Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 135)
TUESDAY 14 MARCH 2006
DR SEAN
O'REILLY, MR
BOB KINDRED,
DR STEWART
BRYANT AND
MS ROSEMARIE
MACQUEEN
Q120 Helen Southworth: Is that something
you would actively seek or want to participate in?
Dr Bryant: Yes.
Dr O'Reilly: We are working at
the moment on the definition of national occupational standards
for precisely that sort of role, which will begin to identify
exactly the skills which are needed in those terms. One of the
failings within the sector from our point of view is that we do
not have, as archaeology has had, those occupational standards
defined. We are working with the Creative and Cultural Sector
Skills Council at the moment to develop those but it is a fundamental
resource requirement from the corporate side of things. I absolutely
agree, it is a key point. The other side is that if that person
is a member of the IHBC, if they are working on the community
side, that is fine by me actually. The Institutes provide a regulatory
framework for these sort of standards as well, outwith Government
itself.
Q121 Helen Southworth: In a way you
are separately answering the question I was asking, which is what
are the requirements. Can we not make this a little easier for
the chief executive and the leader who are making these decisions
rather than expecting them to spend 20 years learning the process?
Can we have some guidelines? Where should they be?
Dr O'Reilly: If it came in in
terms of HPR it could be a statutory duty.
Ms MacQueen: There is a lot of
work done already but there are people in post who are so-called
conservation officers and if one looks at the job adverts one
can immediately see what the skills set is. They are normally
prefaced by "We are looking for someone with a conservation
diploma" because there are professional courses, and it will
also say, "and preferably a member of IHBC" because
to become a member of IHBC you have to have evidence of your skills
set which is both an educational qualification, or an educational
training, but also practical experience. It is very much like
the Town Planning Institute.
Q122 Helen Southworth: I am not disagreeing
with that but what I would say to you is, has every local authority
got this set of people?
Dr O'Reilly: No.
Q123 Helen Southworth: Has anybody
got anything to measure against as to whether they have them?
Dr Bryant: It is slightly different
with archaeology services where we do have national coverage and
the roles are different from conservation officers who tend to
be based closer to planning departments. There are differences
there. With archaeology we have our own Institute of Field Archaeologists
which is complementary to IHBC, so within the sector it is not
straightforward. In terms of the individual unitary authority,
you can have your guidelines but you also have to assess what
the pressures are on the resource and what the resource is in
terms of how many officers you get and where you might get the
advice from.
Dr O'Reilly: That is one of the
complications. Indeed, recent research sponsored by DCMS and Atkins
on the promotion of HPR has highlighted the sheer range of ways
in which people can respond to the general principle of looking
after your historic places without actually being quite clear
what they should or need to be doing. That is a key report because
it has looked at the qualitative and process side of things rather
than the quantitives which other studies have looked at before.
Whether you have the person there or not is an easy question to
answer. Whether the thing is being done or not is a lot more difficult
to pin down. That recent survey has shown the sheer variety of
things and indeed called for more clarity in terms of the process
so that the CEO can actually say, "I am doing my job within
my corporate plan and people from the outside who are looking
in at me can see I am doing that job too." So it is one of
the benefits which could come with HPR but it is something which
is very much needed.
Dr Bryant: We would like to see
more of this sort of research. We are just skimming the surface
so far with a very rapid piece of work and it is revealing a very
complicated picture and we would like to see more research into
what is going on.
Mr Kindred: There is an issue
too about how a service is set up, in that central government
and English Heritage, will have a national view about the sort
of role they think local authorities should have, and equally
local authority councillors will set local aims and objectives
about what the service should deliver. A local authority quite
often may build an Annual Service Management Plan around those
aims and objectives to set out exactly what it is doing and how
it does it, so it is possible to measure the performance of a
local authority and the skills and experience it is bringing to
what the local authority has set it to do.
