26 C O N T E X T 9 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 enthusiasts and chemists, and they have involved a huge range of people, from social housing tenants to cathedral deans. Many have been written as part of the process of applying for HLF funding. Others have been produced by organisations such as English Heritage and the National Trust, simply because they are a useful tool for managing complex sites. What’s in a name? The first obvious change is in the title – conservation management plans. Many practitioners were very worried about the difference between a conservation plan and a management plan. The reason for originally using the term ‘conservation plan’ was because there was a difference between what the HLF was advocating and traditional land management planning. The difference lay in the emphasis on understanding the site and evaluating significance as discrete and important parts of the process. A great deal of traditional management planning is top down and starts from the assumption that the values of the site are understood. In multidisciplinary plans this is rarely the case. We have changed the title because one of the unintended results was that people began to see conservation and management planning as different processes – the former concerned with thinking, and the latter with day-to-day management and maintenance.We wanted to restore the link. Perhaps the biggest concern about plans was that the information in them was rarely used. There are two main ways a plan can be used: to inform a new capital works project, and as part of the strategy for continuing maintenance and management. The new guidance spells this out more clearly. There is a chapter on using a plan to design a capital works project that shows how a plan can inform a heritage impact assessment. There are also sections on management and maintenance planning. Of course a good plan has many other uses. It can help inform audience development and interpretation or simply foster good working between partners. Some have become supplementary planning guidance, and others have been cited at inquiry. The HLF’s Heritage Grants application pack asks that applicants for smaller sums of money produce a conservation statement. This was intended to be a shorter version of a conservation plan.We soon found that there were many occasions when a shorter version was all that was needed. Of course, there is no clear line between a statement and a plan. They are simply documents at different scales. A map of England helps you plan a strategic journey, and an A–Z provides the detail you need actually to reach your destination. What has gradually emerged is that a conservation statement is something done using existing knowledge, often with a group of stakeholders, at an early stage in thinking. It will usually have gaps in it but is a good way of helping to develop outline ideas. Experience showed that it was not easy to produce or commission a good plan, and often the organisation caring for a place did not get sufficiently involved in the process, and certainly did not involve partners or stakeholders. As a result plans were ignored. The new guidance talks about the importance of taking ownership of the process, of getting involved in commissioning and making sure that the knowledge that already exists about a site is best used. Practice showed that it was not easy to commission a conservation plan. Typically consultants would produce wildly different costs for the job and the cheapest quote invariably produced the worst plan. The HLF has now published a model brief on the web to help commission a plan. The biggest issue in writing a brief is to decide how much information is needed, as this influences cost. There is no easy way of specifying this. The only solution is to think about the decisions that need to be taken, and to ensure that a plan contains both a broad overview of a site, and enough detail on particular issues to inform those decisions that need to be taken. Although we tried to encourage heritage practitioners to use a single approach, deep professional divides still remain within heritage, often arising from very different traditions. A series of checklists show how the process can apply to different sectors – to historic buildings and landscapes, to collections in historic buildings, to buried archaeological sites, to large transport items, and to biodiversity and earth heritage. The checklists are also a useful guide to the type of content you might expect in each section of the plan, and they can help an organisation or consultant to control a plan’s quality. Simply publishing guidance does not lead to good planning. Many heritage practitioners have found conservation planning difficult. As a result, it is The award-winning plan for the Kennet and Avon Canal brought historic environment and natural heritage issues together, and helped inform a successful £25 million restoration scheme.
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