44 C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 Director’s cut Heritage bill: where now? With the future of the Heritage Bill for England and Wales now in doubt, we need to explore the IHBC’s response to the situation. The IHBC has been a longstanding supporter of the principles of Heritage Protection Reform (HPR), the thinking informing the bill, despite concerns regarding aspects of the draft. Concerns on detail did not stop us consolidating support for the legislation from a much wider constituency of key stakeholders. Our ‘joint professional response’ to the draft bill was signed up to by five other built environment professional organisations, together representing some quarter of a million professional memberships. This marked a highpoint of the collective specialist interest in the proposed reforms. Of course, as an organisation that operates an emphatically open and democratic structure, there were many different strands to our tapestry of support. But from the start we must not lose sight of the fact that the IHBC has always firmly supported the reforms intended to update the heritage protection system that eventually led to the draft bill. Adopting the same headline aspiration used by English Heritage (Heritage Protection Reform) we supported the need for a more accessible, transparent, integrated and efficient system of heritage protection. This involved managing the historic environment in its entirety as a specially valued and integral part of the planning system. It was not a broken system, but one that needed significant refinement. Clearly devolved governments would require different responses to the wider challenges shaping HPR. Scotland especially has approached the challenges more cautiously. However, all governments needed to address wider public engagement in looking after our historic places, designated and undesignated, as a means of achieving more effective historic environment conservation. The proper framework for such management would be the planning system. As we wrote in the introduction to our Caring for Places and People consultation in 2008, the issues of HPR are issues relevant to ‘our membership in its entirety and to conservation across the UK’. While there have been many different proposals for reform, our responses to the bill and its framing documentation (available on www. ihbc.org.uk) provide an impressive sequence of supportive statements from the IHBC. These identify points that the bill itself could help address. They include the single list of designated assets, simplifying the processes, and the potential of local listings. So even as we sought more substantial reform, the IHBC looked forward to the new regulatory systems presaged by the bill. In light of the uncertainties over the legislative progress it is less clear how the IHBC can best help move the sector forward.We will, of course, maintain our principled support for the bill. This is with the presumption that government will address any resource issues in the hope that the bill can be progressed in the very short term. But if it stays on hold, and if other opportunities arise to progress historic environment objectives, are we to hold fast in the hope of a critical mass of legislative reform winning forward? Or should we grasp what we can? Whatever we do, we need to be sure that we work in tandem with the many partners who share our priorities. Our consolidation across the built environment sector has been the biggest benefit of the entire reform process. With this in mind it is also clear that for the IHBC nothing significant has changed in our aspirations. We want better information for designation and consent, simpler and more transparent processes for stakeholders and more integration across the many services shaping historic environment conservation (inside and outside government). We also want clearer and more substantial policy guidance; fiscal support that reflects both environmental and economic benefits of conservation (as well as its cultural benefits); and the removal of damaging legislative anomalies (such as Shimizu). Broadly speaking, at the heart of the aspirations of both English Heritage and the IHBC lay the idea of creating a planning system that could be more responsive to conservation. There are halfway houses that can be developed to achieve these and other aims. Many of them have been targeted already by English Heritage in light of the status of the draft bill. Access to registers and lists of assets might be simplified by administrative reforms. Current information management could be enhanced and supported more effectively through providing more substantial guidance and by linking local existing authority information systems more effectively. Wider consultation on designation, themes and strategies can be put in place (still being mindful of the lack of the kind of enabling support that would require primary legislation, such as interim protection). And conservation could be more effectively linked into the planning infrastructure
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