Thank you for your letter of 14 August. I am most grateful that the NCA has been given a second opportunity to submit evidence to your Committee's current review of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and I should be grateful if the following submission could be laid before the Committee.

  The National Council on Archives greatly welcomes the advent of the Heritage Lottery Fund as a new source of funding for, inter alia, archive services in the UK. In common with other parts of the national heritage, most publicly-funded archive services have been seriously under-resourced for many years, and the creation of the Heritage Lottery Fund gives hope that some of the multifarious capital investment needs of the sector can now be met from Lottery funding.

  From the creation of the Fund, the NCA has sought to monitor the number and size of applications and awards in the archives sector, and in 1996 it became aware that the pace of applications for assistance from the Fund was slower than anticipated, given the level of need. I therefore undertook a survey on the Council's behalf to identify the reasons for this, and discovered that the main reasons cited by record repositories for not (or not yet) submitting bids were:

—  the difficulty of identifying partnership funding, particularly for larger schemes where 25 per cent is required;

—  the lack of experience of archive staff at preparing bids of this kind, and the difficulty of finding time to do so, particularly in very small respositories; and

—  the prioritisation of bids for other purposes (typically museums and historic buildings) by local authorities and other organisations.

  There was also some concern that the projects which had received funding were not necessarily those which professional judgement would regard as being of the highest priority.

  The NCA held a seminar in January 1997 to discuss these difficulties with representatives of over 100 repositories and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and from this meeting came a series of actions, designed to improve the performance of the archives sector in securing funding from the National Lottery:

—  the appointment of an Archives Lottery Officer (funded by the Society of Archivists and the Public Record Office) to advise record repositories on the preparation of bids, and to help them shape bids in ways that would fit the HLF grant-awarding criteria;

—  the appointment of an Archives and Libraries Adviser within HLF to help the Trustees make appropriately informed decisions on applications in this area; and

—  the conduct of a survey of local authority archives in England (funded by the Public Record Office) to map the needs of these institutions for capital investment; the format of this survey has since been copied in Scotland, Wales and the higher education sector.

  Following on from these initiatives, a seminar was held for HLF trustees and officers in June 1998 at which the needs of the sector were spelled out, and agreement was reached on the need for a detailed and specific prioritisation of spending on the archives sector; the Council will submit this document to the HLF in the next few weeks. The development of a digital National Archival Network to enable the widest possible public to access information about the content and location of archives; measures to improve the storage accommodation and reader facilities of repositories; and a programme of cataloguing work to reduce the very large backlogs of unexplored archives in UK record repositories will be identified as the highest priority tasks.

  As a result of these initiatives, the number of applications and awards to archives organisations has grown significantly in the last 18 months, and it is understood that the HLF is in consequence proposing a substantial increase in the notional budget allocation for archives projects. The Council welcomes this recognition of the value offered by archives projects, and whilst it feels that there will still be substantial room for further increases in the percentage share of HLF awards going to archive repositories in the future, it accepts that the extent to which the HLF's resources fall short of the demands placed upon them means that it will never be able to meet all the needs of the archive community. Archives projects are, however, of value not just because they preserve or improve access to our documentary heritage itself, but also because they unlock resources of great value in the interpretation of other aspects of our national heritage, such as historic buildings, man-made landscape, and archaeology. To this extent they have a double value for the national heritage, which it is hoped will influence the Trustees to give further priority to this area in the years to come.

  To sum up, the Council feels that it has now developed a good working relationship with the Heritage Lottery Fund, which lays the groundwork for a future pattern of grant awards meeting the highest priority needs of the archive community, and thus demonstrating the effectiveness of expenditure in this area. It would be helpful if the HLF would formally adopt focussed policies for awarding archival grants, based on the prioritisation work undertaken by the NCA, since this would give greater clarity to applicants and improve the transparency of decision making. The Council also believes that it would be highly beneficial to continued fruitful co-operation if the HLF were to establish on a permanent basis the Archives and Libraries Adviser post, which is currently due to expire in April 1999. This post provides a valuable conduit by which HLF policy-making can be informed by professional concerns in the library and archive world, which will inevitably change in response to external factors and the successful completion of projects.

September 1998