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Summary of David Tomback's conference paper

Another perspective, this time that of economics, was presented by David Tomback, a chartered surveyor who has been working with English Heritage for the past six years as an advisor on cost effectiveness following a career as a developer in the private sector. He predicted that in 20years time use of the Earth’s resources would only be allowed where it could be demonstrated that nothing already existing could be used instead.

    David Tomback

For now, though, he said from an economic perspective there could be times when conservation did not stack up, although English Heritage had found few occasions in practice when it did not. Tomback said his first task at English Heritage had been to measure how buildings performed, financially and non financially

And he had a cautionary tale. Some years ago there was an example of 1950s public housing which could have been retained as flats. The use could not be justified in economic terms. The building was listed Grade 2* and was saved. It was recently bought by Lincoln property for £1¼ million, changes in the market having made it viable again. If English Heritage had not fought for its survival, it would have been lost.

This and the identification of significance raised in Conservation Plans led to the question of how to quantify something like the aesthetic value of a building. The chemist Peter Brimblecombe said: “I absolutely don’t know.” Nevertheless, he said it was better that human rationality was applied to the question than nothing at all.

Economics. on the other hand, does try to attribute values to nebulous concepts and David Tomback gave an example of how English Heritage had done that at Stonehenge. They had surveyed residents in the area and asked them what certain options were worth to them. For example, they wanted to see how popular the idea of taking the A303 through a 2,000m tunnel was as an attempt to remove traffic from the site. The results showed that35% of households said they would be prepared to pay£18.50 each to have the tunnel, although 42% would pay50p to prevent its construction. Such figures can be used to compare the average value of alternatives.