This summary has been prepared at the request of The Clerk to The Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons to assist the Committee on its inquiry into The Heritage Lottery Fund.

  The Transport Trust was founded in 1965 and is The National Charity for the Preservation of Britain's Transport Heritage. It is a voluntary organisation which co-ordinates preservation projects right across the transport spectrum and gives limited financial support by grants and award schemes from the modest funds it is able to raise from the corporate sector and from private individuals. Having no heritage assets of its own, apart from its library, it is capable of looking objectively at the entire field of transport preservation without sectoral, commercial or political interests.

  From the outset, The Transport Trust (TT) welcomed the formation of The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and readily acknowledges that it has already given significant support to transport preservation by its grants to the Industrial, Transport & Maritime sector.

  At the end of 1997, the TT was invited to submit to the HLF an input to a review of its (the HLFs) Grant Making Policy. In response the TT prepared a report in which it made certain suggestions as to how the HLFs approach to transport preservation might be improved and the following is a summary of the report's conclusions and recommendations.

  The report reviewed, in some detail, the differing problems and modus operandi of each of the 14 categories of preserved transport, namely:

(a)  Aviation.

(b)  Bicycles.

(c)  Buses & Coaches & Trolleybuses.

(d)  Canals.

(e)  Commercial Vehicles.

(f)  Horse-drawn Carriages.

(g)  Maritime.

(h)  Military Vehicles.

(i)  Motor Cars.

(j)  Motor Cycles.

(k)  Railways.

(l)  Traction Engines.

(m)  Tractors.

(n)  Trams.

  From this research, the following conclusions were drawn:

  1.  The contribution of Transport Heritage to Tourism and Leisure is very significant. Preserved railways alone attract some 8 million visitors annually and, across all categories, the number of people participating in transport preservation activities on a voluntary basis probably exceeds 500,000. The existing level of support of heritage transport by the HLF should certainly be sustained therefore and, if possible, increased to reflect the importance of the sector.

  2.  Although the desirability of creating and maintaining registers of historic vehicles and artefacts (coupled with prioritised listings relating to agreed criteria) is widely acknowledged, in some transport categories little or no co-ordinated action has been taken in this direction. Such registers and listings would be of undoubted benefit to the HLF in assessing the relative merits of grant applications and the TT recommended that the HLF utilises some of its funding capacity to encourage and facilitate more effective and widespread registration.

  3.  The TT drew attention to the need for covered and secure storage to prevent deterioration, a problem particularly relevant to the Railway category (in terms of carriages and wagons), to the Bus/Coach, Military Vehicle and Aviation categories and it suggested that priority support should be given to schemes designed to provide appropriate accommodation for vehicles and artefacts which might otherwise be at risk.

  4.  The TT's experience of its own Award Scheme has revealed that many small restoration projects of vehicles of historical importance can stall for lack of relatively small sums of money and it recommended the HLF introduce, experimentally, a Small Grants Programme with a maximum of £10,000 per grant. It set out in some detail how the scheme might operate and made a case for the TT to manage such a programme as Agent to the HLF.

  5.  The ongoing debate as to the merits of operation versus static display of historic transport was acknowledged. Greater opportunity for public participation occurs when such vehicles are operational but operating brings with it maintenance and replacement costs and the possibility that some rare items could be put at risk. The TT recommended that in evaluating requests for grant support, the HLF should be able to treat heavy maintenance of larger operational items (eg, the replacement of a boiler) as "phased restoration" rather than a claim for revenue support).

  6.  There is concern that many of the practical skills associated with restoration, maintenance and operation of transport are in danger of being lost and the TT recommended that HLF funding should support initiatives to expand the training of young people in practical Heritage skills.

  Finally, the TT submitted a discussion paper on the merits of making of grants to private individuals, as opposed to museums, registered charities and properly constituted preservation societies. Private individuals play a considerable role in conserving important elements of the nation's Heritage Transport and the TT made suggestions as to how the element of risk, which would be incurred by the HLF if it made such grants, might be minimised. It should be emphasised that this discussion paper was put forward quite independently of the recommendations made in conclusion No. 4 above.