Q124 Mr Sanders: It all sounds very
much a supply-led solution to a problem, whereas actually our
natural environment and our built environment is not evenly distributed
across the country, and it certainly is not evenly distributed
one local authority to another. Surely the response should be
demand-led, and where there are a plethora of historic buildings
in a particular local authority area that should be reflected
in the skills, abilities, posts which are important in that local
authority? As you say, it is a very complex problem. I am not
aware that the grant system recognises how much historic environment
there is in a given local authority area. The FSS is complicated
enough without trying to find an equation which could go in and
determine that. Is there some other solution? Rather than laying
down, "Your authority has that number of hectares, that number
of population, therefore it should have X number of qualified
officers of this particular profession", is there not some
other way of meeting the needs and also defining a mechanism for
funding it other than it all falling on the council taxpayer?
Dr O'Reilly: You do not have to
define it as precisely as that and I think in any case you will
always find a market balance coming into the system, exactly as
you are talking about; a significant body of historic buildings
will generate and bring with it a team of skilled people and frequently
people with the range of skills required for that management of
it. So you do not have to, within the context of a statutory duty
of care, be as rigorous or as defined as that in terms of how
you actually present it.
Mr Kindred: Frankly, when push
comes to shove, and a local authority is reviewing its financial
position, it will inevitably say to its Chief Planner, "What
do we have to do that is statutory?" I think this is one
of the biggest problems of all. It is the non-statutory element
of the service which is one of the reasons. Sean has referred
to one of the authorities in Lincolnshire which has had precisely
this problem, and this is happening across the country in numerous
authorities, where in fact the service is in decline or being
diminished because there is not a statutory basis for most of
it.
Dr O'Reilly: The other way you
address this is from the outset that is where we are talking about
issues like investment, not just within and through the local
authority but through funding bodies like English Heritage, like
HLF and through things like VAT relief as well. We would absolutely
support the point made earlier about the EU Directive and the
need to sign up to that before the end of the month. Those are
lateral ways of achieving the same end-point. Again, a big part
of our submission has been saying, you do not just do it through
HPR, you can do an awful lot in terms of easing the pressures
on the conservation interest simply by addressing it through other
points like tax relief, not just giving out funding—I think
it is better to think of it as investment in historic buildings—but
allowing people to move forward and take advantage of the taxes
which are helping address market failures. That is a big part
of the process for example with building preservation trusts as
well. They look at a situation where market failure has led to
the loss of an historic building, it has become a building at
risk, and then they put in a framework for bringing it forward
again, and going to bodies like English Heritage and HLF to find
ways of bringing it forward. The local authority is actually an
enabler in that context and may even sit in the background and
facilitate from a distance, simply by keeping out of the way as
the processes go through what they need to go through. So there
are lots of different ways, not just within the local authority,
which I think we should think about all the time in terms of how
we address these issues.
Dr Bryant: The statutory issue
is a key one. The conservation of the historic environment and
the planning process is a partnership between English Heritage
and local government, and if more emphasis is going to be put
on local government there needs to be a better statutory basis
for the services.
Q125 Mr Sanders: I hear this time
and time again. The problem in local government is that these
are non-statutory services therefore we must make them statutory.
What about the other way round? Should we not be arguing there
are fewer statutory services so that local government is truly
local and can set its own priorities?
Dr O'Reilly: Yes, you can do that
as well as long as the infrastructure is there. What we are saying
is we believe under the current circumstances this is the best
way of securing it but you can do it through putting in proper
tax incentives. You cannot address the whole thing but you can
look at it in those terms. One other side of it though is that
you need to have some point at which there is a regulatory mechanism
which looks at the quality of the output, that looks to see the
thing is being done properly. In terms of the current system,
the easiest and probably the most economic way of doing that is
having a local person sitting within the local authority rather
than an independent adviser who is working outwith as a consultant;
someone sitting within the local authority speaking on behalf
of the civic good about this. They do not have to be doing anything
but they need to be able to advise the planning committee as an
independent person who is looking after the public good in that
way. You do not have to do it that way but it seems a pretty good
way of doing it to me as well as our members; it just seems logical
in that sense. You are not restrictive in that sense but you need
to introduce an awful lot of other things as well if you are going
to address it without that.
Ms MacQueen: Taking your point
a bit further, if you wanted to say the political vision of this
particular local authority is to shrink themselves literally to
doing the statutory and regulatory stuff, which would be care
of listed buildings and the fact they have to designate conservation
areas, there are still other arms you are required to do in terms
of fear of a writ of mandamus against you, which will be things
like buildings at risk, enforcement against people who try to
knock down listed buildings, et cetera. How you provide that service
is politically up to the leader and the chief executive and of
course it is perfectly appropriate, as long as you have a continuous
service available to you, to outsource that if you wish to do
so provided the regulatory bits and the making of the recommendations
is done in-house, because otherwise at the moment it is unlawful.
