Simon Pugh-Jones, director, planning consultancy Barton Willmore explains how to implement the new Planning Policy Statement 5 on protecting the historic environment

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Heritage reforms are like buses. You wait and wait, then three new documents turn up at once.

They are, firstly, the government’s Statement on the Historic Environment for England. Second, Planning Policy Statement 5: Planning for the Historic Environment, and finally, PPS5: Historic Environment Planning Practice Guide.

The new PPS 5 replaces PPG 15 and PPG 16 and sets out policies on conservation areas, listed buildings, listed gardens, registered battlefields, World Heritage sites, ancient monuments and Archaeological Sites. The new documents reaffirm the Government’s commitment to heritage, but how do they really work?

1) Don’t think everything has changed

The new PPS5 reads like an entirely new document and appears to be very different to the old PPGs.

This doesn’t mean all the familiar heritage principles have gone. Conservation areas, enforcement, and spot listing are still applicable, but you need to refer back to the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990.

In some instances it pays to keep the old PPGs to hand because a lot of the ‘guidance’ they contain is still completely relevant. PPS 5 is exactly as the title suggests – a policy document, and it doesn’t provide much information about its practical application. While that serves to make it a simpler, smaller document, this could be its greatest weakness.

The ordinary listed building owner may do their homework and look to PPS5 to inform their extension plans, and could easily miss the need to obtain statutory approvals. In the case of a listed building, unauthorised works remain a criminal offence with scope for a custodial sentence. Ignorance is no defence, but listed homeowners who read the old PPGs like an ‘owners guide’ could see compliance with PPS5 as implicit approval. It certainly isn’t, and it is not worth the criminal record to try that approach.

Look out for further supplementary planning guides that fill in these gaps.

2) Put more energy into sustainability

PPS5 puts new emphasis on climate change. This means you should find ways to make historic buildings less environmentally damaging. You can also argue the benefits of reusing buildings on the basis of ‘recycling’ the materials and embodied energy they contain.

This doesn’t mean everyone who lives with draughty single glazed sash windows can rip them out in favour of double-glazed plastic windows. The drive for sustainability must be balanced against the need to preserve historic fabric. There may be rare instances where some heritage ‘harm’ is justified.

3) Know your subject

Before making any decisions, start with researching your site and its context. The new PPS considers the balance of benefits against negatives, but you can’t argue that a proposal doesn’t result in harm if you don’t really know why your site is significant. Equally, you might just be applying too much historic importance to existing features that might be unnecessarily impacting on the viability of a proposal.

The new PPS encourages local authorities to maintain or have access to an historic environment record – many already do and these are publicly accessible archives that may hold details of your site.

Physical resources may also help, such as local history organisations, archives and museums. Frustratingly, this research can take time, just at the point where you need to be making progress, but it is worth doing well. You will at least be showing the local authority that you are taking heritage issues seriously, and you may just find out that your Tudor beams are actually 20th century steel with timber cladding. This is not unheard of.

4) Be clear about defining heritage assets

As part of the consolidation of the old PPG15 and PPG16 the term ‘heritage asset’ has been introduced to cover any kind of designated historic feature. That mean listed buildings, conservation areas etc. It can also mean ‘locally listed buildings’ – that is any structure that the local authority has assessed as being a ‘valued component of the historic environment’. The tendency is to think of the term as a designation in itself – but that puts Grade I in the same pot as locally listed, which isn’t helpful, particularly if yours is the locally listed one.

An old building or structure that isn’t designated is not classed as a heritage asset and decisions about its future shouldn’t be affected by the new PPS 5. Even then it’s important to cover the bases since there’s nothing like the threat of demolition to bring about an application to spot list a building. When this happens, everything slows down until that process reaches a conclusion. It’s far better to assess heritage potential at the beginning and if nothing else be prepared with a contingency plan in case an ‘asset free’ site changes its status later on.

5) Be positive about enabling development

Enabling development is anything that would normally be unacceptable in planning terms, but justified because of the heritage benefit it brings. Simply put, that’s a ticket to all sorts of potential that would otherwise be out of the question. Development in greenbelt, outside of settlement boundaries or in ‘unsustainable’ locations can be treated as a means to a very legitimate heritage end. A possible win for developers and for the historic environment.

It might be worth revisiting sites that weren’t previously viable. For example, the new PPS 5 may support development that facilitates the restoration of a valued asset, either by generating the money to pay for it, or by creating a context that generates a new use to justify restoration. The policy seeks to see heritage assets preserved and acknowledges that sometimes this comes at a cost. Where enabling development results in heritage loss, that loss must be minimised, but when the net benefit is an overall heritage gain, the proposal is supported.

To see the policy statement, click here: PPS5 – Planning for the Historic Environment

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