SUMMARY

  1.  The Directory of Social Change is critical of the work to date of the Heritage Lottery Fund. In particular it believes that it:

a.  has not achieved a fair distribution of its grants across the country;

b.  has favoured, in its grant making, the richer parts of the country over the poorer (and has no monitoring system to help it avoid this);

c.  has failed to ensure a proper degree of public accessibility to the projects that it has funded; and

d.  has been remote and slow in its administration of applications.

  2.  The Directory believes that an underlying cause of the first three of these problems is the Fund's adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes the National Heritage. This is based on a "National Treasure" concept, rather than a more inclusive view which would see all parts of the country, and all sections of society, as possessing valuable heritage in need of support.

THE DIRECTORY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

  3.  DSC is an independent charity providing information and training for voluntary organisations. It publishes over 100 books and two magazines to this end, and runs the country's most extensive programme of voluntary sector training in the field of management and finance.

  4.  In 1995 the charity was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to prepare a report on the likely impacts of the national lottery, published by that Foundation as Winners and Losers. Since then DSC has published the annual National Lottery Yearbook which seeks to review all the workings of the lottery and which includes a complete listing of all grants made by each distributing body.

  5.  Both the Report and the subsequent Yearbooks have been produced by Luke FitzHerbert, a member of the staff (and a former Director) of the charity. He has wide experience, as the series editor of the Guide to Major Trusts, of analysing the work of grant making organisations.

UNFAIR GEOGRAPHICAL ALLOCATIONS

  6.  The remarkable variation between regions is shown in the following chart incorporating all grants to the end of 1997.

  7.  No reason has been given why, for example, the Midlands should continue to get less than a third of what is given to Scotland. If it is because there is a shortage of applications of the right quality, then the Fund needs to explain why it has not done more to remedy this in the way the government requested as long ago as 1994.

  8.  At a county or local authority level the disparities are even more marked, nor have they been dissipating with time (as the Fund asserted that they would).

  9.  By the end of 1997 the Fund had disbursed £850 million but had made only 1,466 grants, far fewer than any other lottery "Good Cause". This averages less than three grants for each local authority district. For very many people, there has been no support at all for what they see as their local heritage.

A BIAS AGAINST THE POOR?

  10.  Even before the distributions began, the Economist newspaper suggested that the lottery might become a means of getting "the poor to pay for the pleasures of the rich". The Directory of Social Change has attempted, with very limited resources, to check whether the more disadvantaged areas of the country were getting as much money in grants as richer areas, running a sample snapshot of a different kind each year. DSC does not suggest that its evidence is more than indicative, but it has strongly argued, without apparent effect in the case of the Heritage Lottery Fund, that the distributors themselves have a responsibility to know whether or not this was true of their own grants.

  11.  For 1995 grants, we compared HLF grants to two groups of equal population, the quartile living in the most disadvantaged local authority districts in England, and those living in the least disadvantaged.

Most disadvantaged	£1.7 million
Least disadvantaged	£14.6 million

  12.  In 1996 we simply divided the population of England into two halves. The more disadvantaged half had by then received £75 million, the less disadvantaged half £108 million.

  13.  In 1997 we looked at the extremes; the 20 smaller local authorities at each end of the official index of living conditions. They had by then received:

Ten poorest LA areas	£377,000
Ten richest LA areas	£3,315,000

  14.  On seeing these last figures, the Fund said that it greatly welcomed applications from areas that had submitted few applications so far. However the possibility of there being insufficient good applications from poor areas had been anticipated by the government four years ago, and a specific request had been made to the then Chairman of the Fund to take steps to deal with such a situation. The Fund was asked to rectify such problems through targeted marketing of the Fund in such areas (as has been successfully done by the English Sports Council). It is hard to explain why this request has been ignored by the Heritage Fund. The letter, which was private, read as follows:

  The Lord Rothschild 20 June 1994

Chairman, The National Heritage Memorial Fund

  . . .15. While solicitation of particular projects will not be permitted this does not mean that you should not encourage applications in general . . . It may, in time, become apparent that sufficient good quality applications from within a particular geographical area or activity were not forthcoming to reasonable spread of expenditure in such areas to take place. In such cases it may be particularly necessary to target your publicity efforts towards such areas to encourage the submission of the right quality and quantity of applications.

    Peter Brooke

    Secretary of State

  15.   Recommendation: The Heritage Lottery Fund should monitor the distribution of its money to ensure that poorer parts of the country get a fair share of the Fund's distribution.

ACCESSIBILITY OF HLF FUNDED PROJECTS

  16.  It was the intention of the government that the benefits of the lottery should be available to all, irrespective of income. Unfortunately, access to many projects, especially those receiving the most money, is difficult or impossible for many people living on low incomes.

  17.  Until recently, there has been virtually no discussion with applicants about the future admission charges to their improved facilities, except with a view to them being high enough to support future running costs. In the case of the Fund's largest single grant (£25 million for the Kennet and Avon Canal), the award was quickly followed by the imposition of a £6 license fee for cyclists' use of the previously publicly available towpath (and leading to the removal of this lottery funded towpath from the SUSTRANS lottery funded National Cycleway project!).

