Heritage

The RTPI promotes sustainable communities where the historic environment is carefully complemented by newer buildings, helping to define and retain a unique character for every community.

Latest news

• World Heritage Site protection for NI:
  The National Trust has urged the Northern Ireland Executive to include more protection in new planning legislation.
• The Scottish Government has launched a 12-week public consultation on a strategy for Scotland's historic environment.
• The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has now received Royal Assent. It merges Conservation Area Consent with planning permission, allows parts of buildings to be specifically excluded from listing, and puts Heritage Partnership Agreements between local authorities and heritage owners onto a statutory basis.
• DCMS has published its proposals following the consultation on improvements to the system of Listed Building Consent.
• English Heritage has published Heritage in local plans: how to create a sound plan under the NPPF.
• Improving Your Neighbourhood: English Heritage has written to all Chief Planning Officers on the role of the historic environment in Neighbourhood Planning and when they will get involved. 
• The Forth Bridge will be put forward to UNESCO to consider making it a World Heritage Site.

Policy changes and consultations

Improvements to the system of Listed Building Consents
This now closed DCMS consultation sought views on options for changing the system of listed building consents.

Averting Crisis in Heritage: This report from the CLA sees heritage as a key part of the future, not just the past, and shows how the CLA wants to work with English Heritage and others in the heritage world to devise and implement changes which will allow the system to protect our heritage more effectively.

The new Welsh Assembly Government is expected to introduce a Heritage Preservation Bill to improve the listed building regime.

Listed Buildings in Northern Ireland: Environment Minister Edwin Poots has published new criteria for the listing of buildings that for the first time provides an in depth explanation of the criteria referred to on listing reports.

Practice

• Heritage Alliance's Heritage Funding Directory: This Directory is a free, easy to use guide to potential sources of support, financial and otherwise, for the United Kingdom.
• Heritage works (second edition): The use of historic buildings in regeneration.
• London World Heritage: guidance from the Mayor designed to conserve the settings of the capitals World Heritage Sites.
• Study of the Economic Value of Northern Ireland's Historic Environment - "[Our historic environment] represents significant past investment in physical, natural and intellectual resources and making the best use of it makes good economic, environmental and social sense".
• Stopping the Rot - an updated guide to enforcement action to save historic buildings from English Heritage.
• English Heritage has funded a checklist full of advice and information which local heritage groups can work through to come up with solutions to help them increase and diversify membership in their local area.
• English Heritage in partnership with Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) has published Knowing Your Place: Heritage and Community-Led Planning in the Countryside, designed to help rural communities in producing, reviewing or updating their community-led plans.
• The National Heritage List for England is the new, searchable online database of 400,000 listed buildings, registered parks, gardens and battlefields, protected shipwrecks and scheduled monuments.
• Valuing Places: Good Practice in Conservation Areas: says that many conservation areas in England are benefiting from the voluntary efforts of local people, working closely with local councils and supported by English Heritage research.
• Sustainable Heritage Toolkit: The Prince's Regeneration Trust provides an on-line toolkit that gives exemplar case studies of how local authorities across the UK have successfully delivered sustainable outcomes for their heritage assets.
• Energy Efficiency and Historic Buildings: technical advice to help prevent conflicts between the energy efficiency requirements in Part L of the Building Regulations and the conservation of historic and traditionally constructed buildings.
• Reviving Britain's Terraces: Life after Pathfinder: SAVE's report onthe disastrous Housing Market Renewal (Pathfinder) Initiative looks at ways good terraced housing earmarked for demolition can be adapted and upgraded to create exemplar 'eco-communities' of the future.
• Constructive conservation
• Signposting to more practice advice.

Networks

The RTPI Historic Environment Group provides a cross-profession route to keeping well informed on and influencing developing policy and practice. Join the network.

RTPI projects and research

• The RTPI's Seven Commitments on Climate Change seeks to ensure sustainability across all aspects of the built and natural environments.
• The Historic Environment Group is compiling a series of webpages that will be of value to those working in or new to the sector - volunteers to contribute and/or monitor content are still required.

Our viewpoint

Planning is about effecting change not opposing it, but sensitively handled, change can benefit from a careful integration with the historic environment and, in turn, heritage assets can benefit local economies through tourism, sustainability and distinctiveness. We support the principle that legislation, policy and systems should afford statutory protection to historic buildings, conservation areas and monuments. The significance and protection of these places is and should continue to be a material consideration, to be responded to in development plans and supplementary policy making and in development management decision making.

More information/events/CPD

• Get involved: email andrew.matheson@rtpi.org.uk
• View our events calendar for upcoming RTPI events

• IHBC 2013 Annual School– Thursday 20 to Saturday 22 June, Carlisle
  Amongst the speakers will be RTPI Past President Colin Haylock on 'Practical approaches to design in historic areas'.