Uncorrected Evidence 912

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 912-v

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE

PROTECTING AND PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE

Tuesday 18 April 2006

DAME LIZ FORGAN and MS CAROLE SOUTER

MS ANTHEA CASE CBE and MS KATE PUGH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 238 - 296

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Tuesday 18 April 2006

Members present

Mr John Whittingdale

Philip Davies

Paul Farrelly

Alan Keen

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Heritage Lottery Fund

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Dame Liz Forgan, Chairman and Ms Carole Souter, Director, Heritage Lottery Fund, gave evidence.

Chairman: Good morning, everybody. As this is the first day that Parliament is back after the recess we are a relatively small but, nevertheless, extremely high quality group. I am particularly pleased to welcome the Heritage Lottery Fund as the first witnesses for this particular session. It is true to say that I think the vast majority of submissions that we have received have acknowledged the huge importance of the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund so we were obviously especially keen to hear from the Fund. Can I welcome Liz Forgan particularly, the Chairman, and Carole Souter, the Director, and invite Philip Davies to begin the questioning.

Q238 Philip Davies: At a recent conference David Lammy said that the heritage sector was "... perceived as experts talking to themselves...". He said that heritage management was about "... encouraging and drawing out local skills, knowledge and experience of place rather than dictating what is of cultural significance". What do you think can be done to enable the local skills, knowledge and experience to influence the management of heritage protection?

Dame Liz Forgan: You have landed us right in the middle of our perhaps favourite topic, so thank you. In the last eight or nine years, one of the things that the Heritage Lottery Fund has sought to do has been to look fundamentally at who decides what heritage value is, who manages it, who it is for and who feels that it belongs to them. I think we have much work to do but we have begun to widen the sense of who this is all for and about, whose opinion about heritage value matters and who ought to be involved in managing it. We have done that by making it a pretty firm condition of our support that local views are invited about what happens, that the definition of heritage in itself is not made by experts but it is fundamentally about what matters to people, what people wish to hand on, what people value sufficiently to hand on. The first step in this story has been to broaden the definition of heritage in the very first place. The second issue, of course, then is one of competence, of who feels able with sufficient skills to manage the heritage, to look after it. It is clear that there is from here and there, across the countryside, a serious deficiency of heritage skills and competence in the complex activity of managing and running major heritage sites. We have attempted to put our own money behind a big programme of skilled education. It is at a very early stage and if you want to know more of the detail I will ask Carole to tell you more about it but clearly that is an important ingredient in all this. David Lammy's description of the heritage as "experts talking to experts" is one which we have sought systematically to broaden. Please do not misunderstand me, the role of experts is very, very important but what we have sought to do is to make a dialogue between expert knowledge, which is indispensable for certain parts of managing the heritage but also to put that in the context of a broader, much more democratic definition of what heritage value is and who should look after it.

Q239 Philip Davies: Do you agree with David Lammy's description then?

Dame Liz Forgan: I think possibly it is historically applicable but certainly I do not think that if you took a snapshot of the heritage today that would still be true.

Q240 Philip Davies: You mentioned that local views are important and were a condition - I think you said - of funding. Is there a conflict of interest between widening local public opinion and also maintaining the excellence? Is there a danger that important things that perhaps the public do not appreciate at the moment are important but may do later could get lost if we widen it too much to public opinion? Where do you draw the balance between those two potentially competing factors?

Dame Liz Forgan: I think sometimes experts fear that but I think our experience is that if you engage amateurs/local people/non-experts in a discussion about heritage for more than about 30 seconds you quite quickly arrive at an extremely sophisticated view of the subject. If you ask people off the top of their heads, "Should we keep this old building or should we have a hospital" it is quite clear they will say, "Sweep away the old buildings, give us hospitals". If you sit and talk a little bit longer, as we have done for instance with citizens juries and as we do with individual projects, people understand perfectly well the value of the past. They understand perfectly well the issues involved in choosing what you should keep from the past and what you must destroy in order to rebuild. We have had the most sophisticated conversations on this subject with people who would not begin to describe themselves as experts in the heritage. We do not think there is a conflict.

Q241 Philip Davies: Could you explain to me what the mechanism is for getting the public opinion for doing it? Presumably, from what you have just said, you would not be in favour of a local paper going and asking people on the street what they think we should support and what we should not support but something more in-depth, so what do you have in mind?

Ms Souter: We have used a whole range of techniques for engaging public opinion and that begins at our planning process, so we are in the process of developing our next strategic plan. We issued 5,000 copies of a pre-consultation document asking people what they thought about what we have done so far and what we were thinking of doing for the future. We had nearly 350 responses, including a lot of membership organisations who speak on behalf of millions of members. At one end of the process we involve consultation in all of our planning, at the other end of the process in terms of decision making we have, throughout all of the English regions, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, committees which take decisions between Ł50,000 and Ł2 million. Those committees are made up of local people. We advertise in the press and we get a whole range of responses from people who want to be involved so the decision making involves local people with local knowledge. In terms of what we ask of applicants, we ask them to demonstrate the support for their projects, the need for their projects and how they are going to involve people in those projects. Every application involves people saying, "This is why we know this park, for example, would be a popular project. This is how we are going to involve friends of the park", that sort of thing. Then we also ask people to think about how they could use volunteers, for example, how they could improve skills. In terms of priority setting, which is one of the things that has been an important area for us, we do look at planning consultation but we have run some very detailed - as Liz said - citizens jury type events. If I take an example, we worked with the Arts Council in the Thames Gateway to talk to young people about what they would like to see in the communities that are being created in the Thames Gateway and they had some very clear views about needing to keep things from the past as well as develop things for the future. At the project level we ask the applicant to show us details of how the public are going to be involved, at the decision level we have local people with local knowledge and expertise taking decisions, and at the strategic level we have widespread consultation and involvement.

Q242 Philip Davies: Are you confident that this does get through to real local public opinion or is this just experts in the local area? You are breaking through the expert barrier.

Ms Souter: Yes. I think we have got a lot of evidence that it does involve widespread groups of people. For example, if I stick with parks for a moment, because I think they are quite a good example, a big parks project will often generate very strong emotions and very strong feelings from the local population, people want to see this and do not want to see that, and a very strong engagement in the discussion about how the project should proceed. We also know that it has lots of spin-offs and benefits which were not anticipated at the beginning of the project. I am thinking of Lister Park in Bradford, for example, where on one day that I visited there were large numbers of Asian ladies out walking. It was not organised, it had not been part of the project proposal but because the park was now a safer, more open, more engaging sort of place it was bringing in groups of people to use its facilities that had not been involved before. I am sure those folk would not see themselves as experts in any sense but they had seen a role and they had taken advantage of what was provided. I think we will see that again and again throughout the projects that we support.

Q243 Paul Farrelly: I entirely agree with you having spent a great deal of my time over the last year or so engaging on planning and conservation issues with local people when they are engaged, particularly on planning applications. I would not call it sophisticated but they come out with a great deal of common sense about what needs to be done to protect the heritage of the area. In my experience it is the planning officers for various reasons who are the philistines, if that is not giving philistines too bad a name, and indeed so-called conservation officers such as we still have in many local authorities such as mine. There are great needs that we will be concentrating on in the report in these areas which are partly mainstream local government and government funding, getting the proper staffing expertise. In terms of your remit, are there any needs which you see that the sector has which you would like to address whilst keeping the Heritage Lottery Fund as a focus body which you are prevented from doing so under the directions that you currently have? Is there any part of your remit which could make you and your contribution more effective?

