News
Draft Heritage Bill
On 2 April 2008 the Government published the draft Heritage Protection Bill which will now be scrutinised by Parliament. This is a relatively new process that gives the Society and others the opportunity to comment on the ideas in the Bill. After this scrutiny process has been finished, probably at the end of the summer, the Government may choose to revise the draft Bill before introducing a definitive version into Parliament for the traditional three readings in both Houses of Parliament and eventual Royal Assent.
The Bill includes plans to:
1) Create a single simple system for designation, to be called the Heritage Register, which will replace listing, scheduling and registering, and give the public a greater say in what gets protected with new consultation rules.
2) Devolve responsibility for designating land-based assets in England from the DCMS to English Heritage.
3) Reform the marine heritage protection regime in England and Wales, by broadening the range of marine historic assets that can be protected and bringing greater flexibility to the licensing system.
4) Introduce a system for provisional registration to give ‘interim protection’ to historic assets while they are being considered for designation, and create new appeals procedures against land-based designation and marine licensing decisions.
5) Put the historic environment at the heart of the planning system by replacing listed building consent and scheduled monument consent with a new Heritage Asset Consent, and merging conservation area consent with planning permission.
6) Secure the basis for informed stewardship of the historic environment by placing local authorities under a duty to maintain or have access to an Historic Environment Record (HER).
The Council of the Society will be considering its response to the draft Bill in due course.
If members of the Society have any major points about the Bill that they think could usefully be fed into the consultation process please send them to the Honorary Secretary at honsec@snr.org.uk before the end of May 2008.
The Bill is available from the website of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.