The Club’s lobbying work in Wales is already being taken seriously, both by AMs and the Welsh Government. After writing to the minister for housing, Julie James, we received an official response from the government. Dafydd Elis-Thomas, deputy minister for culture and tourism, responded to our letter enquiring about the government’s policy on listed buildings. We are gratified to discover that the Welsh government takes these issues seriously, and last year commissioned a report into planning and consent to discuss how to better administer building consent. The Club has responded with our own feedback to the report, as well as
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Local Groups
Local groups are of course crucial to our national campaign. While the Club itself is approaching as many representatives as possible, it’s impossible for us to personally approach every MP and councillor ourselves. To help our members build local and regional groups to lobby directly to their representatives we have created a contact form where members can register their interest in forming a group. We hope that we can help members to find each other, and that we can provide better support once we know where our members are campaigning. Click here to find our campaign contact form. To show
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Case Studies
We want to hear from all our members who have struggled with the present listed building control scheme. Whether that is due to high costs, long waits or unpredictable results; we want to hear about your case so we can show law makers just how big of a problem owners are facing today. It is so easy for politicians to ignore the individual effects of policies by just looking at the statistics. We intend to make sure that they can’t dismiss your challenges by working them into formal case studies that we can distribute to back up our policies. These
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Freedom Of Information Results
We are approaching the deadline for local authorities to return our freedom of information requests. We have so far received well over 300 out of the 430 we initially sent out; a tremendous result for the club. The results will be completely tabulated for the next edition of Listed Heritage, and published as a full report in the coming months. Our initial findings point to an extremely wide range of performance between different planning authorities as well as a gap in the numbers of conservation officers and a declining quality of service. For full details of our on going freedom
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Our Welsh Campaign
Today is St David’s day, which makes it the perfect time to announce the launch of our lobbying efforts in Wales. We have been preparing the ground for a few weeks, but today marks the start of our official campaign. Following the same approach as in England, we are campaigning for the creation of a Cross Party Group on Listed Properties within the Welsh Assembly, as a line of communication between our members and Assembly Members. Today we will be contacting a dozen AMs asking them to support a CPG, with more to follow in the coming week. Today we
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Our National Campaign
This month we are officially launching a new phase of our political campaign, aiming at local councils and devolved parliaments. This will be a parallel campaign, running in tandem with our work in Westminster, looking to influence policy at every level of government. We will be targeting councils with high numbers of listed buildings and lobbying their councillors to ensure that listed buildings will be on the agenda at the upcoming local elections in May. We will also be reaching out to planning departments to engage with them on policy development, both on a local and national level. Our goal
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Policy Development
As we have broadened our campaign to cover more issues and more levels of government, we have seen the need to develop some more concrete policies. We want to be able to take some well researched and actionable suggestions when we meet with representatives. Over the past month we’ve been reaching out to local councils and the heritage community to formulate ideas and start to build them into coherent documents. This is a substantial undertaking, that will require a great deal of consultation and redrafting, but in the coming months we will be releasing these to the public. For full
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Freedom of Information Campaign
The club has used freedom of information requests in the past to gain access to official figures regarding listed buildings. We’ve now expanded these efforts, approaching every planning authority in the UK. We are determined to continue pressing every level of government for up to date information regarding listed buildings, including figures such as the numbers of conservation officers are employed and how resources are spent. Over the coming year we will be holding the government to account on their listed building policies. For full details of the campaign see the March/April edition of Listed Heritage. To show your support
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The APPG in 2019
We were happy to meet with All Party Parliamentary Group on Listed Properties Chairman Craig Mackinlay in Parliament on the 19th of February. This is the first time since the new year that we’ve been able to discuss the agenda for the group in 2019, so it was an important meeting for all involved. Craig continues to be a great standard bearer for listed building owners in parliament, and that will continue in 2019. Planning has been put front and centre of the agenda for the upcoming year, with a focus on reducing costs to owners and streamlining bureaucracy. We
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Our Campaign for Owners in 2019
The past few months have been quiet for the campaign but we have still been busy. Westminster has been rather distracted since the new year, but this has given us the opportunity to plan out our campaign for the coming months, both in Parliament and across the whole UK. Over the past years we’ve had some major successes, including spurring the creation of the APPG on Listed Buildings; the first time that owners have had a direct line of communication with legislators. We’ve received answers from government departments, as well as pressuring the planning minister to open a dialogue on
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