Dame Liz Forgan: We are primarily grant givers, that is our skill, and we are good at it. However, I think it would be a failure to dispense over Ł3 billion worth of grants without taking some cognisance of the strategic impact of that investment and therefore having a broad view about what the strategic application ought to be. We are very careful to stay out of the way of the strategic bodies that are set up by statute to do that job. There is no service to anybody from us tracking over other people's responsibilities, so we are careful about that separation. It is of course true that we have set out on a path which has a clear view about how this money ought to have an impact, and I tried to outline it in my answer to the first question. We do not think of the heritage as something separate that you do on sunny weekends when you have some time and money to spare. We think of it as the blood and guts of the mental health of our society. We think of it as what constitutes the extraordinary distinctiveness of Britain. We think of it as the key to the identity of the people of these islands, past and future. For us it is a very big deal and thoughts about the heritage ought to inform decisions about planning and political development of all sorts. Therefore, we will engage with anybody who will talk to us and we will go and beat at the door of people with responsibility for things that do not sound like heritage like planning and say, "Think of us as an asset not as an obstacle." That approach sometimes gets a very receptive hearing and sometimes it does not. If you ask us what we would really like the good fairy to give us in future, it would not be more powers to intervene, we seek to persuade - admittedly having money to dispense helps with the persuasion - not to have powers. I think if you asked us what single thing would help the heritage in terms of what might be done structurally with local government, I think despite the slight hint that conservation officers were not your idea of a perfect solution, we think that it would be extremely helpful to have a properly resourced proper status network of conservation officers as a focus in local government where people could go for advice, where all the different functions of local government could have an easy reference point to heritage issues. That is asking rather a lot but I think that would be a very helpful thing in terms of bringing heritage to the centre of the hard work of local government and making a place a focus where people get proper reliable advice.

Q244 Paul Farrelly: You touch on an issue which is very close to my heart here, and actually we do not have a conservation officer in my borough of Newcastle-upon-Lyme anymore. I do not think the last one was much missed either, quite frankly. I think we will be very strongly in favour of trying to get more training and a better supply of professionals but also, touching on the point you have just raised, I am a patron of an organisation called Urban Vision in North Staffordshire which is trying to get people to think about good design and heritage and conservation altogether because they belong together. That was a CABE seed funded body and it has been partnered by people in the regeneration zone, English Heritage are not in there but I may yet approach them for some money. Is that organisation, which is not a time limited project, the sort of organisation within your direction which you could help to fund now or by virtue of its other partners is that something that you could not touch under your remit?

Ms Souter: The other partners thing is not an issue at all. We look for the broadest possible partnerships and encourage applicants to engage as many people as they can in support of funding. We are a project based organisation and that is a requirement in our directions that we are looking at projects. I think it is probably important in terms of the additionality question that once we reach a point at which we are being looked to for on-going support for core costs, for example, I think it then becomes much more difficult to demonstrate as a lottery funder that we are providing extras. It also, over time, means that a larger proportion perhaps of our funding would simply be going on day-to-day running costs. That said, of course, an organisation of the kind that you are talking about might well want to run projects. We can fund, for example, education officer posts, community liaison posts over the period of time that the project runs and I think that is often very helpful for people in establishing those sorts of posts, demonstrating the importance that they have and how effective they can be and maybe then going to other funders - maybe it is the local authority or whatever - and saying, "Right, now we want to embed this for the long-term because we have seen what it can do". We can help in that way but I do not think it would be helpful for us as a lottery distributor to get into long-term core costs funding because I think that would confuse the additionality argument.

Q245 Paul Farrelly: One of my colleagues who is not here, Helen Southworth, is an archaeologist and we have heard from the Council of British Archaeology about one particular initiative that you have which is shortly to come to an end, which they find very valuable and would dearly like some news of any replacement, and that is the local heritage initiative. I just wondered what words you might be able to say about that this morning?

Ms Souter: Yes, the local heritage initiative has been an extraordinarily successful partnership with the Countryside Agency and the Nationwide Building Society. It has supported a range of local projects. Its distinctiveness for us has been that it has provided a level of developmental support which is not typical for all of our projects so a small group that has not done any projects of this kind before has been able to have some technical assistance and some support in developing their project. That inevitably comes to an end because of the changes in the structure of the natural environment bodies and will come to an end this year. What we are doing at the moment is reviewing all of our small grant programmes as part of our planning for our next strategic plan and looking at what we can learn from the programmes we have run so far and what we can take forward into the future. I think the key thing from the local heritage initiative is identifying those groups that have got a great idea but not very much capacity and finding a way of supporting them so that they can take their project forward. Not all small applicants need that sort of support and advice, it is not something that we provide directly. We do not have the staffing and we do not necessarily have the local knowledge or skills to do that but the important thing for us is to find a way of putting those smaller newer applicants in touch with the folk who can provide them with the help, support and skills, and I am sure that is something that will be an element of our small grants programmes for the future because it has worked incredibly well both with the local heritage initiative and with our Young Roots scheme where we work with the National Youth Agency to provide funding for 13 to 20 year olds to engage them with heritage which you might think are a rather unpromising group to try and get involved in heritage but actually are incredibly interested and excited and have come up with some really great ideas for projects. We know that finding the right ways of supporting often first time applicants is absolutely crucial to the success of small grants programmes.

Q246 Paul Farrelly: A replacement is under active consideration. One of the frustrations with constant reorganisation across all parts of government is that by the time you have set a scheme up and if anything is valuable people know about it, suddenly it falls between the cracks and people do not know where to go.

Dame Liz Forgan: That is a very loud message you get from any kind of public consultation "For God's sake do not keep changing the programmes because it takes years for people to realise they are there". We try to keep a pretty simple structure. Essentially we have big grants, medium sized grants and small grants. We need to have those categories because the issues involved in a Ł10 million huge great canal scheme are quite different because you are dealing with different people, different disciplines, and different supervision from a small community matter like that so we have a different focus. We do try to keep the number of our special programmes extremely small and change them as little as we possibly can. As Carole said, the reason why small grants have to be looked at again is because of changes elsewhere which mean that structurally it has to change. We will keep that message well in mind.

Paul Farrelly: I am sure we will address this in the report.

Q247 Chairman: Your directions specifically exclude grants being given for projects which are for private gain and you also say in your evidence that "... assets in private ownership are a low priority for HLF funding". We have also heard evidence that private owners own and manage two-thirds of the nation's built heritage and that they are under severe pressure, particularly with the reduction in funding that has taken place from English Heritage. Do you think it is now time to reconsider your policy towards grants to private owners?

Dame Liz Forgan: We are just starting the process of consulting our next strategic plan. Every time we do that we raise this subject again precisely because of the point you make. We are in a bit of a bind. Our direction is pretty elastic, it says we must have projects which promote the public good or charitable purposes and which are not intended primarily for private gain, so that gives us a bit of leeway. When we consult people it is quite clear that the notion of handing large amounts of money, as people would see it, to wealthy private owners is not a popular idea. However, we have historically looked at ways in which we can, with imagination and help, support the private owners consistent with our directions. For instance, at the strategic review, having listened to really eloquent and well-founded pleas, especially from the owners of the historic buildings, what we did was to put in place an encouragement to them to come to us for schemes to support the public visitors to their houses: education, public access, so that would all help with the support of those buildings. Support for mending the roof of a historic house in private ownership is never going to be our key priority, I am afraid to say. Other people have a role in that but in terms of lottery funding I think it is right to be straight with the private sector and say, "Do not look to us for certain things that we cannot do, come to us for the things we can". We will look again, for instance, at this strategic plan to see whether in terms of countryside management there are other ways in which we can support private owners who are making their estates and their land available for public enjoyment, things like that. I think it would be wrong to imagine that we are likely to embark on a major programme of supporting heritage assets in private ownership per se and as a priority.

Q248 Chairman: Can I press you a little bit on that. We have seen the ways in which private owners use considerable imagination to access your funding. We went on a particular visit where we saw facilities such as a sensory tour, a Braille map for partially-sighted people and a virtual tour of the property, all of which are worthy projects, but they pointed out to us that the property is in a severe state of disrepair and there is a major need for expenditure on keeping the roof on. Does it not seem slightly strange that we should say it is fine to give private money for virtual tours but the serious threat to the fabric of the building cannot be addressed?