Also, that kind of approach allows you to have a smaller resource
for a local authority which is in the position of having only
one or two conservation areas or a very small number of listed
buildings. There are ways of sharing resources either by local
authorities teaming up together or by way of having a person who
works for two days a week although they generally need to embed
themselves within the planning department at some stage otherwise
the service does not become integrated enough. So if you have
a private architect who has skills and resources in the conservation
field, there have been local authorities who have had someone
who has had a hot desk scenario on Thursdays and Fridays of each
week so there is a regularity, and that person understands the
planning policies which are a partner—you cannot do one
without the other. So they have to have that background. Whatever
they do on the Monday to Wednesday, they have to be serving the
policy objectives of that local authority on the other days of
the week.
Mr Kindred: The traditional way
in which this was done, and probably where conservation as a local
authority function started, was with County Councils, and certainly
in the early stages of conservation, the roles there were in quite
strong teams in Hampshire, Essex, Derbyshire and elsewhere and
many of those teams sadly are a shadow of their former selves.
If one were to think in terms of the highly specialist advice
which was available at County level, particularly in a county
like Essex, you could perhaps make the medical analogy that they
were the consultants and the District Council conservation officers
who are dealing with work on a more general level were the GPs.
They would deal with a much wider range of problems. In some parts
of the country, certainly with local authorities with a small
heritage resource, they still take advice part of the time or
entirely from staff at the county level. In other local authorities
at district level, where they feel strongly about wishing to manage
the resource locally, the resource will primarily be managed at
that local level and they will only take advice from the county
where particular specialisms are needed.
Q126 Mr Hall: If we can concentrate
now on the planning process itself. PPG 15 is the policy and planning
guidance which has been in place since 1994 which deals with the
historic environment. A number of the submissions we have received
say this ought to be up-dated and revised, what would you like
to see in an up-dated or revised PPG 15?
Mr Kindred: One of the things
we would like to see most urgently, and one of the things which
would be easiest to do, relates to one of its appendices, Appendix
C, which is the one which deals with advice on the alteration
of historic buildings. It was never particularly satisfactory
when it appeared in 1994 and did not have the kind of detailed
guidance which would prove useful in many cases, not just to conservation
staff but also to planning officers. In Scotland, the Memorandum
of Guidance on Alterations is, admittedly, printed on thicker
paper but it is almost the size of the Yellow Pages, it
is a very, very thick document, whereas the existing advice in
England is rather inadequate and needs to be re-written, enlarged
and issued as soon as possible, quite frankly, because that will
not actually be directly affected by any predicted changes to
HPR.
Ms MacQueen: It does need up-dating
because there are very large areas which are missing—sustainability,
access, Parts L and M of the building regulations in terms of
thermal and sounding insulation and also energy and issues of
renewables, et cetera. Those need to be dove-tailed in to make
it truly effective, but it is the Bible that conservation officers
and historic building officers refer to in terms of interpretation
and how they apply the legislation.
Dr Bryant: Likewise, an even older
PPG, PPG 16 on archaeology, dates back to 1990.
Q127 Mr Sanders: It has stood the
test of time.
Dr Bryant: It is very successful
but it is in desperate need of an up-date and refreshment. Particularly
the public understanding and outreach and educational aspects
as outputs of planning need to be enhanced, they are not really
in there as strongly as they should be. We live in a different
world now from the situation in 1990. As a planning document it
is basically sound but in terms of publication and dissemination
of archaeological information it could be enhanced.
Dr O'Reilly: The sustainability
agenda within that whole raft of guidance is very important for
any of these revisions. We recognise that there are issues if
legislation is going to change, because it is pretty difficult
to re-write a whole piece which is dependent on the legislation
which is going to change. Certainly the feeling that there could
be interim up-dates or alterations seems pretty feasible given
the longevity of the guidance to this point.
