48 C O N T E X T 1 3 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 Notes from the chair If the taxpayer will not foot the bill, owners and applicants will have to At last there are some clear signs that the much promised green shoots of an economic upturn are peeping out of the stony ground of the last few years – at least in and around London. The workload of the London borough planning authority that provides my day job has increased substantially in the last few months, with a consequent impact on my caseload. Yet the nature of the proposals put forward is disconcerting. There are few applications for significant numbers of new homes. So, sorry if you are struggling to get a home of your own. Such business applications as I see often relate to shops and other lowwaged sectors. So, sorry if you were hoping for a career.What there have been are large numbers of applications for extensions and loft conversions from existing homeowners, able to access the credit necessary to finance such projects. Good luck to them, but there must be concerns at this focus of economic activity: those who have, wanting more. Perhaps it is just a London phenomenon. I suspect that a driver for these projects is the impossibility for such owners of moving up, from a semi to a detached, and so on. Much of central London has been priced out of the reach of salaried people by City bonuses and foreign cash buyers. So people enlarge what they have. Hence the hundreds of applications for development to build on no-longer-wanted gardens (who has the time when there are so many digital distractions?) or up into the loft.You have never seen so many en suites! Can’t they wait? Seriously (and I confess to having extended my own house 10 years ago for much the same reasons, including three lovely daughters wanting three lovely bedrooms), this is having a major impact on the conservation areas in my patch. Clunking box dormers, frontslope roof lights, single- and two-storey side extensions leading to a terracing effect, and huge rear extensions distorting the balance between the built and natural environment, and a stunning disregard for any trees, fill my in-tray, leaving precious little time for more strategic work (such as character appraisals, s71 management proposals and Article 4 directions). Maybe it is just a London thing. Certainly, working in London you have to be reconciled to the fact that few people come there to protect its built or natural heritage. Most come to make money, and the housing market is one of the easier ways to make it. Sadly, given the poor levels of resourcing within local planning authorities, the often miserable standard of many applications, a government committed to removing what it sees as planning red tape and the overwhelming incentives to play the housing market for personal gain, it should come as no surprise that our conservation areas and local heritage generally are under siege. (And I am not for a second making light of the pressure our nationally designated heritage is under – that is a topic for another day). What can be done? The sixth annual survey of local planning authority conservation officer provision shows the trend line of the last few years continuing, with a further two per cent drop in posts. I have begun to think that there is unlikely to be any realistic prospect of a return to the old days of decent public funding supporting a well-resourced planning and heritage service.We must think afresh and look for new models for professional support for our heritage. If the taxpayer will not foot the bill, owners and applicants will have to. The alternative, de-designating huge swathes of heritage and abandoning it to market forces (for which read, the pressures listed above and the plastic window industry) is too much to contemplate. In what ways might owners and applicants contribute more? Feecharging will be back on the agenda. But why should owners pay fees for a second-rate service? Applicants can not choose who they apply to. If only the best planning authorities (as identified through performance statistics and the previously discussed benchmarking of levels of local provision) could charge fees, might this not incentivise middling planning authorities to up their game, and give a kick up the backside to those bottomquartile authorities? It would certainly introduce a self-evident business case for providing and, through fee-income, funding proper provision of heritage expertise within planning authorities. But, I hear it said by certain owners’ organisations, where is the alternative for the applicant? One idea that has been put forward is that owners/ applicants who commission an accredited conservation professional to lead on their proposals might enjoy a fast-track permission or consent process. After all, the expertise would be front-loaded into the design process (something the IHBC has always supported), and both the client and the planning authority would have the advantage of having an expert intermediary to work with. The fast-track process, it has even been suggested, could extend to being deemed consent, unless the planning authority calls-in the application within the allowed for time-scale. Of course, there would have to be a sector-wide agreement on who is eligible for accreditation (IHBC membership being the obvious qualification, along with those accredited by the RIBA, RICS and ICE). There would also have to be an explicit higher obligation to the historic asset (akin to a lawyer’s obligation to the court above that of their client). The professional bodies have a key role in these regards.While some public-sector members may not be comfortable with these ideas, these arrangements would have the benefit of incentivising the process to be more efficient, while ensuring that the historic asset gets the appropriate professional input. That is plainly not the case at present, where 25 per cent of local planning authorities lack the necessary conservation officer expertise. Beyond these proposed reforms lies the wider picture. Should the planning system be ring-fenced and protected
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=