52 C O N T E X T 1 2 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 3 Director’s cut Why standards? Why not? The issue of standards is of special concern to anyone dealing with heritage just now. ‘Standards’ is a term used here to encompass the wide range of quality assurance processes that span the spectrum from advice and guidance at one end to specifications, protocols and, yes, standards at the other. They play a critical role in controlling the processes that secure outcomes in line with expectations. However, they can also represent the triumph of bureaucracy over informed judgement. Clearly, standardising standards is not easy. There are two main visions of standards. In quality assurance they help secure good over bad outcomes or, more prosaically, adequate over inadequate. Such standards let us agree and identify the features that can help ensure a baseline will not be breached. But standards can also restrict the daring and imaginative, favouring the orthodox over the unorthodox. These contrasting perspectives also have stereotypical political associations – the regulatory and de-regulatory – that can not be ignored, especially as there is yet another, even more critical, consideration in their operation: standards invariably bring costs, whether in development, operation or implementation. So in these straitened times standards are often pitched as obstructions to ‘outcomes’, simply as ‘red tape’ requiring removal to improve efficiencies. Recent consultation headlines reflect current political spin as slack euphemisms for relaxation: ‘review’; ‘streamlining’; ‘extending’ and ‘improving’. The real question for government today is whether, and how, standards save money. Standards have limitations, but they underpin the processes that secure outcomes. Health sector analysts realised that more patients survived if everyone in a surgical team followed the protocol of introducing themselves before starting any ‘cut’. So, too, when assessing significance in heritage, a critical protocol may be checking the historic environment record. In either case the benefits of the action apply regardless of whether it is underpinned by tickbox culture, good professional practice or statutory requirement. Professionals are understandably often ambivalent about standards too. On the one hand, as paper process is (or might be) reduced, so too professional judgement and specialist knowledge become more highly valued. On the other, without the paper to point to in support of the specialist processes, how can they prove to non-specialists that they are right? More than many, architects are governed by a substantial infrastructure around standards, primarily through the regulatory framework that underpins their title through the Architects Registration Board (ARB). Like any regulatory tool, the ARB will always face serious challenges – whether by tying itself in knots over who to call an architect, or through competition by alternative routes to quality assurance. There is a critical limitation with which we can identify especially well: for the ARB can only oversee the standards of those who subscribe to it as architects. Non-architects who provide ‘architectural services’ are not regulated by ARB. The RIBA may well face a comparable challenge in its conservation registration, which standardises the educational requirements of those fit to work on historic buildings from traditional, pre-1919 stock to the highest designations. Presumably that will only be able to regulate the conservationrelated operations of those architects who agree to be bound by the terms of the conservation register. As conservation specialists, the IHBC and its membership face similar challenges. A huge diversity of professions can claim to offer relevant advice and expertise, from archaeologists and historians to builders and designers. There is no reason why they can not offer a service perfectly compatible with conservation outcomes, but that does not does it mean that their generic skills make then competent to deliver conservation as some sort of technical or professional birthright.
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