Dame Liz Forgan: It would do but there are another couple of lines to that dialogue. If you are a private owner of a historic building you have three choices. You look after it yourself, you turn it into a trust which gives it a different status and makes it immediately possible to look to us for support, or you sell it to someone richer than you who can afford to keep it up. Historically that has happened to many great houses. That is the rule of the marketplace. I am speaking to you honestly, I do not think it is ever likely that the Lottery will devote the sorts of sums of money it would have to make any difference whatsoever to the maintenance of the privately owned heritage to make that happen.

Q249 Chairman: I understand you feel that it is not appropriate for the Lottery but you have said in your evidence, grants for private owners have now almost totally gone, HLF funding should not replace them and the Heritage White Paper should address this issue. If HLF is not replaced, how should the Heritage White Paper address the issue?

Dame Liz Forgan: I think that if you talk to the owners of historic houses they will tell you that in the past support that was available to them from, say, English Heritage was much greater and it is no longer what it used to be because English Heritage's funding has declined.

Q250 Chairman: Why is it right that public money can be spent through English Heritage but not Lottery money through HLF?

Dame Liz Forgan: I think "right" is too strong a word for it. We have set out, within the terms of our directions, the priorities which the Lottery will apply to its funding, so everybody needs to be clear about the rules and they have to understand what we do, why we do it and what the priorities are. We do not say we will never fund private gain, we say public gain must greatly outweigh the private gain and it is never going to be a priority. That is our best guidance to people before they spend a lot of money applying to us. I think there is a perfectly good argument, which could be advanced, for the nation if it saw fit to support private owners in continuing ownership of historic assets through the statutory agencies if they so wanted to.

Q251 Chairman: Can I move to another aspect, which has cropped up in the evidence we have had from several witnesses, which is the plea that rather than wait for there to be a real problem requiring substantial expenditure on repair, more attention should be paid to promoting effective maintenance and therefore avoiding the need for that. Is that something which you would be in agreement with and would be in a position to promote?

Dame Liz Forgan: Can I ask Carole to answer that. I am passionately in favour of this but it is necessary to keep a very cool head when replying to this matter. Carole represents, in this instance, a cool head.

Ms Souter: We agree entirely. Very often the projects that we support are tackling problems that have accrued over many, many years and which would not be so acute if proper ongoing maintenance had taken place. I think the issue for us at the moment is how we can ensure that the projects we fund put in place good maintenance regimes for the future so they do not come back ten years later saying "We had that money for that particular building's refurbishment, or park, but now, unfortunately, it is still in difficulty because we have not been doing the ongoing maintenance." We require parks projects, for example, we require buildings to demonstrate what their plans are to keep their estate in good order for the future. What we do not do is provide funds for regular routine maintenance for owners as a matter of course and that comes back to the point I made earlier about additionality and ongoing funding. It is the responsibility of owners to encourage good maintenance and to make sure that they deliver the maintenance. I think what we are keen to support is information about education, and the development of skills in ensuring that maintenance happens on a regular basis. As I say for our own projects or the projects which we fund we can require it, we obviously cannot require others who do not come to us to ensure that they have got good maintenance regimes in place. The more we can emphasise and draw attention to the benefits of maintenance the better. I think, sadly, it is probably true that even as ordinary run-of-the-mill homeowners we do not always do the day-to-day maintenance in quite the way we should, and it will take a lot of encouragement but I think it is something that all of the bodies concerned with the heritage need to be emphasising all the time. Buildings and historic artefacts will require major maintenance from time to time and that cannot be avoided but if the regular day-to-day, year-on-year maintenance is kept under control that ten-yearly, 15-yearly cycle is much easier to manage.

Q252 Chairman: Is there a danger that there is a perverse incentive that owners will decide not to spend money on maintenance because they allow it to deteriorate so badly that they will not have access to funding for major repairs?

Ms Souter: I think it is certainly the case that some of the major capital projects and renovations that we have funded have been the result of lack of maintenance over time. I think it would be a very brave owner who decided to let things go in the hope of Lottery funding in the future, and we would always want to know and understand why that maintenance had not taken place in the past. I think in terms of local authorities it is very often quite clear. We would not look kindly on any suggestion that money was being diverted elsewhere on the assumption that we would come along and bail them out afterwards.

Dame Liz Forgan: This is such an important subject. Can I add a couple of points. One is that I think we have to look forward, we cannot really deal with the past. We need to be sure that we are doing all we possibly can to see that in ten years' time people are not coming back and asking for money again for the same projects that we have been funding. One of the things that we do, for instance, is to allow a local authority which comes to us for, say, a park to capitalise ten years of maintenance budgets as their match funding for our funding which means that it is written into the contract, there it is, there is a sum of money set aside in the budget for ten years or whatever the case may be. The problem is we do not have a police force and the issue of how we enforce that is one we need to think about a lot. The second issue I would lay on the table because I have no solution to this. I think here and there - and I am thinking particularly of churches - health and safety legislation has made it more difficult to enforce maintenance regimes. Once upon a time you could stick a ladder up a church and clear the gutters with a tall verger but now you have to scaffold the blooming place and it has hugely added to costs and really made the problem worse, for good reasons I am sure, but it is an ingredient.

Q253 Paul Farrelly: The Chairman's question has already touched on the overlap, welcome or not, between English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund, particularly where heritage funding is reducing and people are looking to bodies like yourself to fill the gap. I want to explore that further. First of all, in terms of the delineation of roles between yourselves and English Heritage, do you feel that they are clear or are there some areas in which those roles could be made clearer?

Dame Liz Forgan: Carole used to work at English Heritage so she is perhaps best placed to tell you.

Ms Souter: I think they are pretty clear. We are a UK-wide body covering the whole of the heritage natural historic environment, cultures, traditions, industrial, maritime and transport heritage. We have a very broad definition and we go right across the piece. English Heritage has a range of statutory roles and also obviously operates properties and so on. I think whilst the public may regularly use English Heritage Memorial/National Lottery Fund, in terms of the practitioners I think there is no real confusion. I think it is absolutely essential for us that English Heritage is in a position to fulfil its statutory duties and obligations and that it has the resources to provide the advice and the guidance that the sector needs in terms of standards and in terms of knowledge and education and so on. I think the discussion we had previously about private owners also relates to the relevant grant making streams. We work very closely with English Heritage in two particular ways, in relation to grant making both asking them to provide us with expert advice in relation to particular applications but also the joint scheme that we run for places of worship where we each contribute appropriate to our own aims, if you like, to a single scheme which makes it easier for places of worship to have one place to go for a grant and not to have to apply to each of us for different things. I think that does work extremely effectively and, as with other organisations that have statutory responsibilities in fields which we cover, we have very close links in terms of policy discussions, planning and those sorts of things. I think that there is a clear distinction between them.

Q254 Paul Farrelly: That then begs the question, do you think as things currently stand and as things develop in the near future that English Heritage is well-equipped and sufficiently resourced to fulfil its responsibilities?

Ms Souter: I think there is a tremendous demand on English Heritage to provide the extraordinary depth of expertise and knowledge that they have to an increasingly demanding customer base, if you like. We talked earlier about local authorities, and there is no doubt that English Heritage's work to help skill local authorities, both in terms of officers and indeed in terms of members, is extremely important and I am sure they could happily devote significantly more resource to that area of work. I think it is important that English Heritage continues to be properly resourced and for a whole range of reasons; they have not had the increasing level of resources which I think they feel they need to keep up with demand. Obviously from our point of view the more skills, expertise and knowledge there is out there in the world, the easier it is for us to respond to an application quickly and positively, and say, "Yes, this has got everything we need in it", and to disburse funds accordingly.

Q255 Paul Farrelly: Without disparaging English Heritage and the good people there in any way, in short the answer to the question is "no" at the moment?

