C O N T E X T 1 2 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 1 39 Director’s cut The right tools for the job We have just experienced a plethora of major changes and achievements that should lay the foundations for our next few years.We have signed off our remarkable 2011 Annual School, at the same time as mounting our highly distinctive response to England’s draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and helping push out for consultation the National Occupational Standard, to underpin IHBC-UK’s professional membership standards. We have helped to start the re-shaping of the British Standard on conservation, ‘7913’, as well as completing the Stopping the Rot (v2) publication with English Heritage.We have highlighted, individually and in partnership, the collapsing infrastructure for heritage protection in local authorities; hosted our peripatetic council’s reception in Manchester; and won Cadw’s support for a pan-historic environment local authority capacity survey. We have fed into a range of events with important inter-professional links, from supporting the joint CIOB International Conservation Conference inYork (with IHBC’s profile raised across the 40,000 members there), to sponsoring conferences, notably the Churches Conference Trust, on funding, and the Conference on Training in Architectural Conservation (COTAC) exploration of green issues in Greenwich. We have raised the heritage skills agenda through promoting the CITBConstructionSkills consultation on its forward plan, contributing to the re-basing of the National Heritage Training Group (NHTG) and inputting heritage issues into discussions on the Green Deal, the coalition government’s initiative on energy efficiency measures for households and businesses.We have hosted our 4th Branch Connection Day, on communications, and launched both our new membership application form and the 2012 Gus Astley Annual Student Award.We have secured as judge for the 2011 award the estimable Rory Cullen, IHBC member and head of building at the National Trust. Whew! This litany of recent actions, though clearly impressive in an organisation with a staff of just two and a dedicated cluster of consultants and volunteers, may at first seem like too much of a random, scatter-gun of activities. Yet it is important to recognise that this bricolage of activities reflects the genuine complexity of conservation issues when dealing with the world of planning, construction, economics and managing change in places. No less important is the fact that these actions are formally tied together by the needs and priorities agreed by the collective body of our membership, as captured in our Corporate Plan 2010-15. That document is the essential tool for our trustees. Test them on it! Alongside our risk management register, it serves as the crucial tool to help our council monitor, understand, guide and oversee the success of the IHBC’s operations.We may be the conservation bricoleurs, but we work to a plan. The IHBC’s Corporate Plan was produced following some three years of discussions across our membership. Now it is time for us to take our next step, as we move forward the review of our governance, beginning specifically with that most esoteric of corporate tools, our constitution.We must look ahead to future structures and standards because, as our working environment changes, so must we. The changes we have been going through have been substantial, not only during this year, but in the period since we first adopted our constitution, the IHBC’s Memorandum and Articles of Association, in 1997. Those changes are well captured in the pivotal role played by our past treasurer, Mike Knights, in helping shape the growth of the organisation from a loose agglomeration of branches to the integrated corporate presence we now present to the outside world. Few will appreciate the scale of Mike’s contributions to the IHBC better than I, as your director. I worked closely with Mike as we established the executive and operational infrastructure of the national office, a process that demanded careful change management to maintain the strengths and capacity of the voluntary body, while also building in new processes and systems. Retrofitting is a suitable analogy. IHBC chair Jo Evans sets the mood at the NorthWest branch day conference (see also p27)
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