obvious. And yet, until now, all the evidence was conjectural, anecdotal.

Most doctors, designers and architects tended to agree it was probably a good thing to have well decorated wards with pictures on the walls and ideally, a pleasant view. It did not really go much beyond that general consensus.

But this new study has produced a mass of data proving the theory. The common sense was absolutely right. Good hospital design can cut treatment times by 14 per cent in a mental health ward and 21 per cent in a non-operative ward. In cash terms, this can mean savings of as much as £7,000 a year for a single bed. That is now a proven fact.

I am delighted to say that the chairman of the inquiry is based here in Brighton.

He is John Wells-Thorpe, former chairman of both the Commonwealth Association of Architects and of the South Downs Health NHS Trust.

The two hospitals chosen for the study with specific areas undergoing extensive improvement were Poole General and Brighton General.

In both places, patients were discharged significantly more quickly from the new wards than the old ones.

And in Brighton, at the new mental health unit Mill View, patients were judged to be less aggressive with fewer verbal outbursts and fewer instances of threatening behaviour. Most dramatically, patients needed to spend 70 per cent less time in seclusion.

So what happens next? It's very early days. Health bureaucrats, not to mention the Treasury, will be digesting this now proven common sense for some time to come. But already the Department of Culture is showing interest in the remedial potential of both performance and visual arts.

Watch this space!