Mr Kindred: The other element
which probably does need a significant amount of further enhancement
is the most obvious physical manifestation of problems in this
type of environment, and that is the loss of individual buildings,
buildings at risk. Quite a lot of work has been done by English
Heritage and the local authorities in defining how large the problem
is. There are organisations such as the Building Preservations
Trusts which help solve those problems but actually the mechanisms
and the techniques and the processes which are needed to deal
with buildings at risk is one of the relative weaknesses of PPG
15. I think probably the growth of the Building Preservation Trusts
movement—now about 270 strong throughout the UK—is
testimony to the growth of interest in communities in trying to
grapple with buildings at risk which has taken place since 1984.
Q128 Mr Sanders: The general public,
when they hear the term "conservation area", think this
is a good thing to have and yet evidence we have had in front
of the Committee is, one, the local authorities want to side-step
the establishment of conservation areas and, two, Rosemarie mentioned
the Shimizu judgment in 1997. What do we need to do to make conservation
areas do what they are supposed to do? I think we probably all
agree with Philip Venning that this particular judgment of the
House of Lords has to be redressed by legislation.
Mr Kindred: I do not think necessarily
by legislation so much as regulation. What it needs is for the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to amend the General Permitted
Development Order, which is effectively that part of planning
legislation which normally enables the householder to carry out
quite a lot of work without planning permission. Clearly that
remains a weakness within conservation areas because the controls
within still remain very weak. There is a way of strengthening
this by serving an individual direction which brings under control
certain elements of development you could normally carry out within
planning permission, and they are called Article 4 directions
and there is a reference to those in the glossary to the Committee.
What is essentially needed is a change to the blanket controls
in those conservation areas for the simple reason that it makes
them more comprehensible, easier to administer, and in that way
there is clearer understanding by the public of exactly what is
required of them in a conservation area. That would also get round
the problems of compensation to owner occupiers for alterations
forgone if in fact consent is refused under a Direction. So you
have the simple case of slightly more regulation being better
regulation rather than thinking of it perhaps in the general deregulatory
context which to some extent ODPM's thinking about planning.
Dr O'Reilly: Because it is clear
in legislation and clarifies the process for the user. I think
that is a key point there.
Ms MacQueen: The last time Parliament
asked for a survey I was involved in a national conference which
was chaired by Dame Jennifer Jenkins, and the material we had
back at that time was that it was something like 85% of the people
who wrote in wanted more controls, which of course runs completely
antithetical to what people would normally think. I have to say,
personally, that is repeated in the letters which come across
my desk. They are not about, "I do not want a conservation
area", they are about, "I want more, I want it extended",
and "Why don't you do something about the transitory person
who has moved in and is moving out next year having tried to make
a killing by getting a roof extension or a rear extension or whatever,
not for us who have lived in this community and actually know
what is special and locally distinctive about it", which
may be the bay windows, which may be the front boundary walls
and not cars parked in front gardens, et cetera, et cetera.
Dr O'Reilly: The developers also
just want clarity in the process. It makes it all much easier
for everyone to understand what is going on.
Q129 Paul Farrelly: I want to come
on to skills and expertise and ensuring the supply of sufficient
numbers of well-qualified people, but I want to follow up the
conservation area issue which Mike Hall has raised. Going back
to my town, pretty much of it is a conservation area and development
in the conservation area has been the issue which has been the
bane of my life over the last year and a half—poor developments
based on poor advice from officers which have severe impacts not
only on the town itself but on the adjoining conservation area.
If you go through the planning guidance—PPS 1, good design,
building design and all the others—they are robust enough
to deal with this if only the officers are robust enough to deal
with the developers. There is also the threat, particularly going
back to a small, non-unitary authority, of the cost of appeal,
and can you rely on inspectors to apply the guidelines in the
judgments they make. Is there guidance on how inspectors should
be making their judgments, in your opinion? We find it very difficult
to predict and the developers will always hang over you the threat
of the cost of an appeal, which will make the officers cave in
much more easily.
