Dr Alan Thompson, the head of earth sciences at East Grinstead consulting engineers Symonds, is about half way through an investigation into the stone industry. And he\'s not getting much response from the industry, he told the British Stone at their annual meeting.

His investigations started in April. They have included fairly detailed case studies on some of the major dimensional stones - Portland, Purbeck, Cornish granite, York stone, Ancaster, Ham Hill, Cumbrian slate, etc.

"Between them," Dr Thompson told British Stone, "they have been extremely useful, enabling us to get to grips with a lot of details that are a microcosm of a bigger picture."

Symonds had also sent out a questionnaire to stone companies. "We haven\'t had much feedback," he said.

The next stage of the investigation has involved another questionnaire. "We have developed the questionnaire in close consultation with British Stone and Stone Federation, and members of the organisations in as far as they responded."

He pointed out that the information gathered from the questionnaire, designed to establish some details about the market (such as its size), was intended to help the industry.

"Please do fill them in," he said. "They will be seen only by the very small project team working on this. They will be used for regional breakdowns. It won\'t be possible to see the output of any individual producer," he assured them. "Until we can get a handle on the size of the industry we can\'t see what the size of the problems are."

However, even British Stone members have complained about the length of the questionnaire and the sensitive nature of some of the information being asked for.

Early on in the life of British Stone, the Department of the Environment, as it then was, forked out £15,000 for a similar, though much more hastily produced, study into the size of the stone market. The resulting report showed a lack of understanding of the market and was deeply criticised by British Stone members.

This time, much more time is being spent on the survey and it has a clearly defined purpose in producing recommendations on planning that are intended to draw distinctions between aggregate and dimensional stone quarries.

The idea is to make it easier to get planning permission for small-scale dimensional stone production. It is a project supported by English Heritage, which would like it to be much easier to open up small quarries to extract stone for particular conservation projects.

"This is the industry\'s chance to have a direct route to the Deputy Prime Minister\'s Office and the planning process," said Dr Thompson.

0 British Stone was established in 1995 by some of the major UK stone producers who took exception to the Stone Federation\'s inclusion of stone importers among its ranks. But British Stone itself is no longer ruling out including importers as it expands the website that director Ray Symons believes is central to the organisation.

Some of the British Stone members already sell imported stone as well as the stone they quarry, so the philosophical objection to imports may not be as great as it once was.

Ray Symons said at the AGM that the development of the website as a more comprehensive contact point with the stone industry was central to British Stone.

"We may not go so far as to include importers of stone," he said, "though that\'s not ruled out. The whole point is to make architects come back time and time again.""