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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 821-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
DRAFT HERITAGE PROTECTION BILL
Tuesday 1 July 2008 MR PAUL RAYNES, MR MIKE BROWN, MS JAN WILLS and DR ALYSON COOPER MR ROBERT AYTON and MR JOSEPH SAUNDERS MS ANTHEA CASE and MR MATTHEW SLOCOMBE MR PETER HINTON and DR GILL CHITTY Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 57
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 1 July 2008 Members present Mr John Whittingdale, in the Chair Mr Nigel Evans Alan Keen Rosemary McKenna Mr Adrian Saunders ________________ Memoranda submitted by Local Government Association, Institute of Historic Building Conservation and Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Paul Raynes, Programme Director, Local Government Association, Mr Mike Brown, Trustee, Institute of Historic Building Conservation, Ms Jan Wills, Archaeologist, and Committee Member, Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers, and Dr Alyson Cooper, Conservation Team Leader, Carrick District Council, gave evidence.
Chairman: Good morning everybody. This morning the committee is holding the first of two sessions in which we are undertaking pre-legislative scrutiny of the Draft Heritage Protection Bill. We have four parts to this morning's hearing, but to start can I welcome Paul Raynes, the Programme Director of the Local Government Association, Mike Brown, Trustee of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation, Jan Wills, County Archaeologist from the Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers, and Dr Alyson Cooper, the Conservation Team Leader of Carrick District Council. Thank you for coming. Can I invite Rosemary McKenna to start? Q1 Rosemary McKenna: Good morning. What do you think are the main benefits of the Bill and what are its drawbacks? Mr Brown: I think we all welcome the integration and the unified consent regime. We think it is going to be a huge improvement and certainly add greatly to the transparency of the system and the ability of the public to use the system, and so we welcome that. We certainly welcome the clause one and six requirements, but we feel that as a drawback it is not strong enough. The IHBC are all of the view that this needs to be rephrased to make the provision of these services a statutory duty, because we feel that that is the key that will unlock the necessary resources that can be directed to front-line services. Ms Wills: I think ALGAO would endorse that. We welcome the Bill. We feel that it will enhance the role of local authorities, particularly our existing role as advisers on the historic environment in the planning system, and also our very important role at the moment in managing historic environment records and, because of the latter, we are very, very pleased to see in the Bill the proposal that historic environment records will become the statutory duty of local authorities. Lastly, we also very much welcome the Government's statement that in the course of the change in legislation there will be no weakening of the protection offered to the historic environment, and we feel that is of the greatest importance. Dr Cooper: With regard to the benefits, I fully concur with my other two colleagues. With regard to drawbacks, our understanding is the objective of the Bill is to support sustainable communities by putting historic environment at the heart of an effective planning system at local level. What we are concerned about is that from the role of the historic environment specialists our work is much wider than this area of the work. We do an awful lot of work, for example, on regeneration, we do an awful lot of work with local communities and we do an awful lot of work with regard to policy, ensuring that the historic environment is at the centre of the local development framework. What we are concerned about is that the emphasis will be drawn away from that. Mr Raynes: Maybe just to complete the set, simplification and greater transparency, bringing the regimes together is obviously an enormous benefit to the public, to developers and to people attempting to run the system, and it creates an opportunity for us, which is precisely to put the historic environment right at the centre of the planning system. That is an opportunity at this stage and maybe we will come back to this later in the discussion, but there is still a number of questions about the wider planning system and how this is going to be integrated into it, and we will need to address those as the Bill goes forward. Mr Brown: Can I elaborate on that point? I have to say that there is confusion and a need for clarity about how the unified system might affect what are presently scheduled as ancient monuments in migrating them into the planning system, where the presumption is in favour of development. Unless policies dictate otherwise, they will lose the current status, as I understand it, within the Act, where the presumption is against development, and that may carry the danger of there being a weakening of controls over them. So I think that needs further work. Ms Wills: Following that up, I think that is a very important point regarding scheduled monuments and underlines our feeling that there is a need to follow the draft Bill with a redrafting of the Planning Policy Guidance notes for the historic environment for archaeology and listed buildings and conservation areas, because it is in PPG16 that this very important current presumption in favour of the protection and preservation of ancient monuments resides. I think unless the new concepts and the strong protection are carried through into the planning system, we will not see the benefits of the draft legislation as is currently envisaged. Q2 Rosemary McKenna: Given that it is in draft stage at the moment, what would you like to see changed or added to the Bill? Mr Raynes: Regarding that, we would particularly like to see a timetable for the revision of PPG15 and 16, and actually it would be quite nice to begin to see some of the substance of what the new PPG15 and 16 might look like emerging really quite rapidly. Obviously, the Department for Communities and Local Government have a lot on their plate with a new planning bill that is going to require a pretty wholesale change to the system of planning policy guidance, which is supposed to migrate into planning policy statements and so on, but as this Bill goes forward it will be quite difficult to take a rounded view of the effect of this Bill without seeing what the Department for Communities and Local Government is planning to do with those planning policy guidance revisions. Q3 Rosemary McKenna: Is there a change in the Bill? Mr Brown: I think the point should be taken back to the department's lawyers and ask them to bottom it out, though I completely concur with the points made that it is important that proper planning policy guidance is issued as early as possible in order to aid practitioners in interpreting the Act. Ms Wills: I think the points that have just been made touch on a difficulty we all have, which is that, although we have a draft Bill, there are many additions to that draft legislation which are coming forward now. Conservation areas, for example was issued yesterday. We were also awaiting various other pieces of statutory guidance. So it is difficult to take that rounded view of what we would like to see in terms of change and additions. As an example, one of the fundamental changes that is proposed in the new legislation is the move, in the case of archaeology, from the designation of archaeological sites of national importance to sites which are of special archaeological interest. That is a new concept. The change is a very significant one, but at the moment we do not have a definition of "special archaeological interest", so it is difficult to take a view on whether that is a positive change or not. I think we would like to emphasise that there needs to be debate and some robust discussion as soon as possible about those terms to make sure that it is a change for the better, that the terms are robust and are capable of defence and it does not lead to any weakening of the protection for that part of the historic environment. Mr Brown: I would have to agree with that, and I would have to add that I feel that there is a sense that the Bill is following a timetable that cannot be properly resourced. I received the conservation area clauses. Conservation areas are often matters of utmost local significance and importance to my customers, as I think we are encouraged to call them these days. I received those yesterday afternoon at half past five; yet here we are. I would ask the committee to consider the benefits of asking for proper time for public consultation on those clauses before we all rush to a judgment. I think there is a sense that the Bill rather tails off at the end as well. There is little, if any, mention of local lists, and, again, these are of enormous importance to local people. We are all local people in one sense or another, and it is what is important to us as a community that often exercises people the most, and yet, as we are all aware, I trust, they have next to no protection under the current regime. Here we are, halfway through a process with a major Bill in this area, and yet we have no details at all on how the departments will embrace them and give them proper protection, certainly the protection that the public rather expects us to give. Q4 Chairman: When we took evidence on our Heritage Review inquiry (and we took evidence both from DCMS and DCLG), a lot of this Bill is actually going to be about DCLG, and some concern was expressed to us that DCLG does not seem to feature very much in the Bill and is not a sponsor of the Bill. You expressed your concern about how ancient monuments were going to be moved into the planning system and, therefore, really outside the DCMS. Do you worry that DCLG is perhaps not fully brought into the system as much as DCMS is? Mr Brown: It has to be a concern, given the evidence. Mr Raynes: My sense is that those within government have heard the points that have been made around this and that some progress is being made in bringing DCLG within the conversation, but we would encourage them to make further progress. Q5 Chairman: You said you had only just got the conservation area clauses. Has everybody had a chance to see those now? No. Ms Wills: They were issued yesterday, I believe, so we have only had a very short, rapid summary. Mr Brown: I read them on the train here. Q6 Chairman: Did you utter a squawk on the train when you came across anything, or were you relatively content with what you read? Mr Brown: I would like to withhold my judgment on that, but, as you have pressed me, there are margin notes scribbled against virtually every