44 C O N T E X T 1 1 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 0 Director’s cut Conservation: mainstream or specialist? Many readers, mostly members but also some non-members, will have contributed to the recent online IHBC Forward Planning survey. Part of our development of a corporate plan, covering 2010 to 2015, the survey is scheduled for adoption at the next AGM, part of our annual school in London. The corporate planning process has included a range of other opportunities for comment and feedback, generating numerous and wide-ranging thoughts about how we might move forward in our business planning. Some substantial, if ambitious, aspirations have been registered. These include leading the built environment sector, securing 5,000 members, and becoming the government’s first stop for independent advice on managing historic places. There is a strong sense of pride in how the IHBC has progressed recently, in particular in representing the voice of the conservation professional in public debate. Unfortunately, this is combined with a profound frustration that we have barely touched the surface of the really big challenges faced by our sector. For example, we have roundly failed to secure recognition of the real and material benefits of conservation within the mainstream of planning and environmental management, in community development, and in economic progress. Issues that seem so obvious to us – such as the skilled jobs and low carbon footprints attached to maintaining traditional fabric and areas, or the intrinsically inclusive nature of our valued places – are invariably ignored in favour of short-sighted policies shaped by more powerful interests and reactionary presumptions. Scrapping windows and regs At the time of writing, a good example of the short-sighted is the window industries’ scrappage initiative. This asks the tax payer for a £2,000 subvention to households to scrap their old windows for new, ostensibly to reduce carbon emissions. It is currently only a petition to No 10 – a route open to anyone – but it is being touted by parts of the windows industry as their contribution to reducing climate change and saving money for customers. By the time you read this article, our joint letter to The Times will have appeared, and we will be progressing our advocacy. However, the scrappage proposal still represents a nadir in public debate on climate change. Governments have an infinite capacity to succumb to such irrationalities, however competent their advisers. More seriously, while everyone but the bankers seems to recognise the urgent need to increase controls to address the fallout in the financial sector, governments across the UK are engaged in planning strategies that are essentially deregulatory. The intention of such deregulation is, astoundingly, ‘to facilitate economic recovery’ from that same fiscal disaster. The failure to regulate development was a central part of the same property bubble that led to the banking disaster (remember the ‘toxic assets’).Yet further deregulation still seems to be seen as the answer. Bringing sensible and proportionate conservation strategies into the mainstream of development, including effective and streamlined regulation and quality controls, may be a solution for many of our 21st-century ailments. It is not recognised as such outside our own select circles. PPS trouble If the scrappage proposal shows how far we have to go in the core built environment industries, to understand the scale of our problem at the environmental policy level, reference need only be made to England’s draft Planning Policy Statement (PPS) on Planning for the Historic Environment. The draft PPS raised widespread concerns. It attempted to reduce protection to a matter of registering damage to cultural associations (‘significance’). Other important issues were to be addressed in the planning ‘mainstream’. Like the siblings it leads, PPS 1, on Sustainable Development, largely ignores many central values of the historic environment. The intrinsic sustainability of traditional places and their built fabric hardly registers in the document. PPS 1 blithely calls for the protection and conservation of places, but the relevant PPS on the historic environment attempts to define that protection in terms of managing associations and documenting destruction. Some five million buildings, the heart of the bountiful collections of England’s best, most humane and most British places, were (and possibly are) in danger of being dismissed as recordable repositories of some historic memory.We can all commend English Heritage for its substantial – and
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