1.  The Society of Archivists very much supports the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and would strongly encourage it in what it aims to do.

  2.  However there are a number of points that the Society would like to make about it.

  3.  The Fund has changed its rules on several occasions. Applications put in under one set of rules have been judged under another, to the frustration of the applicant and the prejudice of the project it was hoped to undertake. In fact there is a widespread feeling that the Fund is constantly "moving the goal posts", and that the success or failure of a lottery bid can be as much of a gamble as the lottery itself. There is also a perception that applications made by bodies at a distance from London are considered in London, and often without any site visit or reasonable consideration of the project on its local merits. The Society of Archivists would urge the encouragement of local experts to advise—or at least to answer specific questions—on local applications. We believe that this is now happening, and if so it is certainly a move which we applaud.

  4.  As far as archives specifically are concerned, there have been far fewer successful applications to the HLF—and actually far fewer altogether—than the Society would have hoped. There are several possible reasons for this. One is that many archives—probably the majority of them—have only one permanent professional archivist on the staff. The HLF application forms are complicated, and the process of the application itself equally so. In an organisation already running on a shoestring, there is simply not the time to deal with the complexities and the paperwork involved. The HLF has recently recruited an expert to give it advice on archives and libraries. This is welcome news, and the person in question has recently done a great deal to familiarise himself with the problems of archives, but in the end the matter is one for the archivist him or herself.

  5.  Because archive services are small, they are nearly always part of a larger organisation, which can be cultural, legal or administrative. They generally have a reasonable amount of day to day financial independence, but not enough to commit funds or services to the level needed for partnership funding. This is one of the reasons why archivists have been very disappointed by the DCMS papers on "The People's Network" and "Investment in Culture" where libraries seem to dominate the department's thinking, and archives are almost completely absent—certainly they are not being offered any of the funding which it is proposed should be invested in libraries, museums, galleries and other cultural developments.

  6.  The other major difficulty which archives face in any application to the HLF is the rule that existing buildings may not be used as partnership funding. The Society can understand why this is the case, but would point out that it presents a particular problem for archives where the buildings which contain them are almost always their major quantifiable asset, and form a far greater proportion of their assets in general than is the case with other cultural institutions. In practically all cases the regular current funding to which archives have access goes on staff and basic running costs. It rarely has anything much in the way of a purchase grant, for example, which could be set aside for a year or two as partnership funding, and as I have pointed out it generally lacks sufficient financial or administrative independence to raise money itself. The Society of Archivists would therefore urge in the strongest terms that buildings—particularly when a building is offered for conversion to an archive store, or even more where one is to be built from scratch—may be used as partnership funding.

  7.  The Society notes the development of the New Opportunities Fund from which it hopes that archives may profit. In the meantime it is taking steps, through its Lottery Mapping Project, to establish the major areas of need throughout the UK in the field of archives, and hopes that by putting in joint projects designed to deal with clearly defined and nationally recognised objectives, archives will find that it becomes easier to obtain access to Lottery funding.

July 1998