clause, and I think it needs full investigation. I can understand the intent and the direction of travel, but I am not too certain that the wording actually will press the right buttons. Ms Wills: I think I was pleased to see, on my equally rapid reading, that it will be possible to designate conservation areas on archaeological grounds. This offers up the possibility of an area designation. I am not sure, again because I have only just seen the document, but it may offer some possibilities for designation in urban areas, where archaeology is of considerable importance and where, for example, the provisions under the 1979 Act for the designation of areas of archaeological importance will not be continued under the new legislation. So I think this is an area that we would like to consider in more detail and comment on in due course. Q7 Chairman: I think we would say to all of you that, given that they have only just been published, should you wish to make further submissions once you have had a chance to look at them, we would be interested to hear them. Can we move on to what is possibly the area of greatest concern that has been expressed about the Bill, which is not the content of the Bill itself but how it is going to be resourced. The National Trust told us, "We would rather have no legislation than a Bill which does not have the means for its effective delivery." The Government said that their estimate of the net cost of implementation is £1.72 million. There appears to be a degree of scepticism as to whether or not that is actually a sufficient figure. What is your view as to how much this is going to cost? Mr Raynes: It might be helpful, Chairman, if I said something to frame this part of the discussion before we get into numbers. There have been conversations over recent weeks between the Department, English Heritage, the Local Government Association and the two professional bodies represented here, the result of which is that we have all acknowledged that the numbers in the impact assessment would benefit from further scrutiny and more work. We have set up, in a very collaborative and open way, without any resistance on the part of any of the players, an arrangement whereby we will do that further work, and it is being done collectively between the departments, the professional bodies and the LGA. The working group had a meeting yesterday afternoon, for example, and it is making progress. We are hoping to report that work back by the end of July, and my expectation is that it will result in some improvement in the quality of analysis and, therefore, quite possibly in some revisions to the figures that are reflected in the assessment that you have just mentioned. Mr Brown: I read the impact assessment with a great deal of scepticism. I come from a building surveying background, and there they train you to specify what your objective is but then to quantify what is needed to get actually there so that you can feed in the necessary resources. I think that the issue for the whole impact of the Bill is that it has not really been quantified in an effective way. The impact assessment has some figures in it which, I have to say, I find rather difficult to appreciate and understand, but clearly we have an existing system of conservation controls that is unquantified and it does seems to me that a great deal of work needs to be done in order to be able to solve that problem, let alone the issue of the extra burdens which the Bill will bring onto the various agencies who are involved. Mr Raynes: There are a number of parameters here, Chairman, one of which is that we inevitably find that the costs of things vary enormously between different local authorities, and, in particular, if you are looking at this area, the case load, the nature of work is going to vary enormously between different places, so it will be necessary to build in some stress-testing of the impact assessment to work out whether maybe it is built on some assumptions about places where things are easy and cheap which do not bear generalising. Secondly, many of the planning authorities we are talking about are small district councils. The numbers reflected in the impact assessment, were you to divide them by 350-odd planning authorities, come out at such small sums per authority that (a) that looks a bit implausible, but (b) were the numbers to be significantly wrong, the impact on an individual local authority really could be quite serious. Errors of ten or twenty thousand pounds actually do have a significant impact on capacity and ability to do the job in many planning authorities, and so it really is necessary to bottom these numbers out. Ms Wills: Despite all of those very legitimate and serious concerns which must be tackled, I think ALGAO would not concur with the National Trust's view in these circumstances, in the sense that we are very keen to see the provisions of the Bill go forward, and some of them relating to local authorities, for example, in respect of historic environment records will formalise an existing situation. So, although it will be very important to make sure that historic environment records are fit for purpose and deliver the needs of all of the professionals in the historic environment as well as the wider community, we do feel that we would be building on an existing system and, therefore, although there will be costs, we do not feel that these will be completely out of order. We also feel that from the local authority perspective, if historic environment records are a statutory duty, then we will have a better basis for making the case for resources within our individual local authorities. We do see that as quite a positive element, albeit the continuing concern that my colleagues have expressed. Mr Brown: I think what we can say with a great deal of certainty, though, is that the current situation is pretty powerless in that there simply are not the skilled professionals out there to discharge the current work loads let alone the added burden that the Bill will bring. There are some statistics within our written submission from the IHBC, and I would invite you to consider them. Indeed, we have done a recent survey on local authority conservation officer provision and, if the committee so wished, I could arrange for a copy of that report to be placed with you. Q8 Chairman: We are going to come on to skills very shortly. Before we do, Dr Cooper you are a front-line practitioner. Are you going to be able to cope in your district council? Dr Cooper: Perhaps I can explain. As part of local government reorganisation within Cornwall, I have been doing work not only as a team leader within my district but also looking at the resources across the country, and I think what is clear is that there is a tremendous difference across small district councils as to the provisions. Within my district council I have got 2.6 conservation staff, which actually, generally, is seen as being pretty high, despite the fact that we do an awful lot, as I have mentioned previously. With local government reorganisation there will be ten conservation officers, or full-time equivalents, to serve what is now six districts. Currently, out of those ten full-time equivalents, 55% of their time is actually spent on development management - so the system is already creaking. We are all passionately keen about what we do, but there is a limit to what one can do, and it is so important with this legislation and this work that we do that, that we do it right. What we are particularly concerned about is the impact that it will have, not only on the conservation staff but we also work as teams. We work as teams within the planning authority, we work as teams with enforcement officers, with planning officers, and the impact will not only be on the conservation officers but it will also be on those wider skills. It will be vital that enforcement officers are able to carry out their duties as well. Their resources already are at a level that is incredibly pushed; so we do need to consider that wider issue. Q9 Chairman: What happens, Paul, if you come back at the end of your conversations and agree that actually the cost is going to be much greater than the Government is projecting? Mr Raynes: As the committee will no doubt have noticed, last December the Government collectively signed a concordat with the LGA, one provision of which is that new burdens imposed by government legislation on local government will be fully funded, and that, to be fair, is a principle that is absolutely reflected in the wording of the impact assessment, but clearly the trick is not just to commit to fully funding new burdens, it is actually to get the numbers right so that the money is made available. There is a question we have, which again we will be exploring in further conversations with the Government, which is exactly what the mechanism for funding the new burden might be, which is not made explicit in the impact assessment. It is not entirely clear to me whether there is a proposal here that the department and English Heritage should, in perpetuity, pay a stream of grant allocated to this activity. It is much more likely, I suspect, that this will be reflected in the overall local government settlement, which again underlines the fact that we need to get the numbers right because that overall settlement then will knock-on into the council tax in a whole series of individual local authorities where, again, as you may have noticed, one particular local authority has just been capped for disagreeing with the Government about two places of rounding on a percentage point of increase on its council tax. So the pressure on local authorities is quite acute. Mr Brown: I think the experience on the ground is that it is impossible to recruit. I work and practise in London for one of the London boroughs. I am team leader of one, so we are trying to run an entire London borough with myself and one other, and I have been trying for six months to recruit in order to be able to spend approximately three-quarters of a million pounds worth of regeneration money targeted in one of our deprivation wards and yet cannot find any staff in order to be able to do the work. Q10 Mr Evans: That is fascinating: because really what you are saying is that none of you have got any faith in the figure that has been mentioned, the 1.7 million, but that through negotiation, irrespective of what that figure is, you think it will be fully funded but, even if it is fully funded, you may not be able to recruit the staff to implement the Bill. Mr Brown: Welcome to our world. Q11 Mr Evans: As long as we know where we are. Mr Raynes: There is an issue there, obviously, about the scope of the question the committee is asking. We are here to talk about the Bill and the impact of the Bill, and we are engaged in what look like very optimistic conversations