Ms Souter: They could always use more resource, and I think they need more resource to be able to make best use of the skills that they have got. They are such an extraordinary resource of knowledge and expertise and, as we have said already, that knowledge and expertise is not shared across the countryside in all those places where it is needed.

Q256 Paul Farrelly: Do you think that impacts on your work as well and their being insufficiently equipped therefore lets you down?

Ms Souter: I do not think it lets us down, but I think it means that sometimes people who come to us need to take a little bit longer, need more help, maybe need to buy in help and it might be better for them to have more skills themselves having learned from English Heritage and taken advantage of that knowledge.

Q257 Paul Farrelly: Liz, you are straining!

Dame Liz Forgan: I think in an ideal world you have a really well resourced statutory agency whose expertise is established and respected which, for instance, administers rules about conservation areas so that everybody knows where they are and they work, and then the Lottery can dance around, be free to do its work, without getting involved in areas where it has not the expertise. I have to say, if you want to see what happens when the statutory agency is really not properly resourced, you look to Northern Ireland where you see awful depredation going on; not that anybody wills it, it is just there is not a structure, there is not a proper statutory agency to stand over it and say, "This is right and this is not right and this is how we are going to do it". I think English Heritage does a pretty good job but I think, as Carole says, the demand for that function and that expertise, in order to maximise the value of not only the heritage but also the Lottery contribution, is clear.

Q258 Paul Farrelly: Earlier on in response to previous questions, this horrible word/jargon "additionality" was used. Given the resource constraints in English Heritage at the moment, how do you feel that you are now being asked to substitute for what should be central government funding and projects? What pressure have you been under?

Ms Souter: I do not think we are asked directly to substitute for government funding. We have already mentioned local authority funding; I think there is no doubt that there are areas where we are funding projects which are dealing with many years of underfunding, whether it be local museums, parks, whatever. We are pretty clear about not substituting for government funding. It is a terrible word, "additionality", and it is incredibly hard to define, but I think we have got pretty good at knowing what we mean by it and spotting it. We always look to see how we can add value, if you like, do things that would not be possible without our funding. Sometimes that is because there simply is no other source of funding available; sometimes it is because we can add an extra layer of quality, inclusion or access to a project that might otherwise have happened but not happened in the same way. As Liz said earlier, we have got pretty elastic directions and I think we would both feel very strongly that we are not placed in a position where we are asked to do things in an inappropriate way. Were that to happen, we would be pretty good at making clear what that remit is as well. No, I do not think we are regularly asked to substitute for government funding. What I would say is that there is a range of areas where government funding would make a significant difference. We have not mentioned the National Heritage Memorial Fund this morning which is a fund operated by the same trustees that is a resource for acquisitions. We would very much welcome an increase to that funding to support acquisitions of objects, paintings, whatever. We also, of course, hope that the Government's review of the shares of good cause money going to heritage, which will be known in the middle of this year, will confirm the percentage of good cause monies that the Heritage Lottery Fund distributes. I think it would be a great loss to the sector if that were to decline in any sense.

Q259 Paul Farrelly: Finally, Chairman, if you will permit me, let me ask the same question a different way, because any body with money is going to be approached by anyone with nous to get any project off the ground. To what extent do you feel - even if it is not a scientific measurement - that people now are coming to you when they have approached English Heritage and English Heritage have said, "Sorry, have not got the money, try the Lottery Fund", for projects that they previously would have funded? Likewise, although my Government has done a grand job in giving local councils more cash, they are not exactly awash with the stuff at the moment and there are great pressures on grant-giving for non-statutory functions in local councils these days. To what extent do you feel over time that again people are saying, "Try the Lottery Fund" for projects in the past that they would have been able to fund or part fund?

Dame Liz Forgan: Occasionally people do say, "Try the Lottery Fund", but we are quite alert to this problem. It is not an exact science, as Carole says, but we will always ask questions. If somebody comes to us, we will say, "Is there somebody else whose job this is? Is there somebody else that has a responsibility for this? Why have they not done it?" If somebody comes to us and asks us to fund their disability access to a building, we will say, "No, that is your statutory duty. We are not funding that". If somebody finds asbestos and they want asbestos taken out of the roof of the museum and they come to us, we will say, "No, that is the job of the DCMS". We will only help with things like that in the context of a completely Total Lottery project. We are quite alert to that. People do try it on, of course they do a) because that is human nature and b) because the Lottery does represent a large amount of money and, as you say, it attracts people with need, but it is our job to maintain and police that separation. I think it may be that the fact that we are only a Lottery distributor helps us to maintain some clarity in this. The Arts Council, for instance, has two streams that it administers almost as a single fund and I sometimes wonder how they manage to tell which hat they are wearing. It is quite easy for us.

Ms Souter: Other sources of partnership funding are becoming more and more difficult to find, so I think that as European monies are lost from some areas, for example, we will find more people coming to us and saying, "Could you fund more of that because we have not got that source of funding?" That is going to be an increasing pressure particularly on regeneration-type projects in historic areas and historic buildings.

Q260 Alan Keen: Following questions from Philip Davies, you talked about engaging the public and, after all, that is who we all represent really. We heard Paul being very disparaging about the local authority representative who has some responsibility for this field that you are dealing in. There must be some worrying gaps, are there not? I represent the western half of the borough of Hounslow and I live in the eastern half. We have got Sion House and Osterley House and some other bits and pieces in between. I can understand the Friends of Chiswick House in London going to make representations, rightly so, to make sure that that house (thank goodness) is being looked after again very well. How will we fill the gaps in between in areas where they have not got Sion House like we have? Is there a role for schools, for instance? I was intending to say universities but there is not a university in every area so that would leave big gaps. Is there a role for schools to help co-ordinate and look at what really should be looked after in a particular local authority area? Are you concerned about these holes?

Dame Liz Forgan: I never thought of schools. That is an interesting idea. One of the frustrations looking right across the UK as we do is to see where local authorities have really concentrated on how to access Lottery money, have really looked on their heritage as a resource and figured out there is a lot of money available to look after it properly, and then resourced the capacity to ask for it. They tend to be, broadly speaking, the local authorities which are better resourced to do everything and the ones that do not have that system in place are the ones that need it most. There is a limit to the extent to which we can compensate for that. What we do is to look in every region of England and every nation at an index of combination of heritage lack and the number of times they have come to us for money. We have identified cold spots in each of those regions and we target those with particular development resource to go and work with people to make sure that they have the ability to ask us for money. That is the problem. People just cannot ask us for money because they do not know how to frame it and they have not got the resources to put it together. That is our contribution to this. I have had this conversation with the Church of England, for instance, and I have said to them, "Why don't you invest your money in a nationwide resource to enable little tiny parish churches to come to us for money? It is not up to us to resource that; why don't you resource that? For every pound you put into that you would reap many more pounds in response", and they are thinking about it. I think if you were looking at a national strategy, one of the ingredients, along with conservation officers (who are part of this story), is just to find a way in which every local authority had the resources to ask for Lottery money, to put it at its simplest, because they do not at the moment.

Q261 Alan Keen: Paul has already mentioned that local authorities are starved to a certain extent in order to make them more efficient. In the last few minutes you have mentioned disability access and that is something they should be doing and they will obviously concentrate, if they have not got too much money, on things they are forced to do rather than things that they would like to do if money was no problem. I recall when the Lottery first started that Sport England were not allowed to be proactive; they had to wait until people applied for money. That meant all the cricket pavilions in Surrey and Sussex got all the money. I am playing cricket this afternoon so I am not against cricket receiving help, but you are able to be proactive now and you are doing that. You said that you had not thought about schools being involved. Universities would be the natural source but as there are not universities in every area. I think it is a critical part of young people's education to understand history. Do you think there would be room for that? Is that something you would like to look at as a possibility for filling those gaps?

Dame Liz Forgan: We do a lot of work with schools. At least, we do a lot of work with heritage organisations to enable them to work with schools. I think that has been a transforming feature of the HLF's life. We have funded more education spaces - and I am sure the number is in here somewhere but there are hundreds of them all over the country - so that schools can now take children to see museums or landscapes or whatever and there is somewhere safe and dry for them to eat their sandwiches at lunch time and be taught in because previously that was not the case. So from that point of view we can help. The answer to this problem is manyheaded. One of the contributions that we have started to make was when we devolved the organisation some six or seven years ago so instead of everybody living in Sloane Square and doing the work from there, we physically devolved the organisation so there is now a presence in every English region and every nation. That means that it is possible for human beings who work for the Heritage Lottery Fund to engage directly with people in regions who can then ring up and say, "We don't know how to do this. Will you help us?" and we do. That is not at a systematic level within the statutory framework which is the bit that is missing here and there. So we do our best to plug the gaps but it is never going to be thorough until there is a statutory backing for it, I am afraid.

Ms Souter: I think it comes back to the small grants point, if I can just make that point. Very often an area that is not applying to us is not applying to any other funder for anything else either. So if our development staff can find a way of making contact and identifying the folk who can have a Ł25,000 or Ł30,000 grant to do a heritage trail or a local history map or something like that, that can be the first time and the first way, and from that you may get two or three people who come out of that project who think that they could go for some other project for something else, which might not be heritage related at all, but it has given them the confidence to know how to access resources and they can build on it from there on in.

Q262 Alan Keen: You say yourselves that vital tasks remain "still undone" and yet you are going to face a reduction in your funds. What remains undone and how are you going to try to tackle that with even less funds than you have got at the moment?

Dame Liz Forgan: We work very hard with the statutory agencies to try to get closer than we were to a definition of need. It is really quite hard to put your finger on reliable data about what the need really is in all the sectors that we deal with. However, we are making some progress and getting there. We have spelt out some of that in what we have said to you. We simply have to keep our heads in respect of a diminution of funding and what we are anticipating is that in the years leading up to the Olympic Games, which coincides with a couple of other aspects of our funding (it is not only the Olympic Games), that we will be looking at a diminution of funding which we hope will come back again if things go well for the rest of this year. We just have to look very clearly at priorities. To cut the message short, what the trustees have decided is that they will manage this dip in funding by essentially a policy of the biggest applicants taking the hardest hit so the reduction in spending will be greater for people who are asking us for Ł5 or Ł10 million than it will be for people who are asking us for Ł50,000 or half a million. We will just have to apply the criteria and do what we can and remember that it is still a very considerable amount of money and try to manage the views of people out in the country so that we do not send a message of panic around the place to say, "Don't bother applying to us because we have not got any money." So it is quite a tricky business of managing demand. We need to explain to people that we are going to have less money so they will have to think very carefully about what they apply to us for but without turning off the taps and stopping people asking us for things they probably ought to be asking us for.

Q263 Alan Keen: Will the Big Lottery play a part?

Ms Souter: I think it might well do. We have already got a joint parks programme with the Big Lottery which we launched recently where they are putting Ł90 million in to sit alongside the money that we have traditionally given to parks. That is a very happy combination of interests. We have run a parks programme for a long time and we will know exactly how to do it. They have said, "This is an area we are interested in too. Let's put the parks together." We are talking to them constantly about whether there are other areas in which we might be able to do that as well. We can sit alongside the Big Lottery quite comfortably because we are able to focus on the social areas which are important to them, but they do not have heritage directions so there will be always be very large areas of what we do that are only proper to us and which are not easily sitting within what the Big Lottery Fund can do. So we work very closely where there are areas of overlap but I think also we are very clear that there are things that are really important to us which do not sit very easily with them.

Q264 Paul Farrelly: Could I have a supplementary question to the line that Alan has been taking because this is very close to my heart, coming from an area like North Staffordshire where the real concern is about vicious cycles in one area and virtuous circles because of capacity in other areas. Potentially that will get worse as those cities are doing very nicely and want to be city regions. In some areas we are already at the bottom of the food chain in terms of cherry-picking people who have either expertise in conservation, for example, or expertise in getting money out of bodies like yourself and we are left with just bones to pick over. Liz, you said you are already advising the Church of England to set up a body that could resource parishes. You would have thought the Church of England would have done that already and could very well look after its own. Unless your funding increases with the number of grants it is going to be a zero sum game and for those people who are going to get three quid for every pound put into capacity building some people down the food chain are going to get 30 pence, so it is not going to be worthwhile for them. Without creating an overweening bureaucracy, how proactive can you be in looking at your stats? Take my area North Staffordshire - they are so well below par in making bids and getting grants - would you like to be proactive and help or do you rely on those areas for a light bulb to go on and for people to look at the stats themselves and think, "God, we are rubbish. We should go and talk to the Lottery funders to see what help they can give us to do better." How can you strike a balance?

Dame Liz Forgan: We come into contact with most of the RDAs and most of the local authorities one way or another and whenever we do we take the opportunity to say (in slightly more tactful terms, I hope) "There is an opportunity here. Please think about heritage as an asset and not as a difficulty," because very often local authorities with the worst problems simple see heritage as another problem.

Q265 Paul Farrelly: Absolutely.

Dame Liz Forgan: We will be missionary in taking any opportunity to say, "Think about it in a different way. Don't think about it as a problem. Think about it as one of your natural assets and invest in developing it. We can help you in the following ways ..." But in the end they are the responsible authorities and they have to take their responsibilities. When you get to the point that an actual application has come to us, as it often does, from a local authority which essentially has not got a clue, we will then really go into intensive care mode and surround them with every resource we can do to make sure that that project gets delivered in an area which really has nothing else going for it. We cannot do that very often because we simply do not have the resource ourselves, but here and there when it is quite clear that it is the local authority which is just not able to put its back behind what needs to be done to deliver a project and it is a project that really needs to be delivered in terms of the people and heritage of that place, we will get closer than we would otherwise do to make it happen.

Q266 Paul Farrelly: Sadly, I have lost my tact over five years of having to deal with my RDA. I find that being tactless is the only way to get something out of them. Is your main focal point the RDAs because your resource is limited?

Dame Liz Forgan: We will work with anybody who looks as if they have half an interest in taking that forward.

Ms Souter: Realistically we have two or three development staff per region but they will, as Liz says, work very closely with a local authority that has shown any interest in a project to get them to the point where there is something viable.

Q267 Chairman: You referred to your hope that post the Olympic dip you will go back to the previous position. There is of course consultation going on about that. Are you given reason to believe that you will at least get the current 16.6% to enjoy?

Dame Liz Forgan: I am very grateful to you for raising that question because it would be wrong for me to leave this room without hoping very much that when the Committee comes to consider its report it might give some thought to this. It is a very important moment for us. The Department's consultation on the future distribution of Lottery funding has closed. They are in the throes of making a decision. We are promised a decision in June of this year and at the moment, as would be quite proper, we have no undertakings from anybody about what the outcome of that is likely to be. We have guidance that we hope we will continue to be a good cause. The question of the shares of the various good causes however is absolutely up in the air. I think it would be an absolute catastrophe for the heritage of Britain if the Heritage Lottery Fund were not to continue to receive at least the share that it currently does of Lottery proceeds. The difference that that money has been able to make has been simply extraordinary. On the whole looking over the last 11 years of all my predecessors, the record of the spending of that money is a pretty good one. There have been few, if any, disasters. As an organisation we are pretty efficient. We cost the least in terms of our administrative overheads of any Lottery distributor. I think we have grounds to be reasonably confident in the performance of the organisation but, more importantly, confident in the needs of heritage, and anything that you feel able to do to support the argument that this support should continue we would be extremely grateful for.

Chairman: I am sure we will wish to express a view! Thank you very much indeed.

Memorandum submitted by Heritage Link

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Anthea Case CBE, Chairman, and Ms Kate Pugh, Secretary, Heritage Link, gave evidence.

Chairman: Could I welcome now Anthea Case and Kate Pugh of Heritage Link. Your organisation represents 82 different heritage bodies and I am sure trying to get them all to speak with one voice is not an easy task, but it is important there should be some kind of co-ordination and therefore we were especially keen to hear from you. Can I ask Philip to kick off.

Q268 Philip Davies: Many of the submissions that we have had, including from some of your own members, have focused on the role of the DCMS in promoting heritage within government and many have been critical and said it is a small department and does not have the influence within government to do that effectively. What are your views on the efforts of the DCMS in promoting and representing heritage within government? Would you like to see any change in the way that they do represent heritage in government?

Ms Case: I think you have probably yet to meet an interest group who thought that the government department that it looked to did its job exceedingly well, but I think you are right to say that there is a widespread feeling among our members that DCMS do not represent the heritage strongly enough across Whitehall and indeed outside. Our perception - and I think it is difficult to measure this - is that even within the DCMS heritage, the built environment, and the historic environment is not "Top of the Pops" as it were. If there is a hierarchy of bits of the department we do not think the historic environment is tremendously high there. Even more worryingly I think we see its impact outside in areas where our members are involved, particularly I think with the kind of agendas which the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister runs, as being extremely limited. Part of that goes back to A Force for Our Future which was the Government response to the English Heritage Report Power of Place. Part of that was to set up a network within government departments of green ministers taking responsibility for heritage issues in those departments. That seems to us not to work at all and not to work at all because the DCMS has not put effort into making it work, if I can put it like that.

Q269 Philip Davies: Just to clarify, would you prefer heritage to continue to be represented by DCMS in government and that they just do it a bit more vigorously or would you prefer that the responsibility went to a more heavyweight government department like ODPM given its role in planning and the fact they took over the promotion of heritage altogether? Which would you see as the best option?

Ms Case: I think in all machinery of government, wherever you draw the boundary there is difficulty. Boundaries always cause difficulty. If you look at the views of our members, on the whole what they would really want is for the DCMS to pursue the historic environment with more energy and with a broader perception of what the historic environment is and what contribution it could make to modern society, together with some mechanism so that getting historic environment issues on to particularly the land use planning agendas of ODPM, Sustainable Communities, happened because there was somebody in that Department who took an interest in it. If I can give you an example of where we feel the DCMS are letting the sector down, ODPM are pursuing an agenda about community ownership of assets. Many of our members are building preservation trusts and are heavily engaged in that kind of area and yet it took one of our members to put pressure on David Miliband to get historic environment represented in the working group on that, rather than DCMS taking the initiative and ensuring that the historic environment as one of its sectors was represented. It is that type of slipping between two stools that we would like to see addressed and like to see addressed because somewhere in the DCMS there was somebody who was really championing the historic environment and the benefits of investing in it across the field.

Q270 Philip Davies: In your memorandum you state that "our deep concern is that while sport, museums and the arts have had financial recognition from government, the appreciation by government of the historic environment is too shallow." Why do you think that the Government have not been providing stronger financial support to the sector? Do you think in our world of political correctness it might be perhaps because you do not reach out to as diverse an audience as some of those other sectors do? What is your view on that?

Ms Case: Can I put the bit about the diversity of the audience on one side for a minute. I will come back to that. I still think there is a perception that the heritage is somehow not modern, fuddy-duddy, technical, the quotation that you used earlier on from David Lammy about "experts talking to experts". I do not think that the DCMS, and particularly David Lammy, actually believed that. I hope we have gone some way to persuading him that that is not the case, but I think there still is a perception in the DCMS that the historic environment is about sites, about things with fences round them, things you go to visit, so they can think about it in the same way as they think about going to the theatre or going to a sports event. You can then count the numbers of people going in, tick access boxes, and get the Brownie points from doing that. If you take a wider view of the historic environment and treat it as what surrounds you as you walk from your home to the shops or as you walk from your home to school, the things that make up an identity of a community, it is much more difficult to tick the boxes and therefore I think it is much more difficult to make the kind of case which says, "We will fund it provided you get your visitor numbers up from X to Y." It goes back to the other point we made in our memorandum about whether the DCMS really understands that the historical environment is wider than sites and things that you visit. Turning to the point about diversity and access, in one sense if you believed it is walking down the street, the historical environment is probably the most democratically accessible cultural set of assets that there is. You can see it as you walk outside this building. You are engaged in the historic environment. You may not understand it but you can understand it and it is part of what you do. Where we are talking about sites and things that have visitors, I think that it is right to say that perhaps we have been slower than some other cultural sectors to take up the challenge of getting more diversity in our audiences. One of the things we hope to do this year, and we have got some funding from English Heritage among others to do this, is to try and do some research and to do some practical work with heritage bodies across the regions as to what good practice is and how they can learn how to do it better. I think that has been rather slow in coming.

Q271 Paul Farrelly: I want to get on to English Heritage on a similar line of questioning but before that I want to follow up Philip's line. I have a great deal of sympathy for the logic of having planning and heritage issues in one department, but then I think of personalities and personalities drive priorities, and if the ODPM is all about relaxing planning laws to allow people to build even more whacking great distribution sheds because it allegedly contributes to economic efficiency, that is going to conflict with the role of people who want to tighten and make more effective planning regulations. I would fear for that sort of outcome because priorities come back to people at the end of the day. Chris Smith was the last person who should be negotiating with an entrepreneur, shall we say, like Ken Bates about the make-up of Wembley Stadium in his kitchen with no-one taking notes, but there was no doubting his passion for the arts and heritage. Can you now in either the ODPM or in the DCMS say to us that there is one minister there who you are really confident in who has got heritage really right at the top of their agenda, as you might have said with a person like Chris Smith? Can you give me a name?

Ms Case: I hope we are encouraging Mr Lammy to take that role but I could not say with my hand on my heart that he is yet taking it. In terms of what he is saying he is beginning to say some of the things that we would expect somebody to say who was going to champion the historic environment.

Q272 Paul Farrelly: And in the other big department ODPM, is there a name?

Ms Case: No.

Q273 Paul Farrelly: Sadly no?

Ms Case: Sadly no.

Q274 Paul Farrelly: English Heritage - after all the structuring, cutbacks and pressures that they are under, do you think they are and can be now a really effective lead for the heritage sector? If not, if you had a wish-list what could be done to improve the situation?

Ms Case: Yes, I think they can be. Yes, I think they need to be. I think that they have been hamstrung by two things. One is reorganisation and change and I think that inevitably with any organisation makes it rather inward-looking, reduces morale, reduces the certainty of people inside the organisation but also certainty outside the organisation. In one sense my wish-list would be that they would be allowed a period of peace and quiet, as it were, to get on with doing the job which has now been set them, which is a more strategic focus for the future. Thinking about coming here today, in my previous incarnation I nearly always sat here with the Chief Executive of English Heritage. In the time I was at the Heritage Lottery Fund, there were four different Chief Executives of English Heritage. That does not make for consistency, it seems to me, in how an organisation develops. The second thing I think they need to be more effective is more money. It is as simple as that. I do think that the things that they are now trying to do, a lot of which are about being more outward looking, trying to engage with other people and other agendas, are things that actually depend on making relationships and growing relationships over time, and I think that was one of the things that English Heritage has done not terribly well in the past. Again going back to your earlier conversation with Liz Forgan, when the Heritage Lottery Fund opened its doors it was quite clear that people on the ground in the heritage - local history societies, that sort of group - did not know where to go to to get advice. My feeling was that the Art Council and sports did know that there was a thin dotted line that ran from the local societies up through the regional arts councils to HQ. If you take the local heritage initiative scheme, which has been tremendously successful and which my members certainly want to see continued, the hand-holding was done by the Countryside Agency, it was not done by English Heritage. Is English Heritage now saying that if the Countryside Agency is not going to do it we are going to do it? That seems to me something that if you are serious about outreach and enabling people on the ground to flourish and getting a wider audience for the heritage and wider participation, you would want to do.