Ms MacQueen: Quite a lot of work
has been done on this. CABE produced a document about design quality[6]
and it has various recommendations in it, including this mater,
because of course before PPS 1 was re-drafted to include achieving
quality, often what was allowed was mediocre or something which
was safe, good enough, and how could councillors and their officers
be confident enough they were not going to go to an appeals scenario
which, even if costs were not ordered, was going to cost them
money. The CABE document made various recommendations. I would
say my knowledge of inspectors and the various training courses
they go through is that they do go through training courses, in
fact they have an annual one which takes place every March at
which they will be addressed this year by CABE where they are
putting forward ideas of design quality, and they regularly have
seminars from English Heritage as well. I do not think there is
an issue with inspectors not wanting to ensure those quality standards
which are embedded in PPS 1 are delivered in decisions. So in
a sense it comes back to training and confidence, and both EH
and CABE are providing more and more regional seminars in order
to try and inculcate in local authorities, where design perhaps
has not been very far up the agenda, that it is possible to negotiate
providing of course the skills are there among the officers, and
it is possible to require design codes and various other techniques
to ensure volume housebuilders do actually deliver.
Dr O'Reilly: There must also be
that corporate support within the organisation for that you have
hit the nail on the head for a lot of officers, it is not whether
they think it or not, it is what is going to happen further down
the line in the process, and they tend to err on the side of caution,
which I think probably quite naturally under the circumstances.
There is a lot of education going on in terms of the officers,
in terms of the planning committees, the elected members as well,
but it has to be there on the agenda at the highest level in the
corporate side. The inclination is to play it safe. I have a lot
of respect for the inspectors, I think generally they are very
strong for these areas, but it is an issue, you have to appear
confident that your line manage is going to back you up. It is
not just about producing a design which fits in in a very simple
way—a one-and-a-half-storey building in a one-and-a-half-storey
environment—it is about producing good quality where you
need to exercise professional judgment and you need to have that
freedom and support to be able to do that to ensure the quality
goes through the system.
Mr Kindred: It is worth saying
of course there is generally within ODPM advice and in the planning
legislation a presumption in favour of development. Of course
between 85 and 90% of all applications are approved so the ones
the inspectors are picking up are within the less than 10% which
are appealed. One of the additional issues is the relationship
between the status of a conservation professional in the local
authority and his development control colleagues and the weight
given to his or her advice and whether that advice effectively
has compelling weight or not. It also depends to some extent on
one of the initiatives which emerged from A Force for Our Future
from DCMS, which is the idea that local authorities should have
an Historic Environment Champion and whether that person in turn
either also deals with design issues and design quality or more
specifically with historic environment issues, although they may
be prepared to push with their political colleagues the issue
of high quality design and good quality conservation decisions
within that authority.
Dr O'Reilly: Also within the review
of PPG 15 there is a chance to embed that into the policy which
is being used at first hand within the conservation side of the
process as well. Work needs to be done to support it too.
Q130 Paul Farrelly: At the beginning
you outlined a tremendous range of skills which you would need
to have to qualify to be a member of the IHBC and I wish we had
those skills. From my experience of the last 18 months I do not
think any member of my planning department would qualify to be
a member of your organisation. I find planning officers are too
willing to give poor advice, they are prepared to be rolled over
by developers, they retreat into comfort zones. On conservation
issues they are very happy dealing with Mrs Bloggs and the village
wall but not with St Modwyn Properties and all the people who
really take them to task. After all that, they are remarkably
thick-skinned, because quite apart from being virtually unsackable,
they know they are irreplaceable because the people just are not
there to replace them. We have a vacancy for a conservation officer—given
the recent history that is no bad thing in my opinion, given the
comments from the files I have been through which tend to be a
bunch of scribbles, indecipherable, of low quality, and they were
reproduced verbatim in officers' reports by an officer who quite
frankly I would not trust to get the colour of a bathroom right.
This is not an attack on the profession, it is an attack on the
quality we are having to deal with, and we are not by any means
unique. What can we do to stimulate a growing number of trained
professionals with all the skills that you rightly say the job
requires, because conservation is seamless with good urban design
and everything else? What can we do?
Mr Kindred: Before we answer that,
can I say in fact, if anything, I am afraid the situation is going
to get significantly worse because of the age profile of the profession,
both for building conservation staff and archaeologists. There
are a large number now in their 50s and early 60s who will be
retiring in the period running up to HPR implementation in 2010,
so that will be a significant problem. There are not enough people
entering the profession, at the bottom end even to cope with that,
let alone with what you have identified. I think that is a point
worth making.
