1.  THE HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND AND THE NATIONAL TRUST

  1.1  The National Trust ("the Trust") enjoys a good working relationship with the Heritage Lottery Fund ("the Fund") and since the Fund was established in 1995 has been fortunate to have been given 27 grants for a wide range of projects. The total value of grants received, or currently on offer, is £18 million.

  1.2  Twenty-three of these grants (85 per cent) have been for the acquisition of land, buildings or works of art historically associated with a National Trust property. The largest single grant was that of £4.9 million towards the cost of the purchase and endowment of the "Capability" Brown park of Croome Court in Worcestershire.

  1.3  The Trust has been less successful with applications for grants for its existing properties. Nine such applications (total value: £14 million) have been turned down. Five out of the nine were for the provision of facilities to enhance the enjoyment and understanding of visitors, notwithstanding the fact that the provision of better services for visitors was specifically mentioned as a priority for grant in the Fund's original terms of reference, published in 1995. This category of grant was given lower priority in the revised guidelines issued in April 1997.

  1.4  The Fund has therefore added substantially to the national heritage by enabling the National Trust to acquire new properties for the public to enjoy in perpetuity, but this benefit has not been extended in the same degree to the improvement and repair of existing heritage properties. Given an outstanding liability for essential repairs, which, with the cost of a large number of desirable projects, comes to a total of about £250 million, this is a serious matter for the historic buildings, parks and gardens in the Trust's ownership. We would, therefore, like the Fund to give greater emphasis to the repair and improvement of the Trust's existing properties, many of which were acquired many years ago with endowments that are now inadequate.

 2.  THE NEW GUIDELINES

  2.1  We welcome the approach set out in the new guidelines, in particular the greater emphasis they give to increasing access and enhancing educational benefit, both central to the Trust's purposes and both of which are given high priority in our new three-year Strategic Plan. The Trust is as much concerned with people as it is with places and we recall with appreciation and satisfaction the Prime Minister's remark that he wished to see the Lottery transformed into "a National Trust for People".

  2.2  We believe the continuing growth in our membership, which last year passed 2.5 million, is a measure of the public interest in, and enthusiasm for, our work. Our Schools Membership is one of the fastest growing categories and other themes in our current strategy are: increasing the involvement of local communities and of young people in looking after the Trust's properties.

  2.3  Against that background we would like to make the following observations on the new guidelines:

2.4  THE SIZE OF APPLICATIONS

  2.5  The National Trust has been fortunate in obtaining the Fund's support for a number of large projects. The emphasis will now be on smaller schemes. The average value of the grant-applications submitted by the Trust in the past is £882,000, while the new guidelines state that the Fund will in future give preference to grants of between £5,000 and £100,000.

  2.6  We are concerned about the implications of rigid application of this preference. Hitherto, large grants from the Fund have enabled the Trust to assemble "packages" of contributions from both public and private sources to acquire, restore and open to the public for ever such internationally significant places as the historic landscape gardens of Gibside (Tyne and Wear) and Stowe (Buckinghamshire). Grants of even £100,000 would not have enabled the Trust to secure these properties and would not, therefore, have released the contributory funds from other sources. We therefore hope that the Fund will continue to be ready to give grants in excess of £100,000 for endangered places of exceptional importance.

 2.7  TREATMENT OF THE TRUST AS ONE ORGANISATION

  2.8  We are also concerned by the paragraph on page 5 of the Fund's Information for Applicants, which states that "if your organisation has already received a major award, an application which you make for a different project may be given lower priority". Unlike many organisations, the Trust operates all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland and its management is devolved to 15 regions. The implication of the statement quoted above is that funding might not be available for an endangered heritage asset in, say, Northern Ireland, if a grant had already been given for one of equal importance in, say, Somerset.

  2.9  The Workhouse at Southwell in Nottinghamshire is a case in point. This is a building of outstanding social and historic interest. It has been acquired by the Trust in the hope of saving it from conversion to flats and will shortly be the subject of an application to the Fund. The application may fail for other reasons, but it would be a pity if it were to do so under this rule and the opportunity were thus to be lost of saving the best preserved example of a 19th-century workhouse and of telling in a graphic way the story of poorest members of Victorian society. We suggest that it is in the interests of the heritage for the Fund to regard applications from the Trust, not as deriving from one organisation, but in the same way as applications from different local authorities.

