House of Commons Hansard Debates for 18 Dec 1996 (pt 36)

Mr. Nick Hawkins (Blackpool, South): It is Christmas.

Mr. Coombs: Yes, the Bill will bring the cheer of Christmas to many owners of historic houses, which, until now, have been threatened with dilapidation or closure.

I want to contribute to the debate because of the importance of our heritage to tourism. Last year, 23.7 million foreign visitors came to Britain, no doubt for a variety of reasons, but their desire to see our heritage must have been one of the strongest. Some argue that the Government do not give enough money to the arts, our heritage and tourism, but the lottery, which is enabling us to enhance our tourist attractions, will lead to a growth in the number of visitors. One could think of many examples of such attractions, but I shall limit myself to one. The new Tate gallery of modern art at the Bankside power station site, not far from the House, will undoubtedly attract to London many more visitors who love modern art.

The opportunities to entice more visitors to Britain will more than offset any reduction that the Government may seek to make in the money that they give to the British Tourist Authority or the English tourist board because of difficult financial times. We have created a honeypot, and the bees are coming to it from around the world.

I do not need to labour the importance of our heritage to tourism, because those who are present are well aware of that. Tourism will continue to be a massive generator of jobs, but that must be judged against the background of the degeneration of the infrastructure of so much of our heritage. The work needed to maintain our heritage goes on constantly, and in a sense gets more difficult every year because our heritage ages every year. That decay is all very well when people want to look at ruins. Stonehenge would look pretty odd if we rebuilt it, and I hope that we never do. It would obviously be nonsense to suggest that our prehistoric or Roman heritage should be kept in anything other than its current condition, but what about our heritage from the Jacobean and Tudor eras, which is in private hands and has suffered serious decay over many decades?

British people's interest and that of visitors in our joint heritage is intense and growing. There is no doubt that our generation is far more aware of our past and the importance of our history than any generation that came before it.

I am lucky enough to represent the constituency in which the Royal Commission for Historical Monuments for England has been relocated. I pay tribute to the work of Tom Hassall and his staff. They have created an extraordinarily rich treasure trove, which is now being explored by more and more visitors who come to see our monuments.

There is a growth of interest in this country's industrial heritage, so I welcome the Bill's provision to enable access to our industrial heritage and to promote education so that younger generations will become aware of the United Kingdom's industrial heritage.

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In that context, I want to refer to another project in my constituency. The Great Western Railway museum in Swindon has occupied an extremely small building for many years, and a project is now before the national heritage memorial fund to convert a much larger building on the old railway works site into a magnificent new railway museum. It is an imaginative scheme, which is supported by the local council, and it could, in time, create a national railway museum of the south, which might complement--but not, I hope, rival--the excellent museum in York.

Interest in railways is intense in Swindon, which has a railway history that is the envy of other towns. That interest is not limited to Swindon and the surrounding area, but is matched by interest throughout the country and around the world. The romance of the Great Western Railway--God's wonderful railway--and of steam brings together people of all ages, each of whom has a small boy or small girl inside who is trying to escape, in remembering the days when they stood on the platform watching the steam engines of the past. I hope that those memories will be found in Swindon's museum of the future.

Mr. Stephen: Does my hon. Friend agree that the importance of a railway museum is that the locomotives should be kept in working order, so that we can see them, hear them and smell them in action and not look at them sitting in a building as a static exhibit?

Mr. Coombs: I welcome that intervention and assure my hon. Friend that there is every intention of providing a linking line from the main Great Western line to the museum, so that railway engines can be moved off the country's main railway network into the museum. It is also intended that a workshop will be created, where people will be able to watch engines being worked on by railway engineers--there are many such engineers living in my constituency who would love to get back to work, albeit in a museum, in order to demonstrate the skills that they mastered in their working lives. In addition, such engines as King George V and Caerphilly Castle will be on display and I look forward to selling my hon. Friend a ticket to the museum when it is built. However, I must stick to my subject and not allow our mutual love of railways--with which I am sure all hon. Members were born--to cause me to stray too far.

We must strike a note of caution. The NHMF and the heritage lottery fund are soon likely to be over-subscribed; despite the success of the lottery, there are more projects awaiting consideration than there are resources to fund them. It is therefore inevitable that some discrimination will be necessary and projects will have to be worth while and well thought out if they are to succeed in obtaining grant funding.

It is not only councils such as my own that are making bids to the HLF; I am glad to say that, rightly, many individuals are seeking to preserve heritage in their area. A quarter of a mile away from the railway museum is a scheme to save the mechanics institution--a building constructed in the 1950s by the Great Western Railway in order to educate its work force and give them an opportunity to understand the cultural advances of the

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Victorian era. Long before the Education Act 1944 and the Arts Council, an enlightened capitalist company sought to give its employees access to education. The institution was a magnificent building, but it has been closed for many years and has fallen into total disrepair.

As part of the work undertaken a few years ago by candidates of the Common Purpose organisation, a group of people got together to see whether the mechanics institution could be saved from its current state of disrepair. I pay tribute to the efforts of, in the first instance, Colin Grattan and, more recently, Martha Parry and Donald Brunwin, who have tried to put together a project that could be the subject of a bid to the HLF. However, such ad hoc organisations find it extremely difficult to gain access to the professionalism that is necessary to make such projects work and to bring them to a standard that the HLF will accept.

I put it to my hon. Friend the Minister that there is room for help to be given at an early stage, to evaluate schemes while they are still merely a dream or a principle at stake and to determine whether they are worth developing further. Recently, I had the opportunity of discussing that point with the chief executive of the NHMF, Anthea Case, and she assured me that anyone coming to the fund would be given as much help as possible, and I pay tribute to that helpful and understanding attitude among the NHMF's staff. There is a gap, which