Dr O'Reilly: It is also an issue
of the distinction between the skills needs of the person which
we have identified as preferable and actually the salaries which
are on offer. So I would say, from your point of view, add another
£10,000 to the salary and you will be getting a much better
service at the end of the day and it will be money well spent.
That is one of the problems, that the training needed to give
you a person with a range of skills does not correlate to the
level of support within the corporate service that is seen to
be appropriate when you look at the actual financial remuneration
they are being offered. When they are looking for new conservation
officers there are probably some cases where they do not specify
IHBC because it would put them out of the pay bracket they are
aiming at.
Mr Kindred: Certainly I think
there is a key issue about salaries and status. The recruitment
problem is partly related to the relatively poor pay of conservation
staff even by comparison with planning officers.
Dr Bryant: I think English Heritage
has a strategic role as well in identifying where there are key
shortages and ensuring that there are the skills available in
the sector. Certainly in archaeology that is the case. We have
certain key skills in it in certain areas and there is a need
to address those skills shortages and I think the role of English
Heritage, they are doing some interesting things on training,
but particularly with our joint role of our stewardship of the
historic environment, I think we need to work more closely with
them to address those shortages.
Dr O'Reilly: Certainly what HPR
is bringing out is that kind of co-working and support, looking
at where they can help deliver the training for the people who
are on the ground within the local authorities because that is
essential at that end of the delivery side under HPR and that
is something that we would very much welcome. To be fair, I think
English Heritage would be very worried if they did not actually
see upskilling on the ground in terms of all of this and devolving
all of their responsibilities.
Ms MacQueen: The target of trying
to get a heritage/design champion in every local authority is
there and I guess, if I was the local MP for an area, I would
want to ask my various constituents have they got them and then,
once you know that they have got them, what is the programme that
they are following through. There are some very easy gains that
can be made and there is so much guidance available for those
heritage champions now that they do not have to go off to conferences,
but it is all available and electronically sent to them with all
sorts of tick-lists that they can go through to find out whether
their local authorities are actually delivering those, such as
what is the voluntary sector doing and can they be a champion
and, through that political mechanism, get things within the borough
or the city council activated.
Q131 Paul Farrelly: With respect
to champions, but not just champion champions, there is something
in my area, of which I am the patron, which has actually been
sponsored by the CABE called `Urban Vision' which is the urban
design centre for north Staffordshire and there are a number of
these centres around the country. It is not yet the urban design/conservation
heritage centre because there has not been a buy-in from English
Heritage and it has got a limited number of people, but this is
a reference point for expertise that tries to fill the gap where
you cannot afford or you cannot find a conservation officer in
every council. It is a reference point as well for expertise that
does not involve you in the cop-out of spending extremely large
amounts of money on consultants to produce reports which then
have to be implemented by the officers who have not got the skills
in the first place. Do you think English Heritage is doing enough?
CABE has given seed money for many of these centres, so do you
think English Heritage is doing enough to promote that sort of
championing that actually fills the gaps on the ground?
Mr Kindred: They are doing some
joint networking for Design and Historic Environment Champions.
I think in the first round of events which they did, participants
felt that CABE influence was probably too strong and that the
Historic Environment Champion element which sort of drew the initiative
together to start with was not perhaps being promoted forcefully
enough. I think that as a consequence of that feedback has been
given to English Heritage and to CABE they are trying to put together
more balanced programmes of both Design and Historic Environment
Champion advice. At the moment we have something like 360-plus
local authorities in England, of which only about 150 so far have
councillor champions and of course there will be a question, I
think, probably at each local government election, some then lose
their seats, for the need to draw in new councillors as historic
environment champions. In fact I think an exercise has been done
by English Heritage which identifies that, of the 150, I think
there are 11 who are standing in the local government elections
and, therefore, this time round there will not actually be potentially
a loss of some existing councillor champions and, therefore, perhaps
with that confidence to go forward, they will be able to promote
those issues within the local authority better than they have
done hitherto.
