Aimée L Felton 2012

81 EIGHT and implementing an effective maintenance management strategy. All three case study organisations utilised, to some extent, external consultants to produce documents relating to the care andmaintenance of historic buildings. Whilst this could be construed to be harmful towards the management of the buildings- with practitioners within the organisation distanced from the policy and decision making- all participating organisations emphasised cooperation and involvement of in-house teams in drafting conservation related documents.The University of East Anglia even suggested in their CDS that documents were redrafted following consultation with the maintenance division of the estates department. This increased judgement emphasises the awareness within non-heritage sectors of incorporating and utilising already existing organisational management strategies and coherent frameworks to the historic buildings, thus maximising logical progression and efficiency. Network Rail was the only organisation to not have specific or even generic organisational policies regarding the conservation of their historic properties, adopting a more ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Justifying this decision, Network Rail cited the size of their property portfolio, extensive ownership of many listed buildings and cost and complexity of developing a strategy to ‘cover and appease all Local Authorities requirements for each listed building, and various exacting expectations of conservation officers (Grimes, I. 2011). Without explicitly developing conservation principles within primary documents regarding the organisations’ approach to the historic buildings, there is the potential for confusion, poor judgement and irreversible damage to the historic fabric. From the case studies it could be inferred that when cultural significance Chapter Eight - Maintenance in practice Aimee Felton