2.10  LIMITING THE OVERALL GRANT

  2.11  Though the Trust may appear to be a well-resourced organisation, the reality is that it is a charity whose existing responsibilities represent an enormous liability. The size of our membership and the protection we give to beautiful and historic places through inalienable ownership masks a huge back-log of work at many of our properties. Some now appear on English Heritage's register of Buildings at Risk and others, especially countryside properties, have incomes which are far from adequate to cover the cost of maintaining and providing public access to them. We understand, of course, that the Trust is one of an increasing number of worthy causes in the heritage, education and recreation arena, but we hope the Fund will not impose an overall limit on the Trust's eligibility for grants.

 2.12  THE TWO-STAGE PROCEDURE FOR LARGE PROJECTS

  2.13  In common, no doubt, with other applicants, the Trust has incurred substantial expense, involving a great deal of staff-time, in preparing applications for presentation to the Fund, without any indication as to the likelihood of success. This can be wasteful of resources and in cases that in the end fail the result is more damaging than it need be to the morale of the staff concerned. Our staff have from time to time been pressed to meet demanding deadlines which have not been respected; and on two occasions we have been asked to produce—at great expense and in a very short time—complex material which was not then used for the purpose that had dictated the timescale. We therefore welcome the introduction of the two-stage procedure.

  2.14  We suggest, however, that a significant improvement could be made to the balance between the two stages. At present, a full Conservation Plan is required at Stage 1. This is similar to the Business Plan and requires an enormous amount of detailed work. We suggest that outline Conservation and Business Plans are submitted at Stage 1 and that the full plans are submitted at Stage 2.

  2.15  We also note that the 10-month period, within which a decision is promised, is longer than the present nine months.

3.  THE NATIONAL HERITAGE MEMORIAL FUND

  3.1  We have noted with dismay the progressive reduction in the annual allocation to the National Heritage Memorial Fund ("the NHMF") and would like to take this opportunity of emphasising the importance of the distinctive role of the NHMF. It is a distinction that is not widely understood, no doubt because both funds are answerable to the same trustee body.

  3.2  Both the Heritage Lottery Fund ("the HLF") and the NHMF have secured great benefits for the nation, but, because they are funded from different sources and have different terms of reference, they have assumed quite different roles.

  3.3  When the Land Fund had proved unable to save Mentmore and its important collections for the nation, the NHMF was founded in 1980 to be independent of government in the allocation of its funds. Because it is funded from the Treasury and not by the purchase of lottery tickets, it is able to give grants towards the acquisition of places, buildings and things which, while in some cases unlikely to draw great crowds, are nevertheless part of the essence of what it means to millions of people to be a citizen of the United Kingdom.

  3.4  The NHMF has had an extraordinary record of success and no less extraordinary is the variety of treasures and much-loved places it has managed to secure for the nation in its first 18 years, ranging from the Sherborne Missal and the Beckett Casket to remote and wild places of great nature conservation interest like Orford Ness and a World War II bomber raised from a Scottish loch. It has also been able to secure small buildings of local significance, as well as country houses like Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, whose large and beautiful park is now the weekend destination of hundreds of thousands of people from the Midlands and further afield all through the year.

  3.5  But, the park is only one element of a precious and increasingly rare entity. The value of a country house like Calke lies in the sum of its parts: house, archives, collections, related buildings, garden, park and the wider landscape. The Trust assembled a "package" of funds from public and private sources to secure Calke in 1984, but without the grant from the NHMF, these constituent parts would have been dismembered and the nation would be the poorer for it. We believe, therefore, that it is a matter of the greatest importance to the nation, as it is to the National Trust, that the gradual reduction of the annual allocation to the NHMF is halted, and that in future it is sufficiently funded to enable it to continue to perform its complementary role to that of the HLF.

June 1998