  18.   Recommendation: The HLF should assure itself, before making a grant, that the facility will be accessible to people from the full range of income levels.

  19.  For people on low incomes, accessibility is also seriously affected by distance to travel. For those without access to motor cars, heritage projects must usually be local if they are to be accessible at all. By spending nearly half of its money (£662 million) on just 152 projects of £1 million or more, the HLF has not spread its money widely enough for many people without cars to benefit from its grants.

  20.   Recommendation: The HLF should set itself a target of at least trebling the number of projects it supports each year.

ADMINISTRATION

  21.  The DSC finds that the HLF (with the Millennium Commission) has offered the least satisfactory administration of the various distributors. There are numerous complaints, which the DSC is unable to verify, about inappropriate and time-wasting procedures, long delays and over use of inexpert consultants.

  22.  The administrative costs of £17,000 per grant in 1996-97 appear excessive.

  23.  The Fund's arrangements for regional and local representation have made it a laughing stock. At first, it said that local representation was through its appointed members. A list of the addresses of these, when published, demonstrated that this was implausible.

  24.  The effect of recent and welcome appointment of regional staff teams was undermined by the news that these were all to be based in Sloane Square, London.

  25.   Recommendation: Senior regional managers should be based in the areas concerned.

WHAT IS OUR "HERITAGE"?

  26.  "The purpose of the . . . Fund is to help organisations to preserve, restore or acquire, for public access or enjoyment, the great treasures . . . that make up the fabric of our history and culture" (from the Heritage Lottery Fund's promotional literature). This purpose was freely adopted by the fund, which seems not so much to have rejected as to have been unaware of the alternative view that our heritage is everywhere, and is often in most need of financial support where it is at present least visible and enjoyable.

  27.  For example, take a river such as the Colne. Under the Fund's present policies, projects to further improve the river and its landscape in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty have a good chance of being funded. Work to do the same in the industrial reaches of the river near Slough would not qualify in the same way.

  28.  DSC argues that the thrust of the Fund's policies should be reversed, with as much priority being given to the restoration of our national heritage where it is at present least in evidence, as where it is already best preserved. It believes that the present thrust of the Fund's policies derive from its position as a part of the long established National Heritage Memorial Fund, an excellent and long-established body which is indeed properly focused just on "national treasures". DSC argues, however, that that is an inappropriate emphasis for a Fund that has been specifically enjoined to create "benefits for everyone, irrespective of income".

  29.  In many urban and suburban areas, the local heritage lies in the pubs and schools, churches and churchyards, informal open spaces, streams, groups of trees and the like. These are just as important to those who live locally as its internationally known art gallery may be to the next town; but this is not recognised by the Fund.

  30.  At present, small local projects get an almost insignificant part of its funds (in this context, it is most unfortunate that its overdue new Local Heritage Initiative for smaller grants, in partnership with the Countryside Commission and designed in part to rectify this situation, will exclude most of those urban areas already worst treated by the Fund, and will be largely confined to the countryside and market towns).

  31.   Recommendation: We would like to see the Fund set its long term budgets initially on a local basis, with appropriate slices taken off for important county, region and nationwide projects.

POLICY CHANGES ANNOUNCED 16 JUNE 1998

  32.  New policies announced on this date address some of the issues set out above, and are warmly welcomed. The provision for limiting the very large awards to a total of £70 million a year and for assessing these on a competitive basis are a step forward. On the other hand there is little sign that at present the Fund has any assessment system for applications that is sufficiently robust to withstand scrutiny in competitive circumstances.

  33.  The intention to have "more smaller grants" repeats earlier sentiments, but if it will be backed by allocations of at least 40 per cent of available funds for awards less than £375,000, a number of the problems of achieving wider access and fairer geographical distributions would be much easier to achieve. However the continued implication remains that all some areas can expect is information and education programmes; it remains the DSC view that there is ample need for capital improvements to the local heritage in all parts of the country.

  34.  The proposed two stage application process is welcome, provided that it does not lead to an even longer overall decision-taking process for those projects that survive stage 1.

  35.  The intention to delegate to local committees in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland decision making on grants up to £375,000 is welcome, and should be extended to the English regions, many of which are larger than some of these areas.

  36.  The forthcoming extension of the Awards for All scheme from Scotland to the rest of the country is welcome and will bring Heritage funding to numerous new communities—it will need and justify generous funding and extensive promotion from the Fund.

  37.  Two major problems are not directly addressed by the changes: the requirement to actually distribute grants fairly to all parts of the country (not just to enable this to be possible in theory), and the lack of any corresponding scheme for urban areas to the excellent Local Heritage Initiative being run for the Fund by the Countryside Commission. There seems to be no intention even to seek a corresponding partner for grants of this kind in urban areas, leaving a divisive and unfair imbalance.

June 1998