Plea For Council Rethink On Abolishing Conservation Officer Post
Decision would leave Ealing without specialist heritage expertise
The decision to get rid of the post of Ealing's Conservation Officer is due to be reviewed by the council's scrutiny committee today.
Below, Robert Gurd from Ealing Civic Society and Anthony Lewis, representing
Ealing’s Conservation Area Panels urge the council to rethink.
Local and national heritage groups are deeply perturbed by the news that the Council is proposing to abolish the Conservation Officer post in order to save a small amount of money – in practice only around £20,000 a year. The current postholder has been a lone voice in protecting and promoting Ealing's heritage, and has on numerous occasions helped to improve development proposals or to reject plans that were out of sympathy with our architectural heritage.
If this proposal is implemented, Ealing will be one of very few London boroughs without specialist heritage expertise. This would be a tragedy. We are calling upon the Council to regard its heritage as an important asset rather than a hindrance to redevelopment. This can be achieved by encouraging developers to build on the best of what is already there, rather than sweeping away buildings or neighbourhoods and starting afresh.
The Council justifies its decision on the grounds that planning officers will have received heritage and design training. In practice this is likely to count for little, especially given the other pressures they are under and the high turnover in staff. Buying in external expertise on an ad-hoc basis to fill the gap is no substitute for local in-house expertise built up from years of experience.
It is not just the Conservation Area Panels and Ealing Civic Society who are criticising the Council. National heritage bodies including Historic England, the Victorian Society and Save Britain's Heritage (SAVE) have condemned the proposal. Historic England says that when dealing with heritage issues, it is vital to have relevant specialist expertise to hand, particularly given the wealth of heritage assets within the London Borough of Ealing which include 29 conservation areas and 460 listed buildings.
To say that applications relating to heritage issues can now be delegated to generic planning officers devalues the role of the Conservation Officer and the importance of heritage within the Borough. Historic England also says that it is not their role to ‘cover’ for local authorities who ignore national heritage advice and guidance by not having specialist heritage expertise in-house. Historic England cannot fill the gap created by the proposed loss of the Borough’s Conservation Officer as they are not consulted about most planning applications affecting Grade II listed buildings or on most developments in conservation areas. SAVE says that the proposal would send out the message that Ealing Council does not value its historic buildings.
The Victorian Society requests that the abolition of the specialist Conservation Officer’s post is reviewed urgently and adds that, regardless of budget cuts, the Local Authority must take its statutory duties seriously and make appropriate staffing provision to enable it to meet these duties.
We agree with these criticisms and we are asking the Council to reconsider the decision and to find the savings from elsewhere.
Robert Gurd
Anthony Lewis
2nd August 2018