C O N T E X T 1 3 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 4 53 Director’s cut The IHBC is shaping public interest in private places (Part 1) Debate in conservation has focused increasingly on the interfaces between private and public sector interests. From the 1990s and PPG 16, when policy was used to generate a particular class of archaeological output, to government proposals arising from England’s Penfold Review of ‘non-planning consents’ (that included the relocation of regulatory scrutiny into ordinary development practice), the idea has continued to gain ground of addressing public sector constraints using policydriven changes in private sector practice. Policy drivers can and will shape practice, but the approach faces big challenges, especially in this political climate. Surely it is far easier is to work with the private sector, building on its many strengths, while still remembering that regulation is a critical, and generally welcome, part of that package. That is how the IHBC has been developing its support, as noted further below. Yet, driven by cutbacks in local services on the one hand and the increasingly holistic definition of the historic environment, national heritage agencies in particular are challenged by the conundrum created by these circumstances: ‘more heritage – less capacity’. That big picture is framed by ‘big policy’ reactions, not least the relocation of national heritage agencies – or parts thereof – further away from their public-sector contexts. Service relocation to generate savings is not the only strategy in the UK, however, as ever-increasing devolution encourages arrangements more suited to local circumstances.While both Scotland and England grapple with plans for consolidation and heritage service relocation at national levels, Wales is standing back from the brink and has decided not to follow the trend. It will keep separate the records and information activities of RCAHMW and the regulatory and property management roles of Cadw’s role in central government. Similarly Northern Ireland is still grappling with plans to devolve its centralised heritage management arrangements to more local structures, as it tries to enhance services in line with the models longoffered by other parts of the UK, but not always still extant. If specific responses are not universal, the issues are clearly UK-wide: finances do not stretch to the aspirations of our heritage legislation. As our chair, Mike Brown, pithily puts it, we are working with ‘first world legislation and third world infrastructure’. That takes us back to the idea of ‘service relocation to save public money’. The potential benefits of ‘service relocation’ outside the public sector is highlighted most prominently in the consultation paper on the split of English Heritage into, in simple terms, distinct regulatory and property management arms. The consultation cites the potential benefits to be derived from such changes including, at more local levels, supportive references to the success of England’s old archaeology PPG 16. It also commends shared heritage services as de facto ‘imaginative’ responses to cutbacks. Both of these approaches are presented as a frame to the new organisation’s policy – if a new policy is possible before the organisation is incorporated – regarding the future of heritage services. The suggestion from the consultation is that England’s heritage management infrastructure will contract further unless there is a better acceptance of – and more unilateral advocacy of – the benefits of replacing conservation services in local authorities with such preferred alternatives. These may be some unspecified private-sector equivalents to those generated by PPG 16. Or they might operate as some style of collectivised, generic, ‘shared’ heritage service supplier that, by any reading, has private or, more likely, third-sector inclinations. In either case, the policy ignores the importance of the historic, logical and beneficial links that conservation has always had with local planning services: informed, accessible, holistic and, critically, (as the IHBC’s research into Scotland’s local authorities has indicated) by those terms remarkably cost-effective. The conservation world would be foolish to ignore the pressures shaping those national policies promoting service relocation, not least as we can see how national heritage bodies currently exist in that same uncertain terrain: for the public, too much heritage to be ‘planning’, but for government too
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