Good management and maintenance are crucial to the long-term care of heritage sites, collections and assets, while poor management and maintenance can put your heritage at risk and lead to higher costs in the future.
By reading this guidance you’ll get tips for successful management and maintenance planning, including how to structure your plan, steps to take when preparing your plan and how to link to other related plans. It also includes appendices on what we mean by management and maintenance and links to further guidance that’s specific to different types of heritage.
To ensure the heritage we support is valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future, if you’re applying for a grant over £250,000 and your project involves capital works, the creation of new material or the purchase of a historic building, structure, transport heritage or land, we require you to prepare a management and maintenance plan.
If you’re running an area-based project, you’ll instead need to create an area management plan as part of your area action plan.
A management and maintenance plan sets out how your project’s results will be maintained, who will do it, what skills they will need, when things need to be done and what the cost of this work will be. A plan can help you care for your heritage, develop your project, think about resources and hopefully ensure the same problems don’t recur.
As part of our terms of grant, we ask you to ensure the work we fund is kept in good condition and that the benefits of your project are maintained into the future.
If you are required to produce a management and maintenance plan as part of your project, we will expect your organisation to:
You can include increased management and maintenance costs for a maximum of five years following the project within your delivery round application budget.
This includes any increased costs that arise because of capital works which have taken place during your project. If you do this, increased management and maintenance costs must be included in both the cost and income section of your application. Costs and income should be evidenced through a letter stating their value and signed by the most senior financial officer of your organisation.
Management and maintenance planning should not be done in isolation from other aspects of your project planning.
Before you prepare a management and maintenance plan, you will need to consult a condition survey or report on your heritage, such as a building survey or survey of a habitat, landscape or collection. You should also make sure you understand how your building or site functions in terms of its environmental performance.
If your project involves capital works, the creation of new material or the purchase of a historic building, structure, transport heritage or historic designed landscape like a park, we will ask you to prepare a conservation plan in addition to your management and maintenance plan early in the development phase or as part of your delivery round application, and an activity plan as part of your delivery round application. It’s important these plans relate to each other.
Ideas on how you can link different plans are included in Appendix 2 of this guidance.
A management plan should set out:
Your plan needs to be accessible to the intended audience and you might want to consider an overall summary document if the plan itself becomes too technical.
Cross referencing to other plans and summarising content from other documents will help keep the plan size down and make it easier to read.
We suggest you use this structure:
A short section to include:
Structuring this section is key to making the plan readable. The following headings are suggestions.
Your activity plan should provide you with useful information to help you complete this section, which should include:
Give details on any organisations involved in the management and maintenance of the site, collection or asset.
Identify key national, regional and local policy that has a direct impact on the management and maintenance of your site, collection or asset. Only include issues that directly affect you and consider using appendices to include a wider policy context.
Include the current management structure shown as an organogram highlighting the key service areas. List everyone who plays a part in management and maintenance including all staff posts employed directly or indirectly through contracts, full or part-time.
Show as an organogram all other departments and external organisations (stakeholders) who assist or inform the management and maintenance of the site, collection or asset.
Include a short description of the current standards of maintenance including who delivers them, how they are procured, whether they are delivered by site-based staff and what maintenance facilities exist on site.
You should also describe operational procedures for inspections, repairs and non-planned maintenance such as dealing with graffiti and anti-social behaviour.
Say how you have critically evaluated:
You can bring in elements of other plans produced as part of your project so you have a comprehensive assessment. This will enable you to develop not only an overall vision but also some clear aims and objectives that can be translated into actions with identified timescales and resources.
Consider the overall aims you have defined for your project. Assess how your management and maintenance procedures, processes and resources may have to change to sustain the capital works and activities proposed.
To provide a direct comparison with the information provided under ‘current management and maintenance’ above, please provide:
Show that you have thought through how the site, collection or asset needs to be cared for after completion of the capital works. Explain the need for any increased management and maintenance costs that you have allocated to the project or why you believe there is no need for additional costs.
Look at how your future management and maintenance plan will continue to support the proposals identified in your activity plan. There may be new facilities that need to be looked after such as:
Indicate what training you will provide to make sure staff and volunteers have the skills to maintain and manage your heritage after the project has finished, and when and how you will provide this training.
We require any digital outputs (for example, web pages and documents, audio-visual works, maps and surveys) you create with grant funding to be available, accessible and open. This means that you must provide unfettered access to materials for a minimum of five years, depending on the value of your project. Find out more about these requirements from our digital good practice guidance.
We expect all projects we fund to protect the environment. For more information see our environmental sustainability good practice guidance.
