Civic Societies provide invaluable support to the Civic Trust Awards and as we enter the schemes 50th anniversary in 2009, we would like to seek your views and gain support for a new initiative to recognise some of the past Civic Trust Award winning schemes.

Do you feel Civic Societies and other members of the comminity would be interested in voting on a shortlist of winning CTA schemes for your region? Some of these schemes date back to 1959 and we would like for the community to determine which of these schemes has been the most successful for that region.

We would like to secure some regional funding to allow this idea to develop, but ideally we would like to recognise the “best” past winning schemes at the CTA Awards Event in March 2009.

Your views on this idea would be appreciated so that we can establish the likely success of the initiative - with a deadline for feedback to be received by Wednesday 28th May 2008.

In order to send us your comments, please CLICK post reply and tell us what you think.

I always look out for the winners of the Civic Trust Awards and did so this year. I do not always agree that the Civic Trust view takes into consideration the local advisor as much as it should, even though a Local Advisor is on the judging team. I say this because you see some schemes get national recognition when locally people view particular buildings with disgust.

I would like to know how you intend on doing this - I bet many of the buildings are not event present anymore. What will be the criteria? who will be judging every building again? how will public opinion be captured?

An interesting idea but I imagine very difficult to do.

PAdrion
I find your comment rather difficult to understand. I have participated in the Civic Trust Awards as a Lay Advisor in London for the past 3 years and each time I have felt my opionion (and the opinion of the community) have been fully represented and heard by the rest of the judging team. Do not get me wrong sometimes I have disagreed with others over the recommendation we put forward, but in a democracy I have to accept that my view may not always be the “right view” however passionate I feel about a particular scheme.

Have you ever considered being a Civic Trust Award Lay Advisor. I feel your view may be different if you tried it.

I find it quite an enjoyable experience and would recommend it.

Since taking over the management of the scheme in April 2007, it is fair to say the views expressed with regards to the feedback of Local Advisor not being taken (sufficiently) into account is one that I have heard anecdotally on a few occasions. This could be said equally for some Access Advisor too.

We have implemented a different method for all assessors to provide feedback on each scheme they visit. The Architect Assessor, Council Rep, Access Advisor and Local Advisor all submit their own reports via an on-line system. These are all taken into account (on their own merits) if a scheme is referred to National Panel for consideration.

One of the major issues we have is that for a lot of areas, we don’t have people to act in the Local Advisor role, so it is then very difficult to gain local opinion on the schemes. I would certainly appreciate any further offers of support from people willing to volunteer for the scheme.

With regards to the re-assessment of past winning schemes, we have recently undertaken a national pilot of retro assessment for our Built Environment Network project, which has proved very successful. The website (and results from the retro assessment process) will be launched shortly, in conjunction with a new CTA website. Some scheme were still performing admirably, equally, some were considered a failure over time. We developed a new assessment tool for re-assessment, which will be implemented for CTA this year too.

Questions like this are certainly still up for debate - would people prefer to revisit the schemes or would they just re-assess them with photos and the original awards documentation, or by gauging local opinion again? I would certainly appreciate peoples views on their preferred method if this is something of interest.

Regards
Malcolm Hankey
Built Environment Manager
The Civic Trust

I agree with PAdrion.

I have been a Local Advisor in the past and felt as though my opinion was not as well regarded by other members of the assessing team.

I am glad to see a response from the Built Environment Manager and look forward to seeing the changes.

Dear Built Environment Manager

Can I ask when I can learn more information about the retro assessment, I cannot seem to find any information. I would like to get involved if I can? Did I miss a news story by any chance?

thanks

Loise

LFerhus - 17 November 2008 09:23 PM

Dear Built Environment Manager

Can I ask when I can learn more information about the retro assessment, I cannot seem to find any information. I would like to get involved if I can? Did I miss a news story by any chance?

thanks

Loise

We are currently developing a new website for our Built Environment Network which will be launched this week. We plan to link this with an opportunity for local people to vote for past CTA winners in order that we may determine a special award to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Civic Trust Awards - rewarding a past winning scheme that best reflects the true ethos of CTA.

This website will also provide more information on hoiw to get involved with BE-Net and undertake further retro assessments.

I will post the website address on this forum as soon as it goes live.