June 19th, 2026
Looking at the way the profession is embracing employee ownership and which architectural practices are making the transition, it is striking that heritage and conservation firms are disproportionately represented. I think we understand why.
Conservation architecture is, at its heart, a long-term discipline. Practitioners think in decades, about buildings that have stood for centuries and will stand for centuries more. The nature of a long-term stewardship approach doesn’t sit comfortably with an ownership model oriented toward short-term return and exit. Employee ownership, with its emphasis on continuity, purpose and collective responsibility, is structurally more compatible with heritage professionals’ values. We are not optimising for a transaction, or an exit; instead, we are thinking about keeping the specialist skills of the team together, for the long term.
This values alignment is not incidental. It shapes how practices are led, how decisions are made and what kinds of clients and projects we pursue. An employee-owned heritage practice is free to prioritise the right outcome for the building. That independence is itself a form of professional integrity and one that clients recognise and value.
Donald Insall established our Employee Benefit Trust in 1991. At the time, substantial employee ownership was rare, poorly understood and largely without a legislative framework to support it. Not for the first time, Donald was a pioneer. We were early, not because we had predicted a movement, but because the structure reflected something he already believed about how a conservation practice should be run.
Thirty-five years later, employee ownership is growing across the architectural profession, and the sector conversation has finally begun in earnest.
Like DIA, practices specialising in conservation architecture are often built around a founding principal, with their technical reputation, client relationships and sector standing defining the primary commercial value. Because so much of that value is closely tied to individuals, succession is not only a question of leadership, but of ownership transfer. Practices that actively plan for succession enable the next generation to take on leadership of the business, and where careful succession planning has taken place a next generation is already in place to do so. A culture of practice continuity is born, nurtured and lives on.
However, this raises a more fundamental question of equity. Is it fair that those who happen to be in the right place at the right time effectively inherit the practice of a groundbreaking entrepreneur? In some cases, those new owners may then choose to sell the business to an external bidder, potentially relinquishing independence and “cashing in” on the value that pioneers have created over generations of work.
Employee ownership offers an alternative path. It preserves the practice, its culture and its accumulated expertise, while fairly rewarding the founder. It creates a structure in which the people who have built the practice’s knowledge and relationships are the ones who carry it forward.
For a sector where institutional knowledge is genuinely irreplaceable, including a deep understanding of the history of buildings over multiple generations, we sometimes know a client’s property better than they do themselves.
The people who choose careers in heritage and conservation are often motivated by more than financial return. They care about the stories and the history embodied in the built environment, about craftsmanship, about what survives. That motivation makes employee ownership, with its alignment of purpose, reward and shared responsibility, more legible and more attractive than it might be in sectors driven primarily by commercial incentive.
Employee ownership works best in organisations where people genuinely identify with the mission. Heritage practices, almost by definition, attract people who do. The transition to employee ownership in this sector is not just a structural choice; instead it is often a natural expression of values that were already present.
Employee ownership is not a governance shortcut. It requires clarity about purpose, honest communication with the beneficiaries, the people who have a stake, and a willingness to make the difficult decisions that any well-run practice must make, including decisions that individual employees may not welcome in the moment.
What employee ownership has given us, over three and a half decades, is continuity: the ability to navigate change without losing the identity or integrity of the practice. The practice that Donald Insall founded has evolved smoothly through natural leadership transitions, economic cycles and a fundamental shift in how our sector is structured, and has thrived. It has done so because its ownership model aligns the interests of the people who do the work with the long-term health of the practice. That alignment is not incidental to our performance. It is foundational to it.
The built environment needs specialist practices. In the UK, the heritage and conservation sector is responsible for one of world’s largest concentrations of protected buildings. The expertise required to do that work well − the accredited conservation architects, the IHBC-qualified consultants, the practitioners who understand materials, history and planning −has taken generations to develop and cannot be quickly replicated.
Employee ownership is not a solution to every challenge the sector faces, but it is one of the most powerful mechanisms available for ensuring that specialist practices survive succession, retain talent and remain free to prioritise the right outcome over the commercially convenient one.
The practices that make this transition well will be better placed to attract the next generation of conservation professionals, to maintain the independence that defines their offer and to carry forward the expertise the sector depends on.
Thirty-five years on, we remain convinced that employee ownership is not simply a governance model for specialist practices, but one of the most effective ways of ensuring that knowledge, responsibility and stewardship endure beyond any one generation.