with the Government about the costs that are associated with the Bill. It would, of course, be possible to get into wider conversations on which the professional bodies, undoubtedly, will have very strong views about the resourcing of particular professions. Q12 Alan Keen: We are talking about costs, obviously, and local authority representatives always have a punished look on their face when they come before us, and I sympathise. Are there direct links between the costs that you incur, because there are benefits from tourism and attractions to London and other places? Are the costs linked with cost benefits or are you just isolated and there are no direct links? Dr Cooper: May I come in there? Can I ask whether that is with work generally? Within the work I do with 2.8 or 2.6 staff, over the last seven years, by using £200,000 of district council money, I have bid for, managed and financially managed two heritage initiative grant schemes. That £200,000 has brought in £4.2 million worth of investment in the historic environment, it has generated 70 direct jobs, it has provided 70 full-time temporary jobs for work within the construction trade and has generated nearly three million pounds worth of sales. Q13 Alan Keen: Yes, that was my guess. Is that always the case across the grain? There must be some cases where it is not costs, it is a duty to preserve but it does not have any benefits of income? Ms Wills: The vast majority of the work we do is, at its heart, about protecting, understanding, recording the resource that is the historic environment, whether that is archaeological sites, historic buildings or the general historic character of the rural and urban environment. So that is at its core. Sometimes people do not actually see the link between that and what one might call the exploitation of that resource. So people go to visit sites, income is generated, people are employed; there is a very, very real element, a strong element, of income generation which results from the work that we do. Sometimes the links are close and obvious, and you have demonstrated those well; sometimes they are much more tenuous, because, obviously, if the historic environment, the archaeological sites, the historic buildings are not there, they are not there to provide the basis for economic development or to act as the focus for tourist attractions, visitors, et cetera. Q14 Alan Keen: I guess there were not always links. I can understand that Cornwall, because it is a tourist area, gets great benefit from what you and your staff do, but some London boroughs, for instance, have little in the way of heritage - I do not mean to insult them - and others are very rich. The costs should not fall on individual councils, I would not have thought. Is this something which you feel yourselves, or am I completely wrong? Ms Wills: I think one of the distinguishing features of the historic environment is that it is everywhere. You could say that all local authorities will have some element of their heritage, historic environment, which needs protection, conservation, which may act as the focus for regeneration. A good example outside of what is an obvious tourist area would be work, for example, that I am currently engaged on in Gloucester, which in many ways is quite a deprived urban area but where heritage is one of the stimuli, one of the focuses of the current programme of regeneration, spearheaded by the Gloucester Heritage Urban Regeneration Company, and I think there is a very real recognition there of the importance that the historic environment can play in stimulating not only interest in tourists and visitors but being used to enhance people's sense of place, the understanding by the community of where they live, enhancing community cohesion, and so on. I think it has a very, very widespread application, much wider than tourism. Mr Brown: It is very much the pleasure in the job now. Twenty years ago conservation was focused on building techniques, lime and timbers and things like that, but in the last ten years or so it really has moved on. It seems to me the case is very much proven that investment in the historic built environment rapidly transmits itself into major wins about sustaining communities, creating jobs, making places much more pleasant to live in and for people to invest their businesses into, and it seems to me that the areas that have been able to focus on that are the ones that have weathered the various economic storms the best. Q15 Alan Keen: Yes, that is why I raised the point, but I am looking at costs. Education owes you an awful lot, or there is a lot to gain which maybe is not being exploited in every area. Are there enough links across counties and boroughs and district councils or is it fractured? Mr Raynes: I rather think this takes us back to the discussion earlier on about the place of the historic environment in the wider planning process. What we would very much hope the Bill helps to continue with, because it is a trend that, as Mike says, has been going on for some time, is the way in which the historic environment has its proper place at the top table, as it were, through the holistic local development framework in a particular place, its sustainable community strategy, and so on. There are a legion examples of places that are doing this. They are taking a long-term view of their future and defining it with their historic environment as one of the major determinants of their identity and their attraction to incomers, and tourists, and businesses, and so on. Q16 Alan Keen: It is our job to help you. Mr Brown: Indeed. Q17 Alan Keen: We have got a special interest. This committee cares about heritage. Mr Brown: I feel that whatever the net cost turns out to be, I would invite you to see it not as a cost but as an investment in local communities. Q18 Alan Keen: We understand that, but we want to produce a report which reflects the concern that you have got. I am not looking at you as costs. I am saying: is that how other people look at you, and they should not, and what would you like us to say that is going to help? Ms Wills: I think, in a way, this comes back to a point we were discussing earlier about the need to ensure that other government departments are fully engaged in his process, not only DCLG but also Defra, because the historic environment is truly a cross-cutting issue and I think we need to ensure that its relevance and its benefits are fully recognised across local and national government and, as you just said, Mike, that the money invested truly is an investment that can deliver wide benefits for other departments locally and nationally. Q19 Mr Sanders: Going back to the Bill and the reform that the Bill proposes, do you think local authorities have enough staff with the right skills and expertise to cope with it? Mr Brown: In our written submission we have provided some evidence of the fact that there is a surprising percentage of local authorities that have no in-house professional advisors, and, indeed, there is a minority - I think it is 2% - who take no advice at all on the historic built environment when making planning decisions. I am very pleased that the Act is going to address this. To reiterate my earlier points, I do feel that this should be made a statutory duty to ensure that it is properly implemented. I am concerned that there are other clauses beyond one and six that rather fudge the issue and perhaps invite local authorities to try and relocate that burden on local and national amenity societies. I think that is very much a point that needs to be addressed. I have made the case anecdotally about the near impossibility of recruiting at the moment; it is a profession that has been allowed to decline. There is some evidence about the age profile of the profession, indicating that there is going to be a hole of 30 and 40 year olds not able to step in in ten years' time when people like my generation, perhaps, are approaching retirement. So there are long-term trends that need to be addressed, and they will clearly need, therefore, to consider the career structures, the job security and the pay that is on offer to people in this profession. Ms Wills: In the draft Bill there is, as you mention, Mike, a requirement that local authorities take expert advice in determining development proposals, applications, affecting the historic environment. I think we would like to see more detail about that, more detailed guidance, to ensure that local authorities really do have the expert staff to come to an informed judgment about applications. Q20 Mr Sanders: Do they have to be local authority staff or do the local authority just buy in that expertise from the private sector? Ms Wills: Of course local authorities do source expert advice from a variety of places. I think we would argue that to undertake the full range of strategic as well as development focused advice, it would be of great benefit for local authorities to have in-house expertise. They could, of course, choose to source some of that from the private sector, if they so wished, but it is of critical importance that that advice is on hand. Q21 Mr Sanders: I can imagine the situation in Cornwall as it stands at the moment is probably replicated right across the country, where you have districts and counties. The great benefit of Cornwall becoming a unitary is that you can then have equal expertise cover across the whole county, and is that not an advert for having unitary government elsewhere in the country? Dr Cooper: We have been looking at what we thought the provisions of the Bill would produce over the last three or four years as a group of conservation officers and also with our historic environment colleagues at the county council. So, yes, we have been looking at opportunities of improving the service, but, just going back to your point about buying-in advice, for the Heritage Bill consultation one of the questions was the importance of pre-application advice. If you are buying in advice, it is very difficult to actually have the experienced professionals available as someone comes into a planning office and asks for pre-application advice. You really want, as a team, to provide a proper service, to actually have conservation and archaeological advice at pre-application stage running through the determination of the application and also monitoring work on site. We have done an awful lot of work over previous years looking at the quality of applications that are submitted. It is vital that the applications are of a proper standard in order to assess work on site, or proposed work. That is the sort of work that is not desperately well done by external consultants. It really needs to be done within the authority. Q22 Mr Sanders: Can I come back to Mike Brown, who has mentioned the skills gap. Both English Heritage and the department have made an assessment of the level of training required for conservation officers. Is that realistic? Mr Brown: I think the question is: are the conservation officers there in the first place to train? We need some seed-corn investments to get a virtual circle going whereby you are training people who are there, who are interested and committed in their careers and in the field of conservation, who can see a clear career path, know that their jobs are relatively secure and that they are not going to be subject to ad hoc service cuts, which is currently certainly the situation in London. The training that has been suggested is fantastically welcome. There is a huge skills gap. Going back to your earlier point, yes, local authorities, in theory, could buy in heritage professional advice, but, of course, there is not the private sector there to support it. There really is a major skills shortage across all three sectors at the moment, it seems to me, and that does rather prevent us properly using the HERs. Archaeologists are very fortunate in that PPG16, in recognition of the fact that there is so much archaeology the public purse could never properly explore all of it, placed the responsibility for this with developers. It seems to me that perhaps there is a model with staff within the public sector and staff within the private sector to use HERs to properly inform applications. There is a problem at the moment about the quality of applications that are received, and the vehicle for that is conservation plans, whereby an applicant who owns or is an agent for an owner of a listed building who wanted to do work would turn to the HER to draw up the information that would give a proper assessment of the special interest of the asset but then would use that information to properly inform the nature of their application, but to get there we need to put a bit of resource in both sectors, and we are a long, long way from that. Mr Raynes: The very welcome offer from English Heritage around training is one of the things that we are now discussing in this conversation about general resourcing, and we will see where that comes out; but I think the last couple of comments take us into an interesting area where this is partly a question about skills within the system and I am not sure from an LGA point of view we would have a view on the balance between employed and bought services, but it is clear that you need the capacity within the system and, if a local authority does choose to go down a buying-in provision route, they need the capacity to buy in to be an intelligent customer, which is itself a specific skills issue. Ms Wills: And resource needs are not likely to be any less whichever procurement route is actually chosen. Mr Brown: I think it is worth noting, my information is that there are no longer any degree level courses in conservation left in the country. There is one left in Wales. So entry into conservation as a profession is only available at postgraduate level, and I do not see how you can hope to get 18 year olds who may have an interest in historic buildings, regeneration, community work to flow into this without providing the necessary training infrastructure. Q23 Chairman: You do appear to be painting a pretty apocalyptic picture. Here we have a bill which everybody has been asking for, for a long time, which most people agree is worthy, but you are suggesting there is not going to be anybody, to use the quip, to implement it once it is passed. Mr Brown: Do not get me wrong, I wake up every morning with a song in my heart, bursting with enthusiasm for my work, such is the vocational nature of it. I think the Bill needs a little polishing, but fundamentally it is sound. I think what we have largely been discussing this morning is its implications, and it is those implications that need backfilling in terms of guidance and further work on the resources that are necessary to make the Bill work. I very much want it to happen. I think it is a key to really making this a high quality country to live in. Chairman: On that more positive note can I thank the four of you very much. Memoranda submitted by Westminster City Council and University of East Anglia Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Robert Ayton, Head of Design and Development, Westminster City Council, and Mr Joseph Saunders, Estate Development Director, University of East Anglia, gave evidence.
Chairman: In this next session we are looking specifically at heritage partnership agreements. Can I welcome Robert Ayton, the Head of Design and Conservation at Westminster City Council, and Joseph Saunders, Estate Development Director at the University of East Anglia. Adrian Sanders will start. Q24 Mr Sanders: What was your experience of the pilot heritage partnership agreements and would you suggest their widespread introduction? Mr Saunders: I think perhaps I should start by saying that, because we were engaged in something of a prototype, it was a process of adventure and finding out. Having said that and been engaged in very wide consultation, not only within the university but also exploring the scope that the HPA at the university should cover, my overriding opinion is that there is scope for the application of HPAs elsewhere for the listed heritage of the country but that it is one that needs to be developed very closely with a selection. What do I mean by that? I do not think HPAs are universally applicable; I do not think it is a panacea. I think university estates, for example, are ones where it can apply very well, and I think that there may be opportunities within the NHS estate and the MoD estate and maybe large country estates which have villages attached to them, like Mentmore and Woburn Abbey, where there is a range of issues which are in many ways interlinked that can be dealt with very successfully by HPAs. Mr Ayton: Our involvement was with Piccadilly Circus, where English Heritage produced the heritage partnership agreement and consulted us on it. It is a very thorough document, produced by consultants, and it essentially sets out what works do not require listed building consent, what works might require listed building consent and what works will require listed building consent. We think that it can be made to work, as my colleague said, in particular areas, but we do not think it should be used very widespread, partly because it involves quite at lot of work up front. There needs to be a full understanding of the heritage asset and there needs to be a full assessment of what potential works might be proposed and what their impact on the building is. So there is this big investment at the beginning and we are not entirely convinced that the benefits over the long-term necessarily outweigh the input at the beginning. Mr Saunders: Could I take up a point from my colleague there? It took us something in the order of about two and a half years to bring our HPA to maturity, and that certainly sounds a very long time. I had expected and programmed with the university about 18 months. The level of consultation that we engaged in was very much wider than I was expecting, but I think that is part of the nature, it being a prototype. So far as the benefits for the university are concerned, it opens up a measure of security that was not otherwise available to the university, given the nature of the core business of the university to push knowledge forward either in research or to spread it by knowledge transfer, and when one is engaged in an activity of that sort what was most anxious for the university in respect of listing was that it might be frustrated in its core business. So the HPA for the university gave it a freedom that it would not otherwise have been able to enjoy. It cost us, we think, in the order of about £70,000, but, more importantly, it has, to my certain knowledge at the present time, saved us something in the order of a quarter of a million pounds in bringing projects forward since listing. I say since listing, because what we were doing all the time whilst we were working on our HPA was to test it with work that we needed to do at the university in order to keep the university at the forefront of research. My experience at the present time, and I think it will be an on-going experience, unlike my colleague here, is that it will continue always to bring benefit to the university because of the freedom it provides for the university to continue its core business. That does not mean to say that the university can in any sense be cavalier with what it has as an enormous asset, and it is significant to me that before the HPA was in place, or rather before we were listed, the university buildings were under no threat; we were looking after them. We knew they were important, and they were important on a different level just from their heritage level, if I can put that way. They provide the university with an enormously attractive and stimulating environment, they are dynamic buildings, and if you are going to be working in an environment where you are constantly having to push forward through research, new information, new knowledge, you need the right environment to do it. I believe the University of East Anglia is precisely that because of its architectural heritage. Q25 Rosemary McKenna: The heritage partnership agreements that you have been involved in, are they genuine partnerships? Is there an imbalance of power between the various parties or does that matter? Mr Saunders: My experience of it was that there was not an imbalance. I said it took longer for us to do it than I was expecting and I think that was largely because, for the first six months or so of when we were working with English Heritage, we were both finding our way about what the scope of the HPA ought to be, what we call the 'Conservation Development Strategy', and I would like to develop that particular aspect with you in a moment. We argued very firmly with English Heritage that we were not in it for creating what was at that time being described as a 'conservation management plan' because we saw that as nothing more than managing the status quo, and that would inevitably, over a period of time, have brought stagnation to the university. We needed to have a way in which we could both nurture our heritage, but also move forward, and we developed the idea of what we have called the 'Conservation Development Strategy'. It does have, as indeed my colleague mentioned a moment ago, three levels of control, one which is recognised as being maintenance and the straightforward looking after of the buildings on a day-to-day basis, those which are little bit more adventurous, but are still, nevertheless, within the terms of the Conservation Development Strategy and those which are clearly matters which are pushing the bounds and need to have further intellect and scholarship to examine them and possibly be worked