Help With Your Heritage Statement
Planning guidance (PPS5) was issued by the Government to cover the Historic Environment and has had a major impact on the way planning applications have to be made in order to be approved. All future planning applications must adhere to PPS5s policies.
PPS5 states that applicants will need to submit a Heritage Statement alongside their planning application. This must be sufficiently detailed to understand the potential impact of the proposal on any heritage asset that may be affected. It sets out the minimum requirements for the content of the Heritage Statement and states that it needs to be prepared by someone with the appropriate expertise and knowledge.
There have been prior cases where attempts have been made by unqualified individuals and organisations to prepare Heritage Statements. This has led to the Heritage Statement being declared inadequate and rejected by the planning authorities, thus incurring additional costs to the applicant, as the Heritage Statement has needed to be redone by a suitably qualified person.
CBAS can help you to avoid these problems. We have an established track record in preparing high quality and cost effective Heritage Statements and Desk-based Assessments, which will satisfy the requirements of the County Archaeologist and the local planning authority. We can prepare the Heritage Statements quickly to our own standard format or to your own bespoke design.
If you would like to know more about this service, and our competitive prices, please contact us
Planning Policy Statement 5:
HE6.1
Local planning authorities should require an applicant to provide a description of the significance of the heritage assets affected and the contribution of their setting to that significance. The level of detail should be proportionate to the importance of the heritage asset and no more than is sufficient to understand the potential impact of the proposal on the significance of the heritage asset. As a minimum the relevant historic environment record should have been consulted and the heritage assets themselves should have been assessed using appropriate expertise where necessary given the application’s impact. Where an application site includes, or is considered to have the potential to include, heritage assets with archaeological interest, local planning authorities should require developers to submit an appropriate desk-based assessment and, where desk-based research is insufficient to properly assess the interest, a field evaluation.
HE6.2
This information together with an assessment of the impact of the proposal should be set out in the application (within the design and access statement when this is required) as part of the explanation of the design concept. It should detail the sources that have been considered and the expertise that has been consulted.
HE6.3
Local planning authorities should not validate applications where the extent of the impact of the proposal on the significance of any heritage assets affected cannot adequately be understood from the application and supporting documents.