Dr O'Reilly: It is a big challenge,
I think, there is no doubt about it, and it gets bigger in the
context of HPR where you are sort of requiring much more that
range of skills locally or at least the capacity to know when
to draw them in and when to make critical, professional judgments
on those skills. The context of regeneration of course highlights
where you need to have that range of abilities and interests within
the local sort of area, but there is also, I do believe, a lot
of flexibility in terms of how you can draw in skills from outside
as well and the consultant's report is money well spent if it
is actually giving you guidance on how best to move forward, and
also of course in the context of the RDAs using those skills where
they deal with similar sorts of issues and need the advice on
the historic environment as much as anything else as well. So
again it is running into that cross-sector issue that begins to
highlight those sorts of complex issues.
Q132 Paul Farrelly: Should there
be a statutory requirement on local authorities to employ a conservation
officer or is that just too simple?
Dr O'Reilly: I think it is too
simple.
Mr Kindred: I think I would be
worried about the concept of a statutory conservation officer.
This was tried in a different context some years ago with a statutory
waste management officer and a lot of authorities felt all they
needed to do was to designate almost anybody as that officer.
That said, the situation has much improved since, but to avoid
this sort of tick-box basis it was felt that it would be much
more effective to make part of the service statutory and then
employ the appropriately qualified and experienced officers than
employ a statutory conservation officer who may well be, as much
of the research found in 2003, relatively low in the hierarchy
and not particularly influential, so you can have your statutory
officer, but he does not actually make much impact on the local
authority as a whole.
Dr Bryant: And, as discussed earlier,
defining the nature of the service I think is probably the better
way forward and giving that some statutory weight.
Dr O'Reilly: But also you need
the resources for them to work with. You can have your conservation
officer there, but their hands are tied just because they have
nothing actually to sort of work with in terms of funding for
delivering things locally, so it can be just seen as that. I think
probably a lot of the discussion which has gone on this morning
would feed into the feelings of how the conservation officer needs
to work, and they have got to have that extra capacity there and
things to work with.
Q133 Paul Farrelly: Rosemarie?
Ms McQueen: I have nothing to
add. I think it has all been said.
Q134 Mr Hall: Just going back to
the point before, you were talking about the percentage of planning
applications which go to appeal. I have a particular concern about
the consistency of decisions on appeal, so is there any research
which has been done into that?
Mr Kindred: Certainly just dealing
with the numbers, local authorities and the Planning Inspectorate
are required to return performance figures and the local authorities
return their figures each quarter to ODPM on the percentage for
planning applications, Listed Building applications and so on
they approve or refuse. I think that the consistency within the
Planning Inspectorate is probably a question better directed at
them, but, only as a very crude rule of thumb, it is almost always
the case that 60% of appeals are dismissed and 40% are approved.
I cannot tell you quite how that figure was arrived at historically,
so you could argue that if for example 90% of Listed Building
applications are approved, then probably a further 5% are approved
on appeal, but that is consistent with the process. Individuals
will probably always feel aggrieved if the appeal is dismissed
and they have a possible right of further appeal if they feel
that those grounds for dismissal are not the correct ones, but
overall on the basis that applications are determined on their
own merits, then each individual case unfortunately will be different.
Ms MacQueen: Just from personal
experience, I can say that we do have about 350 appeals a year
and, because of our heritage profile/design profile and because
of the high value of development, we have a large number of design
appeals and we have actually done quite a bit of research. In
fact I had a meeting only last week because the Inspectorate are
now much more open about the way they do things and they are actually
going out and engaging with what they call the `stakeholders',
so it is not just local authorities they are talking to about
how we perceive the delivery of their service, but also the development
industry, residents, et cetera. What we have found from that is
that there is actually, I would have to say, very much a very
consistent approach. There are aberrations and those are the ones
where we ask them, when the circumstances were identical in three
instances, why did they allow one, but dismiss the other two,
if it is that way round, and that comes down obviously to the
material weight which was given by the inspector, but I would
say that overwhelmingly our research, which has been pretty consistent
over the years, shows that it is pretty stable.
Q135 Philip Davies: Chairman, perhaps
I can just say that I actually put down a parliamentary question
about this by coincidence at the end of last year and the answer
came back that it was in about a third of all applications that
went to appeal that the inspector overturned the council's original
decision and on two-thirds that they supported the council's decision.
Dr Bryant: Yes, that is right.
Chairman: Can I thank all four of you
very much.
6 Footnote by Witness: Document is entitled
Protecting Design Quality in Planning. Back
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