on through a Listed Building consent or, under the new legislation, Listed Asset consent, but I do not think we should be afraid of that. Insofar as we were able to develop these ideas with English Heritage, it was a development of ideas that was on an equal partnership. However, I would just add a word of caution, and this is going to sound terribly patronising and I do not wish to be patronising in the least, that we were at an advantage where we are a university in that we had a measure of scholarship at our fingertips anyway, so we were able to match an intellectual debate with English Heritage with confidence, and we also took on board a firm of architectural researchers, Cambridge Architectural Research, whose work is directed at research into best practice and design and architecture, so we were supported very well. Interestingly enough, I do not think, once we had gotten into understanding the scope, that we found English Heritage in the least bit resistant. Where the resistance came from was not so much from them, but from the Twentieth Century Society who were very anxious about this new and rather adventurous way of looking after our heritage. Mr Ayton: There are obviously a number of parties that are required to reach the agreement, not just the local planning authority, English Heritage and the landowner, but also the consultees, the national amenity societies, so the Twentieth Century Society, and local amenity societies as well. Our other experience more recently has been in Baker Street Station where English Heritage have not produced a draft agreement and I think we are sort of starting from scratch really, and there we have a problem even at the initial level of deciding what constitutes the heritage asset, where the Listed building begins and ends, and that is just right at the beginning. Unless there is a clear statement already from English Heritage or, as part of the List description, unless there is a clear statement of what the extent of the interest is, you then spend a lot of time trying to define the extent of the building, where the curtilage of the building begins and ends and then, within that curtilage, what is of importance. This is not necessarily an area that you can reach easy agreement on and there is a lot of work that goes into just that stage. In terms of imbalance of power, from our limited experience, I do not think there is an imbalance of power. The local planning authorities have already decided what requires consent and what does not and this is just a different way, a formal way, of encoding that process. Q26 Chairman: Mr Saunders indicated really quite significant cost savings as a result of entering the HPA and you talked about £1/4 million. Mr Ayton, you seem slightly less enthusiastic about this concept. Did you not detect any significant long-term cost savings through this process? Mr Ayton: I think it will save money in terms of in the long term if it results in fewer Listed building applications being made because then there is less work for officers to do in terms of processing those applications, but I am not sure that that will necessarily result. As the Piccadilly Circus agreement is set out, there is a lot of consultation involved and, when work is proposed, LUL will still send us, well, not for the green works which do not require consent, but the amber or the red works, they still either have to make an application to us or send us the proposals for us to assess anyway just to make sure that they are either acceptable or, in the case of the amber proposals, whether they actually require consent or not, so ongoing there is still quite a lot of work involved. Where it does potentially save work is in clearly setting out what work does not require consent and, if that work just carries on without our being involved, then we have saved some time. I would say generally that I looked at our statistics and we do not actually get many applications for Listed building consent for works that do not require it. Mostly, people know what requires consent and they apply for it anyway. Q27 Mr Evans: As far as the cost implications are concerned of the Heritage Partnership Agreement, is it all going to be contingent on how many there are going to be? Mr Saunders: Sorry, could you repeat that? Q28 Mr Evans: The costs, particularly for local authorities and for English Heritage, it could be quite considerable if a lot of HPAs occur. Mr Saunders: I think the capital needed to set them up would certainly have to be expended, but I think thereafter the savings that would accrue are, well, for me, clear. Perhaps if I went into how we resourced this, that might be helpful. So far as the university was concerned, the resource was me and me only. Having said that, I engaged others within the university on a consultative basis and of course we carried out a survey of esteem amongst the university community, but the expectation of pro-vice-chancellors and other individuals across the university is that they expect to engage in this sort of work on behalf of the university, having put aside for a period of time their teaching research, and that is the way in which universities work, so it was not as if there was going to be anything extra on top of what the university would have had to have done in that regard. The £70,000 that I mentioned was in respect of money that the university had to expend outside of the university on consultants' fees, on printing, on travel, on expenses and all of that sort of thing. What I cannot tell you is how much it cost English Heritage or the local authority. However, what I can tell you is that the Conservation Development Strategy, which we drew up, we drew up almost entirely at our own expense, consulting with English Heritage intensely only in the first few months when we were, as I mentioned earlier, agreeing the scope of it. Thereafter, what we did is we sent English Heritage early drafts, later drafts and then the final draft for their comment and so on and so forth, and we worked with the local authority very much on that basis as well. We seem to have gained the trust of the principal stakeholders in this, ourselves as the keepers, the local authority as the administrators and English Heritage as the intellect and, having won that respect, I think that they were able very substantially to leave us alone to develop this HPA ourselves. I am not suggesting that that will always be the case with everybody and I mentioned earlier on to one of your colleagues that we are in perhaps a rather privileged position being a university, and I am not suggesting that it would be the same for everybody, but insofar as there are consultancies out there who do have an ability to be able to carry out the appropriate research and convert that into a practical, in our case, Conservation Development Strategy, I think when an institution decides whether or not it is going to enter into a Heritage Partnership Agreement, it needs to do itself a little business case and I think that is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect. Q29 Mr Evans: It is clearly benefiting you then. Robert, Westminster City Council have spoken about the fact that the HPA on the Piccadilly Line Underground scheme had a lot of consultation and a lot of time involved in it and they say that, "The danger is that, in introducing a widespread, uncontrolled system of HPAs, it will promote work for local planning authorities, English Heritage and other parties, which may not need to be carried out. Whilst HPAs will undoubtedly have some benefits and some exceptional circumstances, their widespread use should be discouraged". Mr Ayton: Well, on the issue of cost, the trouble with the system at the moment is that Listed building application work is totally unfunded by application fees, so it has to be paid for out of the general planning budget, and we feel, not only in the case of HPAs, but also with Listed building consent applications, that local authorities ought to be given the power to charge for those because of the amount of work and officer time that goes into processing them. Q30 Mr Evans: So what are we looking at when you say that they should be able to charge for them? Mr Ayton: A fee. Like you have to pay a fee for a planning application, you should pay a fee for a Listed building application. Q31 Mr Evans: You also want to be able to say no to an HPA? Mr Ayton: Yes, absolutely. We would be very worried if anyone could propose them and we had no choice over whether we had to accept them or not because we think that potentially, and maybe we are over-anxious about this, but we think that there could be a lot of demand for them perhaps by major landowners. My area is the West End and the big estates might think of a way in which they could use these and, if they did and they came to us, that would involve us in a lot of work, unpaid work or unfinanced work, I should say. Mr Saunders: Can I concur with my colleague's comments about applications. We went through a sort of quasi-application process in order to get our Conservation Development Strategy before the Norwich City Council Planning Committee and that did involve the conservation officer and his senior in work as if it had been any planning application, so I think planning authorities should be able to charge for hearing presentations of HPAs. Q32 Mr Evans: Otherwise, it could be a ticking time-bomb then for local authorities where particularly they have got large estates, which could have huge implications? Mr Saunders: Yes. Q33 Mr Evans: Uncontrolled and uncharged. Mr Saunders: Yes, and the university's estate is not a small one. Chairman: On that note, thank you both very much. Memorandum submitted by Heritage Link Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ms Anthea Case CBE, Chairman, and Mr Matthew Slocombe, Trustee, Heritage Link, gave evidence.
