ESCRICK Park Estate, where award-winning efforts have been made to switch from what was traditionally farmland and woodland into commercial and leisure property management, has received another gong.

Proprietor Charles Forbes Adams, whose ancestor, Sir Henry Thompson, bought the 6,000-acre estate in 1668, yesterday received Investors in People Champions status for his eight-person organisat-ion - only one of 16 businesses nationally to receive the honour.

Over the past ten years, through conversions of farm buildings and new builds, the Estate Office has created homes for 40 businesses, generating about 150 jobs.

It even won the RICS National Building Conservation Award for its CROW - or Creating Rural Opportunities for Work - project, a £1.4 million refurbishment scheme in which local tradesmen sympathetically converted five derelict farmsteads into offices and light industrial units.

It turned out to be a double celebration, with the arrival of the first chalet for The Hollicars, a 140-pitch holiday home and timber lodge park due to open on the estate in March.

The presentation of the new award was made by both Nicola Maine, IIP director for marketing, communications and knowledge management, and Selwyn Jones, development manager for the Yorkshire and Humberside IIP assessment board.

Both had been impressed by the training programmes put in place by Jane Whetstone, the estate's IIP co-ordinator to adapt to the new commercial thinking.

Jane said: "We were selected by the IIB Board to be put forward for Investors in People Champions because our past IIP reviews had been so glowing. We are really delighted to have been so successful."

Mr Forbes Adams said: "This was a double celebration, given the arrival of the first chalet thanks to Advent Lodges recently formed by Shepherd's Portasilo group and factory built in York.

"I am particularly proud of our latest award because we were one of the first land-based businesses to achieve IIP status in 1999."

Updated: 09:42 Friday, October 15, 2004