IHBC charter petition

The IHBC’s exploration of chartering centres first on scoping and, if agreed by members, preparing and submitting a ‘petition’ that makes the case for the grant of a Royal Charter. This is an action committed to as part of our 2020 AGM-adopted Corporate Plan 2020–25 (CP25), which calls for the investigation of issues around ‘chartered status internally and externally...’

Our membership controls each stage of this still-nascent petitioning journey, and we cannot know if the process will either generate a formal petition or, even if so, secure a charter for the IHBC. As with a planning application, the request is not granted just because it has been sought. After a formal petition, the award of charter is dependent on measured support from peers and stakeholders, while also lying wholly within the gift of the monarch and Privy Council. For the IHBC, the main threat in this exercise could be taken to be a potential waste of investment – with no dividend – if the charter is not secured.

Fortunately, our scoping of the charter process to date has made it clear that, properly planned, the petition itself should bring substantial benefits to the IHBC, our members, and their conservation work, all regardless of any chartering outcome. The very process of drawing up a petition is a perfect way to advance some of the most challenging ambitions in the IHBC’s current (and previous) corporate plans.

Conversations with officers at the Privy Council Office have stressed the essential priority in granting a charter to be its public interest and, by extension, public benefit. There must be, as they say, ‘a convincing case that it would be in the public interest to regulate the body’ through a charter. A petition that specifies the public benefits brought by the IHBC also benefits the institute, our members, and all our collective and diverse works and advocacy.

In conservation practice, for example, the value of working with the IHBC and our members is framed around the public benefit at the most fundamental levels. That our conservation-related work delivers benefits resoundingly in the public interest is recognised in our charitable status and overseen by charity regulators. Public benefit has also shaped the headline ambitions in our planning since our first AGM-approved Corporate Plan, of 2007, which groups our actions under headings of helping people; helping conservation; and helping conservation specialists.

Yet too often even we forget to emphasise the role of the institute and our members in delivering public benefits. Perhaps we allow others to miss it by taking it too much for granted, perhaps because we do not drill down sufficiently into just why our unique brand of conservation is so important in adding dividends on behalf of society.

Ultimately, the IHBC delivers on that public interest and benefit primarily through the support and advocacy we offer for our particular approach to conservation. Our holistic, integrated, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary practice model and standards aim to deliver sustainable, quality outcomes within no less complex crosscutting systems and processes: social, cultural, economic, environmental and – inevitably in planning – political.

But we can not expect other heritage bodies to have regard to our special nature if we do not press our message. And if we fail to advance that message across the sectors within which we ourselves operate, how can we expect any client, employer or indeed government body to register fully the benefits of our approach?

To make the case for public interest effectively, we need to gather evidence and specify the case around the special public benefit the work of the institute and our members delivers. Clearly, too, enhancing awareness of how our values operate in and deliver on the public interest, brings us huge benefits, regardless of any charter outcomes. Such work can help us actually deliver on the longstanding and worthy – if wordy – corporate ‘vision and mission’, that: ‘The IHBC should be universally recognised as the lead body advocating and supporting built and historic environment conservation practitioners, their specialist interests and standards, their ethical objectives, and the diverse benefits of their work.’

Articulating that public benefit and public good directly boosts client and employer interest in our members and their work. For example, highlighting the public interest of the IHBC in a petition for charter will help pin down the message that using an IHBC-aligned provider is simply the easiest way to help make a difference to some of the biggest challenges in society today.

How often do we make clear that our discipline must, at one time, prioritise managing carbon captured across the ages – that being the most urgent thread in 21st-century conservation – while also balancing client and community values, and reconciling social and economic pressures over the short and long term, all in a way that delivers sustainable outcomes? Ultimately, operating within the informed, holistic and ethical context of the IHBC, our members are uniquely well placed to understand, convey and address the complexities of working with today’s built and historic environment – old, and, given its context, new. If a charter adds weight to these messages, and enthusiasm for our membership standards, it would only be the icing on the petition.

Evidently, the focus on public interest in itself makes the strongest case for the IHBC to explore the charter. To aid such thinking, I would like to suggest a first, easy and personal ‘A B C’ to frame early thinking on the public interest, good and benefits that the IHBC, our members and our networks deliver.

For A, there are many choices: areas, aesthetics, awareness, actions; but I tend to look to amenity. Not either the amenity of ‘site’, as the euphemism for a dump, or the ‘public’ amenity, which does the same for toilets, but rather amenity as it was applied within the early planning system, at the start of the 20th century. There the aim was to manage the complex values of a changing society – of society’s role in supporting a person’s health, especially, including the quality of life on offer in the places where people lived.

Responding to the legacy depredations of the industrial revolution, the solution was to control the worst of the environmental and human ravages caused by unrestrained development. In answer, planning looked to shape how places might be changed to secure the true dividends to society on offer in modern development, promoting the wide-ranging, cross-community and multidisciplinary appreciation of what should be valued, and where it could be enhanced. That is how ‘amenity’ should be recognised, and that is just one critical aspect of the public interest the IHBC works to secure, enhance and promote through its charitable work.

As B, the choice is no less diverse, from buildings, bonus and boost to even the policy-abused beauty. For myself, the affirmation of ‘benefit’ seems the best focus here. The handy catch-all of ‘public benefit’ outlined above is not enough – its application is too often used and bruised to death – but a benefit needs to be fully evidenced and succinctly articulated across the spectrum of what actually enhances amenity: detailed and specific in its analysis, but rounded and holistic in its scope.

With C, the link to public interest could be community, consultation or even change, or better still perhaps ‘competence’, to set skills both as a central issue and an urgent problem or, similarly, as we know from our research on employment, ‘cash’. Then again, for the big picture of public interest today, C surely must stand for climate? In a world where the environment has been presumed as free for so long, climate costs now need to be at the centre of our budget planning.

However, rather than climate, I am opting for ‘conservation’, but here again of a specific form: the conservation practice defined and advocated by the IHBC outlined above. Conservation modelled in the IHBC’s Conservation Cycle and our underpinning competences ties our members’ practice to the holistic outcomes that ‘benefit’ all our ‘amenity’. The IHBC’s conservation mandate, of measured approaches to change (mostly simply put as ‘look before you leap’) requires interventions properly informed by precautionary management; management in turn shaped by proportionate evaluation, all operating within conservation principles and practice standards promulgated by, among others, the IHBC.

For the IHBC, might we better say why, and how, our conservation aims to bring ‘benefit’ to ‘amenity’ in society, by drawing out the substantial threads and textures of our special place within the diverse worlds and words of conservation? If so, there can be no more relevant reason for us to explore a petition for charter.

This article originally appeared as ‘Amenity, Benefit and Conservation: an ABC of an IHBC charter petition’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 176, published in June 2023. It was written by Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation