Charles Mynors MRTPI ARICS gives

a user’s guide to the Planning (Listed Buildings

& Conservation Areas) Act 1990

M’ LEARNED EMEND

The 1971 Act is no more. As from 24 August this year, the statutory basis for almost all planning law and practice is to be found in the four Acts which together replace not only the Town & Country Planning Act 1971 but also a plethora of other Acts which amended it — including the Town & Country Amenities Act 1974, and almost all the planning provisions of the Local Government, Planning & Land Act 1980, the National Heritage Act 1983, and the Housing & Planning Act 1986.

To replace these, the principal new statute is the Town & Country Planning Act 1990. This deals with development plans, control over development, compensation, general enforcement, trees and advertisements. The provisions relating to hazardous substances go into a separate Act. And, most significantly to readers of Context, the provisions of the 1971 Act relating to listed buildings and conservation areas are for the first time all gathered together into a single, separate new Act — the verbosely titled Planning (Listed Buildings & Conservation Areas) Act 1990. Presumably this will be shortened in practice to ‘the Listed Buildings Act’.

It must be appreciated, however, that these new Acts are entirely consolidation measures. That is, they do not change the law at all. They simply sort it out into a more manageable format. Arguably it is in the conservation field that this was most needed. Almost every section of the 1971 Act dealing with listed buildings and conservation areas had been altered or entirely replaced — sometimes several times. It will accordingly be very much easier from now on to find the basic law, since it will all be in one place. Further amendment will doubtless follow in due course — although nothing major is on the horizon at present.

The new Listed Buildings Act contains, unbelievably, 94 sections and four schedules. It is arranged in three Parts, and the first of these is itself divided into six Chapters, as follows:

Part I. Listed buildings

Part II. Conservation areas

Part III. General

Part IV. Supplemental

Also included in the new Act are the provisions that used to be in the Local Authorities (Historic Buildings) Act 1962 and the Town & Country Planning (Amendment) Act 1972, dealing with historic buildings grants. Unfortunately, however, the opportunity was not taken (why not?) to include the Historic Buildings & Ancient Monuments Act 1953, dealing with grants by the Commission and by the Secretary of State. These, therefore, remain in force as a separate code. And the Ancient Monuments & Archaeological Areas Act 1979 remains entirely unaffected by all this.

The new Act (which is available, price £7.65, from HMSO) has been published along with a Table showing where all the provisions in it have come from. ‘What may be more helpful — especially in the next few months — will be the Table below, produced specially for readers of Context, showing where all the sections in the old Act have gone to. It is designed to be taken out (or photocopied!) and inserted into your copy of the Act. As with the 1971 Act, a number of provisions dealing with listed buildings are applied to conservation areas (see s 74 of the new Act) — these are marked **. It is expected that, by the time this appears in print, a new set of Regulations will have been made to provide the fine tuning.