CONTEXT 189 : SEPTEMBER 2026 45 The Case of the Policy Action, Part 1: From competence to commitment CONTEXT 185 : SEPTEMBER 2025 51 Director’s cut Charter… or no Charter I must highlight a couple of qualifications to the title of this column. First, at this stage, only permission to petition – or apply – for a Charter is sought. That takes the form of our nowsubmitted Memorandum to the Privy Council Office, guardians of the chartering process. Critically, any permission received carries no guarantees on outcome. However, as the distinction between Charter and Memorandum might be moot for many readers, for convenience this column’s title conjoins the Memorandum and the Charter. Second, by the time you read this, we may all know the answer, or at least the questions the Memorandum has raised, so that is more moot. Noting that preamble, this column reflects how – with our wonderful Shrewsbury School now done and, almost, dusted (and with kudos to our West Midlands Branch for their work there) – collective thoughts here are turning back to just how the Privy Council Office might respond to our case for a Charter. And, either way on ‘Charter… or no Charter’, how we proceed after we hear its final determination. We have really been thinking about this for years, with the entire experience of the consultation, attendant research and investigation, and the drafting of the Memorandum all tied together by such considerations. But now, with a proper sense of just how suited we might be to a Charter all safely resting in and around our Memorandum, we can plot just what we might do, whichever way the response goes, ‘Charter… or no Charter’. For example, we now know that members strongly support the potential for a Charter to bring substantial benefits to our profession and discipline, and to all our diverse aspirations and attached hopes. That member support is dependent on obvious reservations, especially regarding both finances (including member fees) and any administrative distractions from our core services and role that the process might generate. With issues around these concerns now much clearer after our investigative work, we are in a strong position to advise properly. Investigations suggest that neither cost nor process should be barriers. To date, our costs have been both controlled and, compared to earlier external estimates, even much reduced. Those reductions are helped, both for the past and for the future, by the advice and support of partners, consultants and bodies recruited along our journey, all helped by our familiar cost-conscious management. The chartering processes are simpler for us than for other bodies. That is because we already align so well, and across so many measures, with the modern culture of chartering. Our current accreditation standards align with core Charter precepts – from fostering social and cultural improvements to upholding established and exemplary professional practices and principles – bringing public benefit, and matching or exceeding peer chartered disciplines, if on a rather smaller scale. And while the issue of chartering an individual’s practice standards is not directly relevant to the chartering of the charity discussed here (as current discussions relate only to the chartering of the charity, not to chartering our members, which entails a separate stage) the chartering of a person’s practice is naturally a consideration for all. Furthermore, the Charter’s focus on public benefit, its most underrecognised requirement, is easier for us, as our charitable status has always been our default position. That has been made even simpler as we have already modernised our constitution, and had it authorised by charity regulators in line with the protocols of devolved governments, to be charter-ready, so we are ahead of that game too. That unexpectedly tight tie between charter and public benefit also usefully spurred some more fundamental thinking around the Memorandum on how our regulation of the interdisciplinary conservation practice of our accredited members’ enhances the public benefit that is already intrinsic in good conservation. That will be the subject of a future column, as well as new formal guidance, but again this all confirms a real sense of our fit with the concept of a Charter, and the value of our measured approach to the Memorandum. So, if the next stage is ‘Charter’, not ‘no Charter’, we have a clear route to, and capacity for, developing a formal Petition. All new work will be embedded within that chartering process. We will then pursue the subsequent stages, managing the process and its attendant hurdles with the same cautious optimism and careful stewardship of our profession that has distinguished our work to A longstanding policy committee ‘action’ for the IHBC’s board recently served as a good example for a committee-focused update of this column on how the IHBC is evolving. That evolution has been especially rapid since we began to tackle the headline issue of a charter, from 2020, and facilitated by the fact that we could build on more incremental changes in – and lessons learned from – the years prior to that. This ‘Case of the Policy Action’, with Part 2 to come in the next issue, represents well how much we have needed to change to respond to the more complex tasks that are increasingly part of our daily challenges. This present text is developed from my narrative to the committee on this business thread. Board minutes for over a year have registered a policy committee ‘action’ to trustees, asking them – in various phrasings – ‘to explore how best to raise the issue of capacity in local authorities…’ A pithy directive, and clearly a priority, but not easy given the scale of the challenge, the complex structures and threads required for delivery, our limited capacity, and a distinct lack of wider support for, or even recognition of, the actual problems. The challenge itself has a long history, and would have been familiar to any committee or board attendee since the early 2000s and, likely, before that. Our first responses reflected a broad strategy familiar from that neoliberal, comparatively enlightened time: to ‘count’. So, then, we built on earlier research by Philip Grover, with Roy Lewis, that might help inform an acceptable level of local authority conservation service provision, to develop a data-led understanding and analysis of its infrastructure, and a policy-led interpretation of its role. Prompted by ties to the then ongoing heritage protection reform agenda in England, and its ambitions for a ‘unified’ heritage approach, the aim was the same as the earlier report, if now more overt: to agree what would be, in effect, a ‘standard’ for an authority operating the local government conservation services that would address their statutory and related duties and obligations. In effect we sought a specification of a ‘competent’ service, to use our competence-based accreditation parlance. That research secured genuinely valuable, if now historical, insights to such services in England, which itself spurred allied if much smaller works in Scotland and Wales. However, the impacts were less impressive than the history recorded and the insights drawn there. The data gathered and lessons learned were mostly sent to the digital bookshelves, as interest waned and funders sought less difficult matters than managing conservation within development. Overall, the actual impact was questionable… to minimal. After that, in that same data-led vein, we decided to explore other analytics to identify ‘competence’ in such services (and by extension highlight incompetence) that we could use for direct advocacy. That foundered in part on the complexity of the analysis – it being in the nature of the IHBC and conservation – but more on the fact that we soon realised that even if we could achieve the aim (an IHBC-led analysis of a ‘competent authority’), it would be lucky to even make it to any digital bookshelf other than ours precisely because we did it. So instead, around the mid-teens of the 2010s, we redirected our energies to high-level advocacy, via the UK parliament, reckoning that a strong voice there could have a more immediate impact on solving the problems. Indeed, if we could lead that advocacy, we hoped we might shape any subsequent assessments by national authorities. So began our parliamentary engagement through Westminster’s all-party parliamentary group (APPG) process, by establishing our role as the secretariat to a new APPG on Conservation, Places and People (our CPP APPG), finally, in 2020, and the first inquiry into The Value of Heritage in 2021, as picked up again below. The next stage of this search for a strategy to deliver targeted advocacy on behalf of our founding local conservation officers was materially shaped by two other threads – of infrastructure development and a new pivot in advocacy, with each tied to substantial changes in how we work. IHBC infrastructure For an organisation to properly raise the issue of capacity in local authorities, it needs to be fully interconnected as, like the services themselves, it demands crosscutting actions. For that, the IHBC’s processes and operations would need to work together in a holistic fashion, tied together by an integrated structure that accommodates synergy, symbiosis
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