Casework and advocacy at the CBA.
My work is almost entirely office based at the CBA’s lovely headquarters in central York. With a cup of tea (& a thermos to top it up with) I set about my emails. A welcome one comes from colleagues at the Heritage Alliance with a finalised copy of a mini briefing I drafted for the House of Lords 2nd reading of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
The Heritage Alliance are an umbrella body in the heritage sector who the CBA do a lot of advocacy work with. We don’t have the time or capacity to pursue the current planning reforms through parliament in isolation, so we collaborate with others over briefings and to liase with parliamentarians over tabling reforms to legislation. The government’s planning reforms are keeping me pretty busy at the moment!
This briefing concerns inconsistencies between planning policy to ‘conserve’ the significance of built heritage and 35 year old legislation to ‘preserve’ it. ‘Conservation’ implicitly recognises that change can be managed to old buildings that minimises impact on what makes them special. ‘Preservation’ exacerbates an impression of heritage as a blocker in the planning system. For the full lowdown you can download the briefing via the link below.
After my emails I get down to a bit of casework ….
There are some pretty standard notifications where people are looking to add extensions to listed buildings and convert barns into homes. Some require comments, often advice about how proposals could be revised to reduce the impact on a building’s historic layout and fixtures. Done well extensions to buildings can accommodate contemporary living requirements and reduce pressure on the historic structure to adapt. I submit comments on an application to convert a disused pub in Wisbech into flats, which the CBA support in principle (the pub has been empty for years) but would be improved by less subdivision.
An application for partial demolition at a mill complex in the north-west is more concerning. It’s a site where the CBA have commented on proposals before. I send some detailed advice to the planning officer with links to Historic England guidance and case studies on the regeneration potential of old mill complexes. It’s a site that would really benefit from a master plan rather than piecemeal adaptations.
Before the end of the day, an email lands from a caseworker at the Victorian Society, checking if other caseworkers have had any recent updates on an application to substantially demolish a derelict listed hotel in Wales. Multiple amenity societies are concerned by the extent of demolition proposed. The email triggers a flurry of responses, including news from Historic Buildings and Places (HB & P) that they have written to the Welsh Ministers asking for the application to be ‘called in’. It’s a complicated protracted case. I’m delighted to learn that HB & P have taken this action. To find out more about it you can see the casefile on our database here - https://casework.jcnas.org.uk/case/135827