Chairman: For this next session, can I welcome Anthea Case, the Chairman of Heritage Link, and Matthew Slocombe, who is a Trustee and also Deputy Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Q34 Rosemary McKenna: What do you think the heritage sector would see as the main benefits of the Bill? Ms Case: I think that the whole sector, rather as you heard from your first set of witnesses this morning, very much welcomes the simplification which the Bill provides and the opportunity, as it were, to look at the whole system which has grown piecemeal and put it together in a more logical and coherent way. I think we all welcome too the commitment to as much protection as there currently is in the new system and would want to see that carried out. We also welcomed in the White Paper, but it is, I think, one of the question marks we have over the Bill, the emphasis on heritage protection being more open and inclusive because it is the inclusive element, as it were, which particularly attracts the voluntary sector who want to play a part and have an important part to play in heritage protection. Q35 Rosemary McKenna: Would you like to add something, Matthew? Mr Slocombe: Yes, could I just simply say that the system of control that we have is long-evolved, but hard-fought-for by heritage bodies of all kinds and generally much-respected, but it is a complex business and there is a general feeling from all sides that simplification, bringing together the built heritage and archaeology too into a single register arrangement, would be generally beneficial. It is also valuable to have a new concept of special interest and to try and define that more precisely. At the moment, particularly among owners, there is a great deal of uncertainty about what makes buildings and sites of interest and trying to pin that down more precisely through new designation descriptions would be extremely useful. Q36 Rosemary McKenna: What practical benefits would there be, as has been suggested, for the heritage sector if the Bill were co-sponsored by DCMS and the Department for Local Government? Ms Case: I think it is not so much a matter of, as it were, practical consequences from co-sponsorship, I think co-sponsorship would be symbolic, in some senses, in that I think we would have seen it as symbolic of a real wish and attempt by DCLG and the DCMS to work together on heritage protection and its links with the planning system. We too, I think, have concerns that DCLG are going down one route and DCMS are going down another route and the two are not necessarily well-articulated together, and the absence of DCLG sponsorship, I think, was something which made us concerned rather than it in itself having a practical value; it is what goes on underneath it, what it means, which would have a practical value. Mr Slocombe: Can I add that at a detailed level we have Conservation Area control of course going into general planning which is DCLG's area, and the feeling that there was a joint working on this arrangement would be very reassuring. Similarly, with ecclesiastical exemption, this is not of course an exemption from planning permission, so the feeling that DCLG was in there thinking about the planning implications for the slight extension of the exemption, which the Bill proposes, would be useful. Beyond that, for local voluntary heritage bodies, there are very important roles, say, for things like electronic planning and the accessing of information which is within the system, so the joining up of the advertising side with the heritage applications from DCMS would assist local engagement and help bring local knowledge and local skills into the whole process. Q37 Rosemary McKenna: You do not think it would have been more helpful than obviously what they will have to do, which is bringing in planning guidelines, that it would have been better if they were working on them at the same time? Mr Slocombe: I think working in tandem at this early stage would provide greater reassurance for the system which at the end of the process would be beneficial to all. Q38 Mr Sanders: Is ecclesiastical exemption the opposite of divine intervention! What do you think the implication will be if the Bill proves more expensive to implement than expected? Ms Case: I think at a general level we could have a situation which, in some senses, was worse than what we have now because, leaving aside sort of pure costs, in terms of the work being done there will be stresses on the system as we move from one side to another and those have to be properly handled and those will require additional resource and additional effort, I think, particularly from local authority staff, but also from English Heritage. If one takes designation, if we run a system whereby new designations take account of the new legislation, but the old list still exists, we could have almost a two-tier system, I think, leaving owners of historic properties in greater confusion than they are in now. You heard earlier what pressures the conservation system is under in local authorities and I think it would add to the delays in the system and perhaps not as good decisions being taken. I think there are real risks there of it not being properly funded. Mr Slocombe: I would echo that completely. I have mentioned already that defining special interest in lengthier designation descriptions, I think, is going to be appreciated by all, but, for funding reasons, it seems that English Heritage cannot offer a timetable at the moment for completing this full reassessment process of things already designated in one way or another, and there is a really significant risk that the public will end up very confused as well as perhaps local planning authorities who are trying to deal with old-style list descriptions alongside new-style designations, looking at the old ones in the way they probably always have done, but trying to apply new issues of special interest to the fresh descriptions. May I add too that, from the point of the national amenity societies, we see an increasing amount of work arising from the Bill's proposals which in many ways is very welcome. Things like the requirement to seek expert advice, which is in the Bill, may well fall on the voluntary sector to a quite significant degree and yet the impact assessment assumes that all of this will be done at the voluntary sector's own expense and there is absolutely no provision in there for increased funding. We are all working at capacity at the moment and it seems a missed opportunity not to lever in the expertise through voluntary help that the national and local amenity societies offer through a certain amount of more grant assistance to aid our administrative work; this would be an investment. Q39 Chairman: You wrote an article which had the rather colourful headline, "Heritage Protection Bill fine but, without cash, chaos", and the National Trust, as we quoted earlier, suggest that, without the resources, they would rather not have the Bill at all, and they presumably are part of your umbrella organisation. Generally, the sector appeared to be quite supportive and welcoming of this Bill, but is there a real fear that actually we could end up with a much worse situation than we have at present if the resource is not there to support it? Ms Case: We have always had that worry. From the early days of discussing the White Paper with the DCMS, I think one of the points that we consistently made was that the resources to implement a new system will make the new system work and that, without them, whether "chaos" is the right word, I am not sure. The National Trust have made their position clear and I think, for most of the sector, we still feel slightly in the dark about the judgment we ought to make because we have only got the draft Bill, some of the important sections in the draft Bill are still missing and I certainly have not seen the Conservation Area ---- Q40 Chairman: You have not yet seen it? Ms Case: No, not yet. We are expecting a whole raft of secondary guidance. We do not have a new PPG from DCLG on the historic environment. We have our concerns about the costs, some of which you heard again earlier this morning, so I think that, without all that evidence being brought together, it is difficult to make a judgment, but I think we still stick by our position of welcoming the Bill and very much wanting it to be implemented, but having concerns about whether actually the wherewithal to do it and to do it well will be there. I think I would add one other thing too which is that I was very pleased to hear that the Local Government Association were having further conversations with the DCMS, but the thing, I think, that I have in the back of my mind from conversations with individual local authorities is that they say, "Well, unless the money is ring-fenced, whatever extra money we get may not necessarily go to the purposes for which it was intended", and at the same time DCLG write me letters saying, "Of course it's up to local authorities where they spend their money". Q41 Chairman: Well, that is the story of local government finance! Ms Case: Of course it is. Q42 Chairman: We have the Minister and English Heritage appearing before us tomorrow afternoon and obviously we will wish to press them on this particular point, but are there any other points you would draw to our attention which we might raise with them? Ms Case: Well, I think we have one other point of disappointment, I suppose I would call it, which perhaps is not entirely a matter for the Bill, but may actually be a matter for some of the subsidiary guidance, which is that I think we were very excited by what the White Paper said about the opportunities for the voluntary sector and the involvement of the voluntary sector, yet on the face of the Bill, other than the mention of the national amenity societies, in a sense that public engagement element does not really come through, and I think that is something that we all want to think about further and discuss. Q43 Chairman: It is quite hard to legislate for public engagement. Are you suggesting that there should be specific requirements imposed through the legislation? Ms Case: There is now a requirement on local authorities to take expert advice. You could define that expert advice in a way which specifically brought in local amenity societies or others with a local interest. Chairman: Thank you very much. Witnesses: Mr Peter Hinton, and Dr Gill Chitty, Secretary, Archaeology Forum, gave evidence. Q44 Chairman: For our last session this morning, we turn to archaeology and can I welcome Peter Hinton of the Archaeology Forum and Dr Gill Chitty. Can I ask you, what impact do you think the Bill is going to have on how we protect archaeology and do you generally support the provisions within it? Mr Hinton: Thank you very much, that is an excellent question. Answering on behalf of the Archaeology Forum, perhaps I should just explain that we are an informal grouping of independent non-central government bodies who try to get together to try and give fairly clear and consistent signals on issues of advocacy from a sector that is perhaps famous for its biodiversity, perhaps reflecting the range of skills and activities in the sector. One thing which has come through very clearly from all of our members is the wholehearted support of the principles that underpin the draft Bill. We realise that the Bill really recognises the role that heritage has in terms of sustainable communities, in making, as a previous witness said, the world a better place to live in terms of place-shaping and in terms of economic, social and cultural regeneration. It is a very good thing that it brings together a very disparate, complex and obscure set of existing legislation and practices that have served to cause a great deal of confusion over the years, not just to the general public, but to