C O N T E X T 1 2 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 3 53 Welcome to new members The following members were voted in at the December 2012 council meeting.Welcome to you all. Full members Ignus Froneman LO Jon Phipps EM Upgrades from affiliates to full members Sarah Dyer NO Janice Gooch SO Christina Malathouni LO Sanne Roberts SE Charles Smith YO Liz Stephen LO BenWebb SW LukeWormald SC Affiliate members Karen Averby LO Phil Braithwaite NW Richard Clark SE Heloise Darling SO Jo Deeming SE Karen Fielder SO Michael Friel SC Claire Gayle LO Jane Gleeson LO Laura Hodson EM John Kelly RI Siân Loftus SC Georgina MacHugh EA Kate Matthews LO Ross McCleary SC Deborah McGhee LO Anna Melville SO Antony Rifkin LO Stuart Rumsey SE Mark Service LO Shui-Fung Siu LO AndrewWade SE BobWatkins SW Associate members Sarah Sullivan SE The IHBC can only regulate the small number of specialists who, through IHBC membership, subscribe to the standard that lies at the heart of our skills: the 1993 ICOMOS Guidelines on conservation training and education.We test competence using a standard mapping of the evidence from the applicant against our expectations using that model from ICOMOS, and regulate them as members through our disciplinary procedures, ensuring that standards are observed. But though we do only regulate a comparatively small number of practitioners, we deliver the standard against which all conservation is judged, regardless of what discipline it comes from. So our obligations to standards extend far beyond our members. These considerations help explain why the IHBC and our members put such efforts into ensuring that standards (in their widest sense) are the best they can be for historic environment conservation. It is particularly important just now, as so many are under consideration. The ICOMOS guidelines are under review, with the key challenge being to update a document in a way that reflects the strengths of the original as well as the challenges today: including sustainability, community, costing, climate change and non-technical skills. The IHBC’s response to the review of planning guidance under Lord Taylor in England – which encompasses critical standards for all our members – reflects the need for ‘proportionate’ regulation, but the boundaries of proportionality are still unclear. The update of the British Standard for conservation, BS 7913, is also under review. That standard sits within a European infrastructure where, again, updating a 20th-century conservation practitioners’ manual to a 21st-century ‘standard’ is a critical challenge. Both in Scotland andWales substantial reviews of the infrastructure of built and historic environment conservation are also taking place in their own right. As readers of our news and information services will know, IHBC representatives are hugely active in these areas, delivering important messages about conservation and its needs and benefits. Regardless of how one sees standards in conservation, as in any process-based activity, they can not be ignored. It is the IHBC’s duty to make sure that they are the best they can possibly be. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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