Yesterday the Club attended the Heritage Alliance’s tax working group. This body feeds into government discussions about heritage and tax reform, so it has a significant amount of influence. Tax remains a critical part of our campaign for owners, and we were happy to see the other stakeholders at the working group working to build the evidence case for tax relief. While VAT stands as the most obvious tax challenge owners face, the group is working on a number of possible schemes. The Club will be taking part as the group puts together it’s case for a pilot project to
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Survey Results
The Club are happy to report that we have already received hundreds of responses to our campaign survey over the weekend, and more continue to flow in. We are extremely pleased to see that so many of you support our work and are keen to influence our campaign. We’ve already seen some surprising answers come back, as well as confirming the need for reforms in tax and planning. And of course we are extremely proud to see that the vast majority of you see the Club as a valuable source of information. For a full breakdown of our campaign issues
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Official Response from the Welsh Government
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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