14 CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 Nationally, planning policy is generally helpful. The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) encourages the re-use of rural buildings, especially heritage (current paragraph 80); prior approval schemes (see below) encourage re-use; and Historic England’s The Adaptive Reuse of Traditional Farm Buildings (HEAN9, 2017) encourages ‘new… uses that enhance their historic… significance’. These policies, however, have made little impact on the first problem: that at the heart of most rural local plans are formidable policy presumptions that development outside major settlements – as crumbling rural heritage usually is – is ‘unsustainable’ and thus unacceptable. Given the primacy of the local plan in planning (and appeal) decisions, these policies make it extremely difficult to obtain, or indeed for the local planning authority to grant, consent to re-use rural heritage at risk, however compelling the heritage case, even with pro-heritage policies in the margins of the plan. This means that sympathetic applications are refused (‘the proposal is unsustainable and inconsistent with policies H1 [etc] in the local plan…’). Worse, the high application costs and low probability of success mean that most people with redundant crumbling heritage, understandably, do not try. This is lethal for rural heritage. Class Q prior approval This is a challenging problem that the heritage sector cannot easily address by itself. The obvious solution is the Class Q prior approval scheme for residential conversion of agricultural buildings (and Classes R and S for other uses). Class Q is highly restrictive, and it leaves the decision with the local planning authority. Planning authorities can easily reject Class Q applications, on a series of grounds, and an extraordinarily high 57 per cent of applications are, wisely or not, rejected. Class Q does, however, ask the local planning authority to consider wider issues. Some councils do consider the benefits of conversion, and consents do follow, at least in a minority of cases, though so far there have been relatively few applications for heritage buildings, probably because lower financial returns from heritage re-use do not appear to outweigh the high costs of applications and the high risk of refusal. The heritage sector has been wary of Class Q/R/S, but realistically reviewing these is probably the best or only way of making it less difficult to get consents for heritage buildings outside major settlement boundaries. If we put effort into getting its details right, we could reuse hundreds, perhaps thousands, of buildings which otherwise will probably be lost. Viable uses The second soluble problem is that we often wait until after holes appear in the roof. Heritage being very expensive to repair can easily become at risk; any building without a viable use, or unattractive to users, even if initially in full repair, is at potential risk, so we should try to prevent that wherever possible. With any rural building, we should (after, as always, analysing heritage significance) proactively ask a series of questions. Is this building in a genuinely viable use? If it is, what sympathetic changes are needed (such as extra bathrooms in a house) to make it attractive to potential users? If it is not, can we get it into a viable use? What can we do to help the owner? Does this proposal need tweaking to make it better? What would be the impact on this building’s future if we rejected this application: can we be sure that, in practice, a better alternative would actually happen? We should articulate these key questions in new published guidance. Historic England’s current advice on heritage at risk, that ‘working with the owner is the route to solving heritage at risk’ (Managing Significance in Decision-Taking in the Historic Environment, GPA2, 2015) is a good start. But it needs more detail, as above, incorporating also the advice on holistic decision-taking in the IHBC’s helpful Conservation Professional Practice Principles (2017). Dereliction in Staffordshire A collapsing roof in Cumbria
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=