Following over a year of consultation, this week sees the formal announcement from Ed Vaizey and Sir Laurie Magnus of the English Heritage split. This has not been widely trailed in the press, so for those who have not been aware of the plans – judging by a show of hands at a construction industry event recently you are in the majority – they boil down to the formation of a new standalone charity to care for the National Heritage Collection (think Stonehenge, castle ruins up and down the country and archaeological sites spread far and wide), and the continuation of the advice giving organisation as a non-departmental body. Rather confusingly, the charity will be known as English Heritage, with the advisory body becoming Historic England.

Of great interest to heritage boffins is the fact that following eight years of government funding totalling £88 million to address the repairs back-log and re-interpretation of sites, English Heritage as a charity will attempt to become self-sufficient. A huge change will be required in the way that English Heritage present and market their properties, most of which are free to access at present. Other organisations, for instance the National Trust, have been very successful in melding conservation with visitor attraction. However, their ‘stock’ is very different to that of English Heritage, and it remains to be seen if the new charity can raise enough money to care for over 400 heritage sites. There is a faint whiff of ‘selling off the family silver’ about the new charity, and the public may feel strongly about this issue once they become aware – though the retention of the English Heritage branding may help to prevent the changes filtering through to the general consciousness.

Of more interest to consultants, developers and other stakeholders will be the operation of Historic England. On the face of it, we are assured that nothing changes – advice may arrive on differently headed paper, but essentially we will be talking to the same people about the same issues. The organisation will continue to focus on Grade I and II* buildings, and act as a consultee on applications concerning these higher ranked heritage assets. Funding for Historic England will not be cut for two years, and the status quo will be maintained.

However, a speaker from the soon-to-be Historic England at a recent event indicated that there may be additional services, one of which involves the provision of early pre-application advice - for a fee. Hooray, I hear you cry – we can get Historic England on site to give in principle agreements and de-risk our risky heritage sites! While this sounds very attractive, I’m not sure things will be quite so simple.

We already see the difficulties that some of our under resourced local authority heritage teams have in finding the time to give valuable pre-application advice and engage with projects. At present, English Heritage are consulted on 14,000 planning applications a year, and they are busy people. How busy will they become if each of those applications now required the provision of a site visit and pre-application advice? After all, people will be paying for timely, useful advice. How much will Historic England need to liaise with their local authority counterparts to ensure that there is a consistency of advice? It would be highly embarrassing if Historic England gave official pre-application advice that was different to that of the local authority officer. To my mind, Historic England are going to have to staff up to resource this – and with their funding staying the same (which is in fact a real terms cut) that may not be possible.

Still, this restructure may well be good news for historic asset owners and stakeholders if we are able to rely on early advice from Historic England, and it will be fascinating to see how the new structure establishes itself over the coming months and years. And as is pointed out by the DCMS press release, it’s good news all round because “the taxpayer will benefit as the need for direct government funding for the heritage collection reduces over time”. Which is great. Isn’t it?