heritage professionals as well which often leads to an appearance of arbitrariness in the decision-making by heritage professionals, arbitrary verging on the contrary from time to time, and I think that making a more effective, open system will make it much clearer that the heritage community is not opposed to change, it is not trying to fossilise a historic environment in aspic, but, as archaeologists, we quite like change actually; it is rather our business. Better integration with the planning process you have heard a lot about, and that is certainly something that we wish to see more work done on, but we are very pleased to hear that the intention is to put the historic environment at the heart of the planning process, and we have welcomed the commitment from successive ministers not to weaken protection. In terms of the big wins that we see in the Bill, we are very pleased to see the commitment to improving the clarity and indeed parity for marine archaeological assets. The requirement for local authorities to have a historic environment record is something that our forum has campaigned for for many a year and we are delighted to see that, as we have campaigned for the expansion of protection to cover sites without structures, palaeo-environmental deposits, artefact scatters and things like that, which can slip through the net of current legislation. I too have not yet had the privilege of seeing the section on Conservation Areas, but the commitments published in the guidance to the Bill to restore protection back to its former levels is extremely welcome, as is the move to give greater protection to heritage and open spaces, so very positive feelings about it. Dr Chitty: I think it would be fair to say that there are ways in which, we think, it could be even better, and we would like the opportunity just to mention a few of those. It is in the nature of being towards the end of the session that some of what we say will be a reprise of what people have said already, but perhaps you can forgive that. We think it is absolutely fundamental that we have a new PPS to embed what is a very new approach, a lot of new language, some very new concepts in the Bill, in national policy, and to ensure that there is clarity and consistency across the whole spectrum of the planning system to deliver those principles because this Bill of course only addresses designation, protection of the specific assets, and clearly the historic environment is a lot bigger than that. A new PPS would serve a number of valuable purposes, the first of which, as many other colleagues have mentioned, would be to have a very public imprimatur from DCLG of the value of this within the whole system of planning for sustainable communities, and a very practical purpose of it could be to bring together what is a whole raft of secondary legislation, supplementary guidance and amendment of other legislation; there is a great portfolio of other tasks to be accomplished alongside the primary legislation Thirdly, we think it will be very valuable to recapture something of the vision of the power of place and the force for our future. A Bill is necessarily a very practical piece of apparatus with process and procedure, but a new Policy Planning Statement would be a very valuable way of restating that vision that we all have for why we need this change and what it is going to do in the bigger picture. Q45 Chairman: Obviously the setting up a statutory requirement on local authorities to maintain heritage environmental records you have referred to as something you welcome and have called for, but you will have heard from all of our previous witnesses the considerable concerns that are being expressed that local authorities may not have either the resources or the skills required to meet these new responsibilities. Is this a concern you share? Dr Chitty: On HERs themselves, as our colleague Jan Wills has already said, these exist or sites and monuments records, at any rate, have existed for many decades and local authorities and indeed English Heritage have invested very heavily in them, so, in terms of resourcing for HERs, what we are talking about is bringing them up to a new benchmark standard and at the moment the compliance standard, whatever it may be, has not been published, so it is quite hard to look at the figures in the impact assessment and say whether they are fair or not. I think it is true to say that, intuitively, we feel they may be a bit light, but we are very reassured to hear that the LGA is taking the lead with the Department and English Heritage in looking closely at some of those estimates and monitoring how it goes in the early period because I think that will give us a much better feel. HERs are very variable, they are very diverse, some of them are absolutely excellent, others have been the victim of little investment, so clearly the funding needs are going to be proportionate to the situation in different authorities and I think that is the case with other areas of resourcing too which is why it needs looking at in detail. On the broader issue, Peter, would you like to comment? Mr Hinton: I absolutely would agree that we do not feel that we are in a position to dispute the impact assessment in terms of the amount of resources that will be required to bring historic environment records up to that baseline. What our ambition would be of course would be to have historic environment services that go beyond the baseline of providing that historic environment record. You heard earlier on from our local government colleagues of the important range of activities that local authorities carry out with regard to the historic environment, and clearly what we are looking at here is resourcing one of their tools which is the record. We would like to see greater investment in local authorities so that they can actually play to their best, play to their strengths, and clearly, as has been raised with you before, there are a number of skills issues which we could expand upon. Chairman: It is worth saying also, as I said to the previous witnesses, given you have not yet had a chance to have a look at the additional clauses which have been made available, if you wished to come back to us with any further observations, we would be keen to hear them. Q46 Rosemary McKenna: What will be the effect of the devolution of responsibility from DCMS to English Heritage for the designation of land-based assets in England? Mr Hinton: I think we are very comfortable with this proposal in the Bill. We recognise that there will be a need for English Heritage to invest over some considerable period of time in getting the list descriptions and other existing documentation up to a fit standard for the future and that will need a strategic and staged approach, but the principle of devolution is something that we are very comfortable with and we feel that that is a form of accountability that fits well in the modern world. Dr Chitty: I think there are two specific areas actually where it would perhaps be useful just to unpack some of the issues that might relate to urban areas and to rural ones. One of the responsibilities, as we understand it, that will come from English Heritage to local authorities is that for managing the class consent system. Now, we have not seen the details of what is proposed there and it is another area where we are waiting for details, but we do have a very welcome assurance in the White Paper that the Class 1 consent for continued cultivation of designated sites would be revoked. The implications of that are not straightforward and there is certainly an area there for the Department and for English Heritage to explore with local authorities as to the implications of developing the management agreements to take the place of that class consent, agri-environment schemes which might takes its place or indeed compensation issues which might arise for local authorities in inheriting that responsibility, so that is certainly something, we feel, which needs to be pushed forward now. Clearly, any reformed system cannot really support the continuation of this aberration whereby some of our most vulnerable and important sites, such as Verulanium and Verulanium Roman town, for example, continue to be ploughed and damaged year on year, despite the fact that they are actually designated. The other area of possible interest in terms of local authority resources relates to the repeal of the second part of the 1979 Act, which one of my colleagues mentioned earlier, where areas of archaeological importance will no longer exist under the new provisions, and I think we all accept that the provisions of the PPG have largely superseded the need for that and it was never a very effective additional layer of protection, but it did offer some extra controls, particularly over permitted development and the operations of utility companies. I have not seen the Conservation Area drafting either, but we do hope that the new Conservation Areas, which can apply as Areas of Special Archaeological Interest, might well take the place of those AAI designations and indeed many other historic town centres that deserve them to have that extra level of control over activity in urban centres. Q47 Mr Evans: When you look at this Bill and at conservation and heritage generally in this country and when you look abroad, are you envious of another country which, you think, does it far better than we do it here or are about to do it here? Mr Hinton: I think my answer to that question would be that there is considerably less legislation covering the historic environment in this country. Most other European countries have much tougher legislation. Whether that legislation is actually effectively enforced varies a lot, and certainly there are a number of European countries where one gets the impression of very powerful legislation that is just not taken seriously by law enforcement authorities or indeed the bodies responsible for the heritage. There are a couple of things that we would like to see additionally that are not here and perhaps I might just pull a couple of things out. You may be aware from the written evidence that you have received that there is a degree of disquiet amongst the maritime archaeology community that one of the big things on our wish-list is not addressed through this Bill and that is the removal of the cultural heritage from the salvage regime; the salvage regime does not seem an appropriate way of looking after part of our cultural heritage. I recognise that this may not be the Bill to deal with that, but that is a bit of unfinished business that should be flagged up. I think another thing that concerns the practising archaeologists very greatly is that in nearly all other European countries there is a system of archaeological licensing which we do not have in England and in Wales, nor indeed in