You will need to consider:
You will be asked for this as part of your delivery round application.
This section captures all that you need to do and when, usually in a table. Actions should flow from your objectives. Your action plan should be clear about:
Set out an income and expenditure table that covers five years post completion of the practical works. On completion of the practical works, update this with:
You are strongly encouraged to think of innovative ways of raising income to support your future costs such as grants, local authority funding, tenancies, leases, commercial access, concessions, rentals, cafes, shops, weddings, parking, entrance charges, filming, events, sponsorship, carbon sequestration and biodiversity net gain.
Explain how the plan itself will be reviewed and updated.
Once you are in the delivery stage, review the plan at least annually to reflect new information, new research and design changes, and to highlight what has been achieved.
You and your team might need help to prepare the management and maintenance plan or to train staff to implement it. If you need specialist help to prepare your plan, make sure you identify the cost as part of your project development work.
Use the process to bring together the people who will be essential to the success of your project or management strategy. Make sure the document includes a wide range of views. Delays and extra costs can arise if the right people are not involved. Also, give copies of the completed plan to anyone involved in looking after your site including volunteers, staff and contractors.
Make sure the plan you prepare, or commission helps you care for the asset. Be prepared to manage the planning process from the first discussion of the idea through to the commissioning process, to make sure people use the plan in the long term.
Use the plan to mediate between different ideas about heritage and its conservation. For example, built heritage specialists and ecologists might have diverse aspirations about how to look after your site, collection or asset.
A plan can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of information needed to care for a complicated heritage asset. Keep a secure management and maintenance file and regularly update it. Keep copies of surveys and other information in the file, as well as a copy of your management and maintenance plan. You may also want to have an up-to-date working copy.
We expect you to adopt the plan formally as part of your organisation’s management policies. We also expect to see the plan clearly labelled as adopted with the names of those responsible for its adoption on behalf of your organisation and the date when the plan was adopted.
Make sure everyone who needs to use the plan has a copy. Keep a master copy in a secure archive as we may ask to see it in future. The plan should be made available on your website so that other people can learn from it.
If your project is restoring a landscape, public park, cemetery or garden, as part of our grant terms you should secure and retain the Green Flag Award once your project’s capital works have reached practical completion. You will be required to retain a Green Flag Award, at a high pass level, for at least seven years.
To assist in attaining a Green Flag Award you may use the standard Green Flag Award management and maintenance template for producing your plan for your project application. There is no need to produce two plans.
The Green Flag Award’s guidance will help you to prepare a management and maintenance plan that will satisfy both us and the Green Flag Award.
The best way to tackle the long-term care of historic buildings is to concentrate on regular preventative maintenance, which:
Planned annual maintenance inspections need to be carried out in a careful and organised way. Ideally, you should aim to complete a full visual inspection of your buildings at least once a year. Begin by preparing a checklist identifying all the elements of the building that need to be inspected. Templates are available from:
When we talk about management and maintenance, management includes all the activities that can keep heritage in good condition, such as having procedures or arrangements for:
Maintenance is the routine everyday work needed to prevent decay such as:
If you have a project which includes commercial income streams, such as from a café or visitor centre, we will require information on the operation of these businesses to be set out within your management and maintenance plan.
Think about your heritage and consider if all the right organisations are involved in its current management and maintenance. Consider if the overall standards of maintenance are what is required? Think about how standards might be improved either by capital investment or by changes in working practices.
Review the current staffing structure and wider resources. Consider how this might need to change in the future and in response to our investment in the project.
Consider if everything to be delivered through the project can be properly maintained by existing management and maintenance budgets and resources. If the answer is yes, you will need to provide a clear explanation of how this will be achieved and how standards will be maintained. If the answer is no, you will need to identify additional funding and resources and explain how these will be maintained in the long term.
Identify the team that will be involved in preparing the management and maintenance plan during the development phase. Identify what skills they will need to be able to write the plan. Decide if you can produce the plan in house or whether you need additional help or expertise. If additional resources are required, then include the cost of these in your application. Don’t underestimate the time it will take or the benefits of employing expert advice or a critical friend.
Think about how you will review your environmental management performance and procedures during the development phase and allow for expert advice in your application if specialist help is needed.
By your development review, we will expect you to have:
After the development review we will expect you to:
The management and maintenance plan should be a living document which is reviewed and updated as the project develops. During this phase you should:
Review and update your management and maintenance plan. We expect you to:
You will need to consider how you resource development of the management and maintenance plan during project delivery and allow for the cost of any specialist advice you may need.