38 C O N T E X T 1 2 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 Director’s cut Hard times meet great expectations There’s no doubting the huge pressures our sector faces, especially in England. The scale of the trauma is horrific. Helped by the IHBC’s research into local authority conservation services, supported by English Heritage, we have some detail on the character of the problems in England, and their scale. That does not resolve them. At least we can be reasonably precise: since 2006, local authority conservation capacity has plummeted 25 per cent. In the last year alone we have seen a drop of about 13 per cent, at a time when listed building consent applications have risen by five per cent. Indeed, some of the services that are included in our statistics can not be considered credible in operational terms.While in Scotland, for example, it is recommended that an average authority should have capacity equivalent to at least two full-time full members of the IHBC, there is no comparable statement for England. The reality is that in some of England’s authorities conservation capacity is so small that the service may as well not be there. For a real sense of what is going on we should supplement the 25 per cent drop identified there by another – as yet undefined – proportion of de facto ‘non-credible conservation service’. As levels of public service pay for in-house professionals have decreased, so too is there a tendency to downgrade skilled conservation roles to generic ‘heritage-istic’ or trainee planning posts. These might be operated by early career professionals or, where skilled, people lacking training in line with the international conservation standards identified by ICOMOS. With the RIBA’s adoption of the ICOMOS guidelines through its new conservation register, these standards are now recognised by all credible professional bodies. Unfortunately, the same can not be said of employers and regulators, so the longstanding undervaluing of professional conservation standards is only increased. Add in to the mix of the undersized, underpaid and underskilled, the unsympathetic ethos promoted by the coalition government in England (and, if less obviously, also evident in Scotland’s wider politics), and the problems are aggravated further. From the reduction of environment resource management to a sub-Jeremy Clarkson ‘bunny-hugging’ debate, to the persistent stereotyping of conservation as opposing growth, we can see that things are only getting worse. All that is not to say that we can not both fire-fight the inevitable disasters, as well as seek alternative solutions. For a start, we can promote our supporters, and even get pleasant surprises. Jeremy Clarkson’s recent passing quip about the importance of planners caring for the character of England’s towns might go against his own carefully managed public persona, but it does us no harm. Even if, like Ruskin, the sheer profligacy of his pronouncements means that he must eventually say something astute, that does not mean that we can not make use of them when it suits, and feature his opinions on our NewsBlog. We should register also how the scale and breadth of interest in heritage has expanded in recent times too. The World Monuments Fund has secured hundreds of millions of project funding since 1997, following the generosity of hedge-fund manager Robert Wilson, while SAVE’s success on redefining demolition as development has transformed the very fundamentals of planning. On the bright side too, Civic Voice has powered ahead as a voice for communities, while even England’s Penfold review of so-called ‘nonplanning consents’ may yet prove to have a bigger impact on conservation services than any legislative changes, given its focus on customer services. At the same time the government in Wales has expressed an interest in a ‘duty of care’ for owners, while in Scotland there is a revival of interest in promoting ‘flat-VAT’ solutions for repairs though the work of the Built Environment Forum Scotland (BEFS). In terms of the big picture, the most dramatic developments have been in the arrival - admittedly slowly - of over-arching plans for each of the main sectors that conservation relies on for its success: cultural heritage, planning, and construction. These correspond roughly to the IHBC’s three main ‘Areas of Practical Competence’ in our model ‘conservation cycle’: • Evaluation: where we assess values, such as special interest and significance • Management: where we plan and manage change • Intervention: where we instigate and implement change that is appropriate and proportionate. Now the three sectors corresponding to these areas of competence have plans in place, or at least
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