Scotland, and we do feel there is a need to bring forward some competence-based right to practise archaeology, particularly through the commercial world where there is likely to be damage, where there will be definite damage, as part of the project design and as part of the archaeological process, to important monuments because we need to ensure that there is proper public benefit from that process. Q48 Mr Evans: Are you saying that there are too many cowboys in the field at the moment? Mr Hinton: There are certainly cowboy tendencies that have the potential to grow. You will understand that at present anyone can provide commercial archaeological services, regardless of their background and competence. Our calculations indicate that, for England, approximately £135 million is invested every year into the planning process, into the historic environment, which may affect something like £20 billion worth of development, and the asymmetry of information that there is between the service provider and the people who are buying the services, and there was reference earlier on to the need for informed and intelligent clients, can encourage the less competent and the less ethical to provide poor services. Other organisations, for example, registered organisations with the Institute of Field Archaeologists, do provide good archaeology for the public and a reformed market where we can break out of the market failure that we find ourselves in could actually give much better public benefit. Q49 Mr Evans: If you are brave enough, Peter, I would love to hear some examples where you think money has gone in and it has been a bit of a shambles because people have not been properly trained to do the job that they said they were doing. Mr Hinton: Well, perhaps, rather than risk the specifics, I could deal with the generalities. Our feeling is that one of the things that a move towards accredited practice could give us is an encouragement for archaeological service providers, who are capable of doing brilliant work, we know that, that they do that on all of their projects rather than on occasional projects, the problem being of an intensely competitive market where anyone who seeks to add value to their project is in danger of pricing themselves out of the opportunity to win the project. That is something that I think the Bill, or particularly the guidance that underpins the Bill, could address, as too could reform to the planning guidance. The commitment that we heard on Friday from Baroness Andrews to bring forward revisions to planning guidance is encouraging. It has been mentioned that it is a very tight timescale and we would wish to get into those discussions very soon, just as we would wish to get into discussions with DCMS and the Welsh Assembly Government and its advisers about these issues as soon as possible because they are urgent and they are troubling the sector. Q50 Mr Evans: Gill, do you have anything to add to that? Dr Chitty: No, I do not, except that I think that having that very valuable clause about a duty to take expert advice is exactly the hook that we need in the Bill for supporting that. Q51 Alan Keen: You heard Anthea Case be critical that, although national amenity groups were included in the draft Bill for consultation, local civic groups and, as she mentions in her submission, archaeological groups were not. Did you feel the same as Anthea, that that should be specified that local archaeological groups should be involved officially in the consultation? Dr Chitty: I think there are a whole range of local specialist groups and amenity groups, including archaeological ones, that could make a really valuable contribution in local authority consultations, and I think it is fair to say that, already in statements of community involvement, many local authorities are very inclusive, but it would be very helpful to have that spelled out in some way in the Bill, yes. Q52 Alan Keen: Unfortunately, our archaeological expert we have on the Committee is on another committee this morning, so I am doing my best to fill in for her without any help from her. I guess that the archaeological groups and volunteer groups do play a massive part in what you can do and presumably you would not be able to do very much without them. Dr Chitty: They do indeed. As individuals and as organisations, we have a network, and I am speaking now for the Council of British Archaeology, of volunteer groups and organisations who support us in our current statutory role as a consultee on Listed building consent applications and we depend entirely on that national network of volunteers to make our input into the process, and they have become our eyes and ears on the ground and they are often able to operate in lots of ways to support our interests at the local level in a very sort of powerful way as a local voice, so yes, a very important part of the network. Q53 Alan Keen: So you would like us to mention that when we put our Report together? Dr Chitty: Yes. Q54 Mr Evans: Peter, when you were talking about accredited businesses being the leaders, you are not talking about their not being able to access the enormous number of volunteers that come in and get involved, particularly in digs? Mr Hinton: Absolutely not, no. What I was talking about was the opportunity to add a little extra layer of regulation to some of the commercial service providers. One of the things that we sometimes see, but, sadly, not often enough, is commercial archaeological excavations going ahead with opportunities for public participation and public involvement and that is extremely valuable. We want the public to be much more involved in its archaeology, it is not ours. There are about just under 7,000 of us and we want to share it with the rest of the world. Our concern is just to make sure really that the environment is right so that we can get the proper articulation between the paid professionals and the voluntary sector from which so many of the paid professionals originated. Q55 Chairman: Finally, your overriding concern, understandably, is that this Bill should not result in any reduction in the level of protection that exists for archaeological sites. There have been a couple of areas where, it has been suggested, that might be a risk, such as the abolition of areas of archaeological importance, but also the change in the definition from 'national importance' to 'special archaeological interest'. Do you think that there is a risk that, perhaps inadvertently, it might lead to a reduction in the overall level of protection? Dr Chitty: I think we have already touched on AAIs and that extra level of control which they offered and the fact that we hope that, with those five authorities that currently enjoy the AAI designation, there can be conversations with English Heritage and the Department to discuss what, they think, the impact might be of the reduction in that protection and whether we can look at Conservation Areas of archaeological interest as an opportunity to build on the existing system and make it even better, so certainly that is an area that we believe local authorities should be very actively engaged in developing. I do not think that means necessarily adding content to the Bill, but it is all of these additional bits of supporting work that need to be carried out. In terms of 'national importance' and 'special interest', national importance is the criterion by which the Secretary of State selects sites for designation at the moment and that is embedded in PPG16 and has been for the last 18 years as the benchmark for the principle of preservation of sites, whether they are scheduled or not, and that is quite an important principle. That wording from PPG16 is embedded in Local Plan policies and documents throughout the country now. It is very clear and it is very unambiguous and it has served archaeology extremely well. I think that, if we are going to move from the concept of national importance to a concept of special interest, then there does need to be a very close scrutiny of the selection criteria and of the possible pitfalls of that transition. I am actually looking at my notes because it is quite a difficult concept to get across, but, as we understand it, modernising the system moves the concept from a need to demonstrate national importance, which is what we have at the moment, to the need to demonstrate that an archaeological site might contain evidence of human activity that is of special historic interest, so, in other words, special archaeological interest is predicated on the evidence for the existence of special historic interest. Now, I am not sure if I have explained that very clearly and, if I have not, that demonstrates really the fragility of the concepts at the moment, which is not to say that we do not believe that an overarching concept of special interest of the historic environment is not the right one to go for, it is. Q56 Mr Evans: So are you saying that, if we do understood that, we were not listening carefully enough? Dr Chitty: I am not sure I understand it myself! However, I think what we want is something that is robust, as robust as what we have got and even better, if we can get it, that is reasonable, as it has to be, within the planning system and which is defensible and which all of us who work in the historic environment sector can go out and work with with a degree of confidence, and I think that, in order to achieve that, we need a very direct engagement with the people who are working on developing these principles and this new language. Q57 Chairman: Is the key to it going to be the new Policy Planning Statement? Dr Chitty: That will be a big part of it, yes. The principles of selection in the new PPS will be critical and getting those articulated with the criteria that we have at the moment, yes. Mr Hinton: Once again, it shows how important the guidance, which is still evolving, will actually be. The devil will be in the detail and we really hope that it will be more angelic than diabolic, but again we would hope to be involved much more in that than we have been to date. That is not a criticism of the process so far. We do recognise that during the drafting stage DCMS and its advisers would necessarily be very circumspect in releasing information and had to conduct their business with a great deal of confidentiality. As we move beyond that process, we have had assurances that there will be a greater level of involvement with the sector and I am sure that that will be essential when you hear issues of the kind of complexity that Gill has just described; it is going to need a great many minds coming from different directions to try and untangle that one. Dr Chitty: And we are very committed to getting it right. Chairman: Well, hopefully we can perhaps help at least to contribute in some small way to that objective. Can I thank you both very much. |