C O N T E X T 1 3 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 4 51 Notes from the chair That was the year that was This column will be my last before the AGM (5.20 pm at the Annual School on Friday 6 June, Edinburgh). As tradition demands, it seems appropriate to review what has happened over the last 12 months and where the institute might go next. The first thing to note, personally, is how fast the year has gone, and how astonishingly busy it has been. It has been an exciting year, with many new initiatives and a great deal achieved. I am indebted to Seán O’Reilly and the national office for their endless enthusiasm and energy, and the help and assistance of council members in driving things forward. I have spelled out before the strategy we are following.To recap, it is: 1. Increasing national office capacity. 2. Better use of our body of statistics and data. 3. Assisting affiliates to become full members. 4. Forging partnerships to develop our campaigning efforts. 5. Modernising our governance to make it more transparent and democratic. Many of these areas overlap. Delivering many of these initiatives was and is dependent on finding the solution to the capacity issue. I am pleased to report the following progress over the year: 1.Through careful management of our finances, modest surpluses have become available.These have allowed us to invest in further capacity within the national office.This has been targeted at areas that free up the director to undertake more strategic work and those activities that, in time, will facilitate further increases in income.Three new posts have been approved by council, two of which have already been recruited to. The weekly Newsblog service (which I trust you find as interesting as I do) is now undertaken by a retained consultant, freeing up Seán for more strategic matters. 2. Similarly, specialist capacity has been brought in to mine the institute’s collated data resource, and to begin the production of sector analysis, statistical trends, guidance and information that, we hope, members will find invaluable in their day-to-day practice and that will assist the institute’s campaigning efforts. 3. I trust that those of you who are affiliates will already be familiar with the Stepping Stones programme, being designed to help you to move up to full membership.This initiative is to be delivered through our branch network supported by Paul Butler (membership and ethics secretary) and Emilia McDonald (née Hands), vice chair. Seán and I felt that this programme needed even more support and resources.To that end council in April approved the recruitment of a new officer to support the branches in, among other things, delivering the programme.The post, provisionally titled the Learning, Education,Training and Standards Liaison Officer (LETS Liaison Officer for short) will allow stronger links with and between the branch networks and, as full membership numbers flourish and income grows, will strengthen further our capacity to deliver yet more initiatives. 4. As you will know, the institute is very concerned at the loss of public sector conservation jobs and commissions for private heritage practitioners in the present economic climate. As you may have seen in the article in Planning magazine at the end of March, we are not alone in our concern. I and others have been very active in the last year in getting this issue out into the public arena, and campaigning to get politicians and others to understand that our nation’s heritage is facing a crisis. Remember, a third of conservation officer posts have been lost since the recession began, that a quarter of local planning departments lack any proper specialist provision. As budgets have been cut, commissions for private consultants have been few and far between. It has been a tough period for our members. In some parts of the UK protection is inadequate while, across the whole UK, too many opportunities for heritage-led regeneration, skilled jobs and economic growth are being missed through short-termism and damaging cuts. As part of our fight back on these issues, the institute, already part of the Cut-the-VAT campaign, part-funded an updated research paper to demonstrate the positive impact that a reduction of VAT on the labour element of construction works to five per cent would have on the British economy. I and others were at the launch of the research paper at the House of Commons attended by a number of MPs with supporting speeches by the Heritage Alliance (the spirited Loyd Grossman) and all three main parties.We particularly stressed to MPs the impact that the current 20 per cent rate of VAT was having on the viability of heritage projects, Heritage at Risk, and the loss of work for skilled professionals and craftsmen. Events such as this can only help spread the message while raising the profile of the IHBC. Our relationship with the archaeology world continues to grow. Following submission of our written evidence, I was pleased to appear with Bob Kindred (government liaison officer) at the Redesdale Inquiry into the loss of capacity in the archaeology world (see my previous column, Context 133, March). Set up by the minister, Ed Vaisey MP, we were grilled not on archaeology cuts, but rather on the experiences of the conservation world when faced with similar, if earlier and, thus far, deeper cuts.This gave us an invaluable platform to spell out to our politicians the devastating impact current policies are having on the nation’s heritage, the threats to be faced and the responses in place.We await the report with interest. The work to develop two benchmarking algorithms to identify minimum conservation and archaeology capacity within local authorities presses ahead, supported by English Heritage and in partnership with the Institute for Archaeologists, Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers, Council for British Archaeology and, representing listed building owners, the CLA. It has been agreed that, alongside the benchmarking stick, we should also offer a carrot to upper-quartile authorities in the form of kite-marking by the respective professional bodies.This will reward those authorities that have, despite the cuts, retained their conservation capacity,
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