Q275 Paul Farrelly: Another horrible phrase "modernisation" - and, Kate, you might want to come in on this as well as Anthea - English Heritage has been through one of these modernisation programmes. What precisely has that achieved?

Ms Pugh: It used to be very well respected for its research, its conservation and its personnel. I know that some of our members would cite examples where the expertise is now spread extremely thinly. For example, the Association of Gardens Trust says that there are only five landscape specialists and the Battlefields Trust says that it is only 10% of one man across the whole of English Heritage and across England. Although they are obviously fighting for their own particular specialisms, I do think the support that specialist voluntary organisations are getting from English Heritage is getting scarce and very thin on the ground, and as heritage itself gets wider and wider that is one gap that is emerging now. I think on the personnel there has been a lot of restructuring and the latest restructuring has lost some extremely long-standing, experienced personalities there which is a shame. It is a different world; we have to move on.

Q276 Paul Farrelly: So perversely then modernisation has been a success because it has got rid of lots of historical expertise, but that surely was not the intention?

Ms Pugh: They were very well-respected officers who took voluntary redundancy.

Q277 Paul Farrelly: We have also as MPs of all parties, particularly since the last Election, been having to put up with across many spheres "permanent revolution", a concept we thought had gone out in the 1920s with an ice pick. The Government seems to be changing everything and now we are doing this inquiry in anticipation of yet another shake-up. Is there a case for any more change or is there a case for bodies now that have been modernised and changed to be left alone to develop?

Ms Case: There are two key public sector bodies in the heritage field. One is the Heritage Lottery Fund and the other is EH. My feeling would be that they are both now sufficiently efficient, slimmed down, whatever the right phrase is, to enable them to stay as they are and to go on doing what they are intended to do. The judgments which are made about them ought to be about what they deliver, not about how they are internally bureaucratically structured.

Q278 Paul Farrelly: We do not want this purely to concentrate on English Heritage. We heard a reference previously to Northern Ireland and the shambles there. What about Scotland and CADW in Wales? Can you say a few brief words in your experience about the situation in Wales and Scotland?

Ms Case: I have to say my own experience on Scotland and Wales is not as up-to-date as it used to be. When I did deal with them, each of the three statutory bodies - CADW, Historic Scotland and EH - was very different and in some senses I think that Historic Scotland both benefited from and suffered from the fact that instead of being a non-departmental public body and therefore at arms' length from the Scottish Executive, it is an agency, and it therefore was less good, if I can put it like that, at being seen as the independent leader of the sector. I think the same to some extent is true of CADW. The other thing to bear in mind is that both of them operate in a much smaller community, if I can put it like that. It may be a joke but when you go to Cardiff everybody knows everybody, as it were, you are not dealing with nine English regions. So I think that the jobs that they do are rather different.

Q279 Chairman: Your body came into existence really in response to complaints from the Government that the sector was too disparate and there was no coherent single voice, and you obviously are attempting to provide that. Do you feel that having set up Heritage Link it is listened to by the Government?

Ms Case: I would challenge your first assumption that it was set up in response to complaints from Government. I think it was set up because when the voluntary sector organisations in significant numbers sat round the table to do the work which led to Power of Place they realised that they were not punching as hard as they could because they were sitting in different silos and not talking to each other. I think that Heritage Link is genuinely the creature of a will from the voluntary sector rather than a response to complaints from the Government. Whether we are having and how significant an impact we are having, I do not know. I think we are beginning to have an impact. I do not make enormous claims because I think any new organisation inevitably takes time to learn how to do the job that it was set up to do. I think there was a period at the beginning of Heritage Link's life where the members took time to learn how to work together, if I can put it like that. I think we are now doing that and perhaps Kate can illustrate that.

Ms Pugh: Yes, I think over the last two years there have been definite signs that there is a culture of working together, which is really encouraging. I see that in several different ways. One of them is the co-operation we now get for signing joint letters and responses to consultations on particular issues. This used to be quite difficult just in terms of office procedures but as people get used to this they are much more willing to do this faster, people are keener, they know that we will take the response forward and they are looking forward to having that help. We always try to show some added value and I think that in particular has come true. I think that there was some scepticism perhaps that we were going to supplant their campaigning activities but that is not true. We are always saying it is as well as not instead of their own responses. That is one area where there is a lot more co-operation and understanding of our role. The second I think is the interest groups that are now emerging under Heritage Link itself. There are various groups already there. The membership is 80 strong. There are the working groups which concentrate on land use, planning, inclusion and funding. Those bring together certain elements of the membership and under those there are six projects this year, again bringing together people with a particular interest in funding or fund-raising skills or inclusion issues. Under that formal level there is also a new brand of interest groups emerging in response to a Government initiative like the Education Task Group or the Rural Heritage Task Group, both responding to consultations and drawing together certain sections of the membership. Also the members are making up the groups themselves now. There is interest from other areas to come together and swap ideas, join up and act together. I think that is partly an influence that Heritage Link has had. We also facilitate interest groups like skills. We facilitated a workshop with Cultural and Creative Skills Sector Skills Council and also with the Urban Arts Trust (?). That is offering a platform for members with interests to come together and they are certainly taking up those opportunities. I think the culture of working together is both at national level and at regional level because we also run regional networking events which bring the voluntary heritage sector together at regional level. Those are certainly areas where I see an impact that we have made.

Q280 Chairman: How much access to ministers do you get?

Ms Case: We talk to DCMS ministers. We have had a DCMS minister at each of our last two AGMs to talk to our membership. We do not get very easy access to other ministers, though certainly education ministers have been quite keen to put us in touch with people in their department and work in their department that they think we can help with.

Q281 Alan Keen: You have answered most of the questions I was going to ask already so could I just move straight on to ask if the Government have had discussions on the Cultural Olympiad with your sector?

Ms Case: The DCMS has had one meeting with us about what the historic environment might contribute to it. I think at the moment we are in a state of some frustration, if I can put it like that, with a feeling on the one hand, and a worry clearly, that the Olympics is going to suck money out of the sector in some sense. That is not just Government funding but construction skills and all that sort of thing. Also at the moment there does not seem to be anybody for us to engage with about what the historic environment could offer in the Olympic context. Certainly some of our members have some quite interesting ideas, for example about the regeneration of East London, but at the moment do not know who to engage with about it. We are due to have a meeting with the DCMS representative on the Olympics Operating Group after Easter when we hope to find a way of opening those doors and facilitating those conversations because I think it would be a pity if when we talk about the legacy in terms of the regeneration of East London for the Olympics, it was just a lot of splendidly designed new buildings (which wearing a different hat I am sure CABE would be interested in ensuring) but equally if it did not do something for the existing heritage of those areas which can add to the sense of identity and distinctiveness of those communities.

Q282 Alan Keen: There is a great opportunity to have a link with a historical area even without many iconic sites. What ideas have come up from your area?

Ms Case: The Heritage of London Trust certainly has been thinking about it quite seriously and at one stage had a thought about whether you could take a corridor from Central London going toward Newham and Stratford and identify where there were buildings of importance to those communities which could do with some maintenance and being refreshed. That is the sort of thing they have been thinking about. I think it is important that we are talking about doing things which will have an impact for tourism around the Olympics but also for those communities on-going after the Olympics so that it is not simply something which happens in 2012 and then stops being of benefit.

Q283 Alan Keen: So is there anything you would like us to put in the report on that?

Ms Case: I think finding some way of ensuring that the historic environment can play its full role and that if one is talking about the cultural programme it is not just about festivals and opera, however important they are, but it is about the fabric of these communities.

