DAYTWO:CONSERVATIONI PRACTICE. THE ORGANISATIONOF CONSERVATIONI LOCALGOVERNMENT: RUSSELLWRIGHT Hardly surprising with a subject so close to the hearts of most of the audience, that Russell Wright•s research work on the status, function and distribution of conservation officers in the UK should already be familiar to many of the audience, even though the Department of the Environment has as yet not been able to publish it. According to Russell Wright there are now approximately 650 conservation staff alive and (often) well, in the local authority planning departments of England and Wales. We tend to conform to standardised prescriptions or models; the most common is the "historic buildings expert" who originated in the 1960s. However, the HBE model has been joined by the "entrepreneur" who attempts to stimulate investment in historic urban areas, relating planing issues to architectural issues; a shift from the passive consultative to the active role. Finally the "conservation planner" (the latest model) is mainly concerned with strategic socio-economic planning and management for conservation areas c~vered by local plans. Although there are approximately 400 staff in district councils and 200 in county councils, Russell Wright has iden• tified some areas of the country which are under-populated with conservation staff; the North West, the hinterlands of the Wash and the South West peninsula. These (mainly rural) areas have minimum coverage and predominantly have depressed local economies. (It was suggested at this point that lack of conservation staff might be not unrelated to the predominance of feudal-type land owning elected members in these regions and the consequent opposition of committees to such appointmentsl) The numbers and distribution of conservation staff are only two aspects; equally important is the variety of patterns of organisation within planning departments. Russell Wrightts Staff Models show the varieties of relationships of conservation teams to other groups within the planning department. In terms of the status of the Conservation Officer, Russell Wright distinguishes between 11bureaucratic 11 status (hierarchical position within the local authority structure) and 11social 11 status - how important the job is seen to be by the localcommunity and interest groups. Bureaucratic status for conservation staff seems to be dependent principally upon qualifications in architecture or town planning. The survey shows, however, that a large proportion of conservation officers are not qualified in either profession, yet are performing the same tasks as their qualified colleaguesa Russell Wright queried whether there was any evidence to suggest that either of these two professional qualifications are the most suitable basis for work as a Conservation Officer in a local authority. He concluded that, overall, current conservation staff resources are inadequate. He was particularly concerned that any planning authority can vet applications for Listed Building Consent on Grade II buildings without the involvement of specialised officers. During discussion afterwards, coucerning the extent to which it was possible for Conservation Officers to change the climate of opinion in which they worked, Russell Wright stressed the importance of education of decision-makers as to what models of Conservation Officer are available (the "historic buildings expert", etc.) so that the job description and hence the person appointed matched the needs of the area. The appointment reflects initial attitudes, and it may be that the appointee is not the right sort of person to change the terms of reference once in the job. Further questioning raised two more points of interest. Firstly, the possession of a diploma in conservation studies appears to have no effect on status, (position within the bureaucratic hierarchy), despite the fact that the first conservation course, at York, was established 11 years ago. Secondly there is no system at the moment for monitoring the workload in terms of numbers of LBC applications handled by conservation staff country-wide. (Communal ad-hoe estimates of½ an 11.
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