46 CONTEXT 189 : SEPTEMBER 2026 and iteration into a holistic unit. Our historic structures were conceived as compartmentalised operations, and were anything but that. For example, to build a case for valuing the conservation officer and service, we would need to have flexible, interactive and reciprocal operations across practice principles and standards (for us our membership and ethics committee, legal panel and so on); real-world practice valuing, reaching across corporate silos, hierarchies and data (policy and education committees, including research); targeted advocacy and engagement (communications committee; national office); resources tied to high-level strategies and networks (IHBC board and trustees); and more. These different threads would need coordinate, so, for example, we generate impacts at levels that can make a difference (political) without operating outside our remit or beyond our duties (statutory). The linkages are as never ending a familiar feature as in conservation, but when addressing governments and political platforms they are essential and, tied to even more erratic timings, both complexities and threats multiply exponentially. The perception of that challenge crystallised awareness of a key IHBC barrier to progress since the structures formally agreed in our first corporate plan in 2007: a small board of informed trustees overseeing (and often populating) committees, boards and panels that each operate under distinct remits, to avoid confusion. All was then supported by a national office, itself supported by active trustees and officers ‘popping in’ to support, connect and enhance operations and, critically, add capacity, as far as their own capacity allowed. That model served us well till the mid-teens. Later, Covid impacts undercut the critical thread of human connectivity, and society left its data-led planning, largely, behind. Our most recent response to address this barrier has been light touch and experimental, as befits our size. At our most recent board meeting we formalised the recast of what had been an informal network of senior officers serving as a corrective thread for cross-cutting engagement, our ‘finance working group’. In 2025–26, our board agreed that the old group should be reformed into a new ‘finance and resources working group’ that would have authorities – not powers – delegated from the board. Crucially, its interim terms of reference encompass crosscommittee issues in a way that can address multi-layered business challenges, and we can now more easily integrate the cross-cutting issues into cross-committee, internal processes of reference and advice, all facilitating direct board oversight. In effect we now have a governance ‘tool’, and a management ‘process’, to underpin internal planning across the areas in our operations that really might make a difference. Pivoting advocacy As outlined above, our parliamentary engagement tied to the APPG process, established in 2020, offered a high-level platform, producing the report The Value of Heritage in 2021, built on evidence collated from across the sector. While an effective learning exercise, the impact was, again, minimal. One key constraint was that, under the system, our agenda was constrained by APPG policy and member interests. The best we achieved on behalf of our ‘policy action’ in The Value of Heritage was its Recommendation 5: to ‘Provide local and combined authorities with greater control over levelling up and regeneration funding’. A start, but not enough. So, as our APPG had to be closed, as new costs tied to new guidance took their toll on us as well as other smaller bodies, we devised a new approach, one that looked to independent briefings in Westminster. These are sponsored by an MP, and while obviously part of their interest, the content is not tied to any specific political protocol other than that it was happening in the home of parliament – and, hopefully, reaching the parliamentarians – and that it had a value to the sponsor. The independence offered by this new approach meant that we could set and press the agenda that we wanted. Through that, it also offered better value, as we could fully control the narrative and devise the kind of comms-friendly topic we would need to deliver the impacts our policy committee called for. Our first such briefing took place in November 2025. Known in shorthand as our ‘Five Commitments’, it is properly titled From Crafts in Crisis to Rubbish in Retrofit: the IHBC’s five commitments to help heritage skills in conservation. That ostensibly combative framing of our agenda was based on longstanding ambitions that included our policy committee’s call. The new mood of that title captured well the potential benefits of weaving together the complicated threads that currently used to advance this agenda, the meat of which will be covered in my next column. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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