Q284 Paul Farrelly: I have got a quite separate question from what Alan was talking about but come to think about it you have sparked off another bug bear for me! I am the MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is in North Staffordshire if you have not quite gathered that so far, but when I am in London I have the privilege of living in Hackney. At the moment there has been a big rumpus, which might be one of many small rumpuses across London but being in the local area I know about it, about the approach to the new Tube which is coming to Dalston in Hackney which is being driven by the Olympic timetable so that it actually gets achieved, but building the 18-storey tower blocks in the meantime is going to demolish lots of sites near there which have got great cultural and historical interest to local people. I think there is a second injunction there at the moment that the local group has gone to court to get to stop Hackney Council deliberately neglecting the area in the hope of demolishing it because of the Tube and so on and so forth. That shows the local engagement. However, when we sat here with Ken Livingston in our Olympic evidence-taking session he made it pretty clear that local groups like that are not going to get too much sympathy from him, and neither presumably are yourselves, because nothing should stand in the way of progress and the timetable being achieved. The same question that Alan was asking, what co-operation and access do you get to the London Mayor?

Ms Case: We have not ourselves gone to the London Mayor, in part because we see our role as being "national" rather than "local", but again I think that those of our members who have tried to talk to the London Mayor and the London Development Agency have found it a rather frustrating experience for those sorts of reasons.

Q285 Paul Farrelly: Thank you, Chairman, for bearing with me, I just wanted to give some publicity to OPEN, the organisation that is fighting for that historic environment. That is O-P-E-N, Chairman! I will send them the page of evidence. These are issues that are maybe replicated across historic parts of East London, if not West London.

Ms Pugh: Can I just say that Heritage Link is very keen on local engagement in the planning process and it is the subject of our most recent research. The title of the research was called Why Bother? You do wonder sometimes why the local communities have the courage to go on and on and on when they get such a diffident response.

Q286 Paul Farrelly: You say "Why bother?" The real question I have been asked to ask here is I detect a certain level of despair from your evidence when you urge there should not be any dilution of the current level of statutory protection for heritage assets. That does really smack of some despair because surely the issue is how can it be strengthened?

Ms Case: If despair was the message that you got, I do not think despair was the message that we intended to give about the level of statutory protection. Like everybody else who has given evidence to you, our real concern is about the resources that may or may not be available to deal with whatever system emerges. You have already had a conversation this morning about the number of conservation officers and their skills in a traditional sense. I am very conscious of the need for them to have communication skills if they are to engage with local communities. I think one of the difficulties is that quite often local authority officers, whether they are conservation officers or archaeologists, use language which does not make much sense to small local groups which are not used to that planning language, if I can put it like that. If we are to engage local communities we need conservation officers and others who are skilled in talking to people and letting them have their say and understand what is being said.

Q287 Paul Farrelly: We have discussed at length the proposal of having statutory conservation officers in each authority and the side effects of how that might not work and alternatives which try to attain the same outcome. There was a suggestion earlier, again echoed in parts of this inquiry, that local areas should be able to draw on committed resources for this in terms of architectural heritage centres. Is that something that you are also in favour of?

Ms Case: My experience of architectural heritage centres, including the one in Hackney for example, is that they have been very good at engaging their local communities and in particular in beginning to engage young people. Going back to the question Mr Keen asked earlier about schools, if you can get young people to understand about the nature of the historic environment, the street pattern, why it is like it is, I think then you are hopefully going to have a generation which will be much more at ease in having discussions about planning and development and that sort of issue.

Q288 Paul Farrelly: Final question - is it a frustration to you, as it is to many people involved in backing these sorts of centres, that heritage by its very definition is not a time-limited issue nor is design, but these bodies quite often after many great efforts setting the things up suddenly find that after three years they have to go cap in hand trying to scratch around for money to carry on the job?

Ms Case: I think that is a frustration to everybody who depends on that sort of funding from government or local government. It is a fact of life.

Q289 Paul Farrelly: More priorities. Kate, have you got anything to say on how we can improve things in terms of strengthening the statutory protection on the ground?

Ms Pugh: I do think the resources and skills are the main issues. That has come up from our members in responses to the heritage protection field. How exactly you do that has been discussed enormously but it is only now really being discussed by DCMS and ODPM. There are some issues - not small - in the change in legislation. Certainly we have within our membership the joint committee of the National Amenity Societies who are at the sharp end of the actual protection. I agree with Anthea that education and community involvement are going to be really important over the next decade or so and how to get the best out of the community to facilitate their involvement is something that obviously we are very interested in. So first of all you need the statutory protection but then you need the impetus and public interest in it to make it effective.

Q290 Chairman: Do you think the Government properly understands how to deal with essentially what are a huge number of voluntary bodies made up of people who do this out of love? You in your evidence stress the importance of the voluntary sector throughout the role of maintaining the heritage. Is that something that is properly understood within government and do they deal with it as effectively as they might?

Ms Case: I think it is a challenge for the DCMS to deal with the voluntary sector. Perhaps that is why we get these criticisms about there being too many bodies or not being able to get its act together, because my perception is that for most of the other cultural sectors the DCMS deals with, there are more statutory bodies or more big organisations for them to deal with. If you take the museums sector, for example, there is the statutory Museums Council, there is the Archives Council but there are the big national museums as well as the local authority ones so it cascades down, and I think that the normal method of intercourse, if I can put it like that, between the DCMS and its sectors is between the two public sector bodies with the levers, the carrots and sticks as it were, which apply to relationships between two public sector bodies. I think that the historic environment voluntary sector poses different issues because how does it engage with us? It does not have levers or has not found yet the right levers to engage with us. The funding levers are held by heritage in so far as there are any. We pose a challenge in terms of finding a modus vivendi, if I can put it like that, in which we can engage fully with them and they can engage fully with us. Whether that is better or different in other government departments where there are a lot of voluntary agencies (the Home Office is probably the one that springs to mind) I do not know, but I certainly feel that for our sector we have not yet found the right framework.

Chairman: A final question from Paul.

Q291 Paul Farrelly: Just a very quick question about VAT. Everyone is delighted that the Chancellor has extended the scheme for churches in the Budget. You have written to him about zero rating VAT on historic repairs. Have you had a response from him or the Paymaster General?

Ms Case: We have not had a response from him. We have had an informal conversation with the Paymaster General and we are following that up by going to talk to her, but I think that it is the issue on which the sector is more united than anything else. It is one of the things which could contribute to the "stitch in time" maintenance issue, but even if nothing is done on the tax front, if you take the grant scheme for listed places of worship, in a sense the principle that underlies that is the same principle as you could apply to any of the non-trading charitable bodies or private owners in the historic environment sector.

Q292 Paul Farrelly: What will you say to the Paymaster General if she tells you this will just be a nice little tax break for the upper and middle classes? "We have given to the ecclesiastical classes but we ---"

Ms Case: I suppose they have given a tax break to the ecclesiastical classes if one is looking at it like that. I think what we shall be saying to her is if you think that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for listed places of worship, why do you not think it is a reasonable thing to do for other categories? I think there is a real issue for the Treasury because they are clearly going to be worried about leakage, but if we all put our thinking hats on we ought to be able to find a way in the same way listed places of worship are satisfactorily ring-fenced (or at least nobody has ever said that they are not) of ring-fencing building preservation trusts or other sectors within our sector.

Q293 Paul Farrelly: When you go to see Dawn with your two or three or four-page memorandum about how ring-fencing can work, would you send that to us as well?

Ms Case: Thank you.

Q294 Chairman: Is it not too late though?

Ms Case: The deadline for the thing I wrote to the Chancellor about, Annex K, is passed, which is why I think having the conversation has to be now probably about extending the grant scheme rather than changing the tax system.

Q295 Chairman: You were worried specifically about the opportunity that existed and you got no joy?

Ms Case: We had no reply.

Q296 Chairman: You had no reply. Can I thank you very much for your time.

Ms Case: Thank you very much.