Civic Voice has published its ‘Conversation Area Audit’ toolkit as a way for a community to assess the condition of a conservation area: guiding ‘first steps’ of communities managing the change in local conservation areas.
Civic Voice writes:
The audit provides a simple framework to gain a snapshot of the key issues affecting your conservation area at a point in time, which can then be used to support you in developing an action plan to address those issues. The audit provides prompts for discussions, allowing you to consider all the issues potentially impacting on the conservation area in a methodical manner. The audit will help you identify where the conservation area needs to change or improve its condition.
The audit is simple and consists of 20 questions which cover the common issues in a conservation area, as identified by Civic Voice members in a survey in 2016. When you answer the questions, you are then required to fill in a simple form to help interpret the results. Civic Voice can support you at this point….
This audit is used to identify the issues impacting conservation areas, to support community action to help manage the area. It is not a character appraisal but a management audit so that we can help prevent further deterioration of conservation areas. We recognise that the best form of management is taking positive action and that local authorities often do not have the time or capacity to manage them. This audit is to help the community think about what ‘we can do’ to make change happen.
Where a conservation area is at risk, you may see several issues highlighted as challenges to address. But even if your conservation area is not classed as at risk, this audit is still useful as it will help you to identify the early ‘yellow flags’ or warning signs about what could become an issue, so that you can address it through early intervention and do something about it before it does become an issue.
