Advocacy is a team sport, so when campaigning efforts make a difference (for example getting heritage issues in election manifestos, or securing amendments to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill) it’s a shared success. Finding common ground is key to that, even though defining and communicating shared messages widely can be half the battle. We try to ensure smaller heritage organisations can join in these conversations and equip themselves with the tools they need to campaign for their issues, even if they don’t have any in-house advocacy capacity. It’s brilliant when our members take the initiative and contact their MPs to arrange visits, or share new evidence and case studies with us – it all helps to make the case.

Getting heritage on the agenda is also an achievement in itself, especially with so many competing priorities in a new term of government. Beyond that, success is creating the space to be proactive and deliver the evidence and campaigns that tell a positive story about our sector. It often feels like we are on the back foot warding off threat after threat, but it’s usually the advocacy which focuses on benefits and solutions which breaks through and captures people’s imagination.

Success in political and policy advocacy is often hard to measure, because it comes in peaks and troughs, and it’s hard to pin down specific announcements or policy changes to individual contributions. But I’m ultimately aiming for Ministers across departments to understand and appreciate the value of heritage for their policy agendas and to want to support the sector. We have seen progress over the years – for example there were positive changes arising from the Levelling up and Regeneration Act, and I hope we can build on these in future.

The adoption of the Heritage Strategy by Sheffield City Council is an important success already delivered. We are now working towards other major decision makers either adopting the strategy or creating their own plans for heritage inspired by the aims of the strategy.

Success in the short term means seeing Council plans and strategies explicitly integrating the adopted strategy. Their Council Plan 2024-2028 which sets out their role in helping the city achieve its ambitions was updated to recognise the heritage value of some proposals, and the draft Growth Plan 2025-2035 has been significantly changed following our input to express the role of heritage in the wider economy, rather than confining it to a single “cultural” sector. As new plans come forward we will seek similar changes.

In the longer term the challenge will be to translate these aspirations into reality. That should translate into such things as regeneration proposals seeking to retain and restore far more of the historic environment, public understanding and celebration of heritage being integral to such proposals from the start, more funding being sought and won from the Government, National Lottery Heritage Fund and others, reputational change for the Council, more communication between different heritage interests (especially those of previously underserved groups), greater use of heritage as a tool in education and health, more focus on heritage skills and retrofitting generally, a wider role for both tangible and intangible heritage in the visitor economy, and much more.

We have no defined metrics for this. For the time being it can be measured by comparison with previous experience. For example, the very fact that a new Council plan includes more than token mention of the words “heritage” or “history” demonstrates some degree of success.