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8 C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 Surviving the wreckage From Henry M Duckett The September issue ( Context 177) offered interesting missives from two former colleagues (at the GLC, and the London region of then English Heritage) from way back in the mists of conservation. A thread common to each could be divined as relating to concerns about ‘subjectivity’. A degree of subjectivity will always be present in attempts to arrive at balanced judgements when both practical and aesthetic considerations are in play. Advice and guidance hitherto (pre-National Planning Policy Framework) managed, by and large, to facilitate scope for arriving at some degree of necessarily balanced objectivity through a dispassionate application of criteria and an equitable operation of procedures. John Fidler (‘Risks of fast adoption’, page 4) focuses, inter alia, on the hopelessly subjective phrase ‘less than substantial harm’ and its likely effect. An attempt to quantify and measure ‘harm’ is perhaps the most egregiously subjective element amid the welter of weasel-words scattered throughout the wretched NPPF. If, as appears to be the case, these were expressly calculated to afford the maximum opportunity for wriggle-room to bad-actors among politicians, developers and their growing phalanxes of parasitical acolytes, they appear to have achieved some degree of success. It seems though that for some vested interests the amount of wriggle-room configured therein remains wholly insufficient. Calls for a yet greater lassitude are heard, increasing in volume. Richard Griffith (‘Proper governance’, page 4) returns to a theme which has long troubled him and others – a seeming complete absence of any objective means of measuring the performance and effectiveness of listed building control. Thirty years ago and more Griffith was attempting, with little encouragement from above, to begin to introduce into the clunky bureaucratic procedures then available some initial means of measuring such. Today, one just supposes that, as with the slippery sophistry facilitated by the NPPF, a certain vagueness and ambiguity in relation to the extracting of data or in the monitoring of outcomes from what is, after all, government policy, is best served by tolerating a climate of studiedly innocent ignorance. This enshrines much useful room for policy manoeuvre and, if necessary, obfuscation in delivery, all to the advantage especially of those who wilfully persist in the patently erroneous notion that conservation inevitably applies some kind of break on just about all reasonable economic activity. This, despite shedloads of evidence to the contrary. Underlying, even driving, such skewed inequities is the relentless blind pursuit of delusional economic growth, such as seems to afflict most political stripes to varying degrees. Attempts to force the pace, to harvest any growth, from any source, whatever the product or possible usefulness of outcome, and never mind any awkward fall-out, simply inculcates a quasi-religious belief in what may be termed a divine right to exponential growth (DREG) in perpetuity (notwithstanding the absurdity of such aspirations in a world of finite limits). If capitalism has long been slowly eating itself, roughly speaking since the reformation, its greedily devouring inequities gathering significant pace through the industrial revolution to arrive at uncomfortable and selfishly rank over-eating, and indigestion, since the second world war, we might reasonably expect it soon to belch loudly. If some form of democracy survives from the wreckage, we might again be scratching around to put in place forms of equitably objective structures around recovery in the realms of land use planning, construction, conservation and the like. It will then be necessary to ensure, somehow, that whatever new form of dispensation might emerge from such a seismic shake-out, that those framing fresh guidelines are freer from the direct purse- and apron-strings of all levels of Letters