C O N T E X T 1 1 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 41 Director’s cut Busy Bees @ IHBC: 2 In this second cut of the Director’s cut – following that in the previous issue of Context – I want to draw together the threads of how we work regulation and promotion together. Despite an apparent polarisation, like many extremes these two areas go together more closely than one might expect. Promotion of the value of our members’ work presumes that qualified, competent specialists can deliver quality outcomes. However, unless the professional body ensures that its members deliver the advertised outcomes, that promotion dies a quick death. It is a test every such body faces, and when they overreach themselves they fall flat in the most damaging of ways for their members. Integrating promotion and regulation is also especially important given the cutback-culture we are entering, where government stands back and quality assurance is expected to be provided through internal processes rather than government oversight. For conservation professionals it is only too obvious that the muchheralded big society – howsoever it might operate – will need informed and receptive local government to ensure its effective operation. Equally we are ready to accept that, just as we have laid the foundation for professionalism in historic environment conservation through our professional body and our membership standards, so too we have a core responsibility to ensure that the processes we work with will secure the quality outcomes clients stakeholders require. Alongside our now well-known membership procedures, HESPR is our other key tool for achieving quality outcomes. HESPR The IHBC’s Historic Environment Service Providers Recognition scheme (HESPR), integrates our membership standards into the planning and development system at a corporate level. And with our newly elected Disciplinary Committee, we also have additional capacity to oversee HESPR’s own quality controls. The principle is simple. The standard by which we judge our members’ activities must be the best they, and we, can reasonably achieve. If you employ a HESPR organisation you should be able to rely on receiving the same service standard you would expect of an IHBC member, but with the benefit of a suitable standard of corporate support that will further underpin their personal and professional skills, and the outcomes. When using HESPR, the client needs less quality assurance because HESPR, backed by the IHBC, provides an effective baseline for standards. For a client in the Big Society, HESPR, not government, is the first step to quality assurance in historic and built environment conservation. However, for HESPR to succeed in raising the bar in the business of conservation we need more clarity in our professional expectations (standards, guidelines and specifications) and, crucially, we need members to recommend it and clients to adopt it. Standards In line with our Corporate Plan, we are examining how best to establish and adopt standards, looking at how we can serve both as the author of and the clearing house for what might be called the ‘intelligent standard’. Given the breadth of our operations, and our multi-disciplinary (or pan-disciplinary) foundations, the range of standards open to our members is legion. For this reason (and notwithstanding your director’s efforts to the contrary), to date we have only officially recognised one ‘standard’: ICOMOS’ 1993 guidelines on conservation training and education, those same guidelines that underpin our membership criteria. For the future, we want to develop a programme of standards by which our members, and our HESPR-endorsed businesses, will be expected to operate. In the interim, our disciplinary committee, overseen ultimately by the UK cadre of conservation professionals represented by our council, provides operating oversight of our standards. A wall of Dragon Hall, a Grade 1 listed trading hall in Norwich, built in about 1430
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