Examination of Witnesses (Questions 167-179)
2 FEBRUARY 2004
MR CHRIS
BROWN, DR
ROB PICKARD,
MR GEORGE
FERGUSON, MR
MIKE HAYES
AND MR
JACK WARSHAW
Q167 Chairman: Good afternoon, thank
you for coming. Would you state your names for the record, please?
Mr Warshaw: I am Jack Warshaw.
I am head of a practice called Conservation Architecture and Planning;
here with the RTPI this afternoon. I am the lead author of the
RTPI's conservation good practice guide and a former head of conservation
at Wandsworth Council.
Mr Hayes: I am Mike Hayes. I am
currently President of the Royal Town Planning Institute. I work
in local government, currently for Watford Borough Council, though
in previous lives for Lambeth, Glasgow and Liverpool.
Mr Ferguson: George Ferguson,
President of the RIBA.
Dr Pickard: Rob Pickard. I am
a member of the RICS. I am also a member of the IHBC. I am at
present a university lecturer in Newcastle, dealing with both
RICS matters and historic conservation matters. I am a member
of a Council of Europe expert group on the form of legislation
to do with cultural heritage.
Mr Brown: Chris Brown, Director
of Igloo Regeneration Fund and also representing the RICS this
afternoon.
Chairman: We do usually give people the
opportunity to make a brief statement if they wish to add anything
to their written submission. Otherwise we will go to questions
if you are happy to do that.
Q168 Christine Russell: May I invite
you gentlemen to comment on how effective or otherwise you believe
government agencies and arm's-length government agencies, quangos,
whatever, are when they work in the field of regeneration? How
effectively do they work?
Mr Ferguson: Are you referring
both to organisations like English Heritage and the RDAs for instance?
Q169 Christine Russell: Absolutely; central
government, local government, regional government.
Mr Ferguson: It is a very broad
question, but in the question of English Heritage, they do their
prime job extremely well and that is to protect and enhance our
heritage. They are having a lot else pushed on them, but that
is the job they do well. The RDAs are being very effective and
we would probably all think and agree with some of the things
which have been said about the needs for more skills within local
authorities.
Mr Brown: May I pick up the point
about RDAs? From my point of view, I see the RDAs reducing the
amount of money and activity which is going into urban regeneration
at the moment. I also see English Partnerships focusing increasingly
on the sustainable communities plan, which, because it involved
the growth areas in the South-East, means they are also moving
their focus a little bit away from regeneration.
Q170 Christine Russell: How do you think
the RDAs in the North are reducing the amount of attention and
money they are giving to regeneration?
Mr Brown: They have hugely wide
remits and they started with about 80% of their budgets coming
from things like a single regeneration budget. They are now increasingly
focused all the way through the organisation, certainly at board
level, the individuals there, certainly now in the lead departments,
on the economic development agenda rather than the urban regeneration
agenda. You need both, but I suspect the balance has gone a little
awry.
Q171 Christine Russell: What about the
RTPI?
Mr Hayes: There is a large number
of organisations; they all have a different perspective on life,
sometimes different skills and sometimes competing objectives.
The key is: what are we going to do? It does strike me that holding
the rein very often is the local authority. It is the local authority's
task to assemble, to make these different perspectives, these
different funding regimes, these different sets of expertise work.
The issue very often is providing the expertise and resource at
local level to put the local authority on the front foot, so it
has vision and some sense of how that vision might be delivered
so it can play that key role of co-ordination between these different
agencies.
Mr Warshaw: It must be said that
not all local authorities are equally effective. I am sure it
is recognised that many are very proactive and have been able
to utilise resources more than some others.
Q172 Christine Russell: Do you think
there is a correlation between the number of historic buildings
which a local authority has within its boundaries and its effectiveness?
Is there a correlation there?
Mr Hayes: There may well be a
correlation. A large number of buildings means that there is a
necessity to develop and create the scarce skills in-house. It
is very often the larger local authorities, or those which have
very obvious historic inheritances, which have been able to develop
expertise. Elsewhere, with a smaller number of listed buildings,
a smaller number of local authorities, it is much more difficult
to develop that in-house capability.
Mr Warshaw: There is no general
rule.
Dr Pickard: A good example is
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Simon Thurley mentioned the Grainger Town
regeneration project, which was one of the first conservation
area partnership schemes and then a heritage economic regeneration
scheme where you have seen the local authority, the Grainger Town
Project, with people from English Heritage and the local authority
being seconded, other agencies like the regional development agency,
the single regeneration budget, as well as financial elements
coming in, business operators in the community, residential associations
working together. There are some examples where there are very
good, best evidence examples which could be spread elsewhere.
Newcastle is a place which has a very high density number of listed
buildings and had a high number at risk which is perhaps unusual
in so many other places in the country.
Q173 Christine Russell: George Ferguson
mentioned the lack of skills within local government planning
departments. May I turn the argument around and ask you about
your own three separate organisations and invite you to comment
on the skill level and perhaps the amount of training which goes
on amongst your membership in the field of the historic environment
and getting involved with regeneration schemes?
Dr Pickard: May I make a comment
on this, because I think I can speak for both sides, being a chartered
surveyor, but also a member of the IHBC and also having taught
budding surveying students, as well as people who are going to
conservation training? There is a gulf still between the two sides.
Although English Heritage and the RICS and other bodies have been
working very closely together since the mid-1990s with studies
on the economics of conservation, it was probably recognised then
that the two sides do not have enough understanding of each other's
issues, particularly those working in conservation do not really
understand the financial appraisal or development or the investment
sides of the argument.
Q174 Christine Russell: Do surveyors
really understand the need for good urban design?
Dr Pickard: That is another thing.
From an educational point of view, we try to develop those things.
It really depends on the module elements of those things. What
you will find is that the natural surveyor will be the person
who wants to—
Q175 Christine Russell: Demolish the
building.
Dr Pickard: Yes.
Mr Ferguson: We are certainly
advocating having more learning together. It is very important
that surveyors and planners and we learn together. Richard Rogers
in the House of Lords only on 22 January, in the Committee stage
of the Planning Bill, was advocating this. He was going so far
as to say that planning and architecture should become one skill.
Certainly we are saying that we should consider such things as
a foundation course for planners and architects to work together.
What we do feel is that we have the skills within the profession
and we do not advocate that every architect is appropriate for
every historic building. Some architects are less appropriate
for historic buildings than others, while there are some absolutely
brilliant designers who can add value to an historic building.
We do not want to slot people into only dealing with historic
buildings or only dealing with new buildings. There are wonderful
cases, some which have come out of the whole lottery process,
of where historic buildings and good contemporary architecture
have gone really well together. That is a developing skill.
Mr Hayes: There is traditionally
a lack of design awareness across the whole of the public sector
and certainly until maybe the last decade there has been little
incentive within the planning system to promote good design. That
is changing and it needs to change. It is changing fast. We have
14,000 corporate members, of whom we reckon around 400 work in
conservation in the public sector. That is not a large proportion.
As an institute, we are working hard to reform planning education,
both to widen the range of people coming into planning—
Q176 Christine Russell: How are you doing
that? How are you trying to make planning a more attractive proposition?
Everyone wants to be architects? How many want to be planners?
Mr Hayes: How long do we have?
We have been through two decades where planning has been relegated
to the status of regulation. We are coming out of that and a good
thing too. We are into the business of capturing the vision and
the delivery of schemes on the ground through the planning process.
We are in the business of changing the world, at local level,
at regional level, at citywide level. That is about as exciting
as it gets. It is difficult for people very often to get into
any form of further education. So we are promoting at the moment
one-year master courses, full year and promoting them particularly
to young people, to women returners, to folk from black and minority
ethnic communities to come and be planners.
Q177 Christine Russell: What are you
doing with 15- and 16-year-olds who are still in school?
Mr Hayes: We are engaging through
planning aid with communities at local level to enable people
to engage with the planning process and at regional level, through
our branches, we have a programme of visiting schools, getting
involved with career's advice and the like. We are also—and
this is relevant to the topic under consideration today, developing
continuing professional development and a lifelong learning ethos,
so that people who are qualified as planners can continue to develop
their skill base. In terms of becoming design aware and conservation
and regeneration aware, that is terrifically important.
Q178 Sir Paul Beresford: Is the statement
that developments with a heritage aspect generally command a higher
value in the marketplace correct?
Mr Warshaw: I do not think there
is any central rule about that.
Q179 Sir Paul Beresford: Are there examples
where it does?
Dr Pickard: It depends on the
circumstances. Research has been done by the Investment Property
Databank in association with the RICS for about ten years now
which has shown quite consistently in certain places, for instance
the South-East and London, that there is a prestige value to listed
buildings. Elsewhere in the country, for instance Newcastle or
some other northern cities, you would find that there is generally
a lower value to office space and therefore it is perhaps more
difficult to find the same prestige value. This whole question
really depends upon this sort of research which has been going
on for a while now on the economics of conservation, the economics
of heritage and in a way that research is only just starting in
the UK. The best examples would be from the United States and
some European countries in Germany, but that is often the argument
to use, to find out what benefits you create financially from
investing in the heritage[1]We
do not have that material with us now.
1 Evidence of the benefits of investing in historic
building conservation in the USA (and some European countries),
which have been used to justify financial support mechanisms including
tax credits for rehabilitation and additional tax credits for
conversion to affordable housing (creating a market for investing
in both heritage conservation and social housing), as well state
`bond' revenue raising programmes and rental assistance to tenants,
can be found in a RICS publication: Pickard, R. and Pickerill,
T (2002) Real estate tax credits and other financial incentives
for investing in historic property in the United States, in RICS
Foundation Research Paper Series, Vol 4, No 17 (63 pages)
(Electronic Reference PS0417). Back
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