Justification for listed building demolition - general principles

The destruction of historic buildings is very seldom necessary for reasons of good planning; more often it is a result of neglect or the failure to make imaginative efforts to find new uses for them or to incorporate them into a new development. While it is acknowledged that very occasionally demolition of a listed building will be unavoidable, consent will not be given simply because redevelopment is economically more attractive to the developer than repair and re-use of the building, or because the developer acquired the building at a price that reflected the potential for redevelopment rather than the condition and constraints of the existing historic building.