Historic Scotland is to post on its website its 2009 report into local authority ‘policies, staffing and resources for the historic environment’, by Geoff Peart Consulting with Arup Planning.
Key points include:
- Staff with some historic environment responsibilities totalled 203 FTEs, and 110 FTE specialist HE staff exclusively related to planning and archaeological functions.
- Archaeological services were almost entirely delivered by staff with an archaeological qualification, whereas only 46% of Planning Services had staff with specialist HE qualifications relevant to conservation & within those services only 44% of the conservation staff had relevant specialist qualifications.
- Expenditure by authorities on the management of the historic environment in 2007-8 was estimated at around £49m (indicative), representing gross expenditure per head of population in Scotland of the order of £9.53 per year.
- Historic Environment ‘core’ staff/overhead spending per head of population varied from £0.33 per head to £10.68, with an average figure of £1.46.
- Most of the income came from external heritage grants…and considerable reliance [grants] for project finance.
- Dealing with applications for listed building consent and conservation area consent comprised a major part of the HE workload of authorities. However, there were varying levels of specialist HE input to applications affecting scheduled monuments (95%), listed buildings (78%) and conservation areas (46%)
- Only 38% of conservation areas had adopted conservation area Appraisals (CAAs) in place.
- Promotional and outreach activities also formed an essential, if relatively minor, part (10%) of the workload of historic environment services.
- Survey returns indicate that at present there was no rigorous way of measuring the performance of authorities in relation to either their efficiency or their effectiveness in managing the historic environment.
- In terms of Community Planning across Scotland the historic environment barely features.
- There is, as yet, no currently available, systematic definition of ‘need’ in relation to the historic environment.
The context note on the release of the report states:
‘Scottish Ministers accepted the Historic Environment Advisory Council for Scotland’s (HEACS) recommendation to commission an independent survey of local authorities. The aim of the project was to gather and analyse information on local authority policies, staffing and resources and assess their implications for the ongoing and future management of the historic environment in Scotland.
A self completion questionnaire was issued to around 100 appropriate staff in the 32 LAs and 2 National Parks. Responses were received from all, but not from all services with HE responsibilities. Every respondent did not answer all of the questions, but there was a reasonable response in relation to ‘core’ services. Additionally, 5 LA case studies explored the management of the local HE. It proved difficult to gather this data and concerns remain about how much weight can be placed on the figures. However, data are probably as good as we can expect using this approach. The method was robust and it does provide an interesting snapshot of how LAs manage and resource their HE activities. Any future data collection would be better to issue a shorter, more focused questionnaire and deal with different topics on a rolling basis.
As we instructed, in the report, the LAs are anonymised. So, no league table comparisons will be able to be done when the report is published. The overall picture is mixed. The report notes that this is not a system in crisis. It does however highlight a wide variation between LAs in terms of resourcing and practice in relation to the HE. This is the first time we have had a picture of this situation across Scotland and a reasonable resource has been invested in obtaining it. It is therefore reasonable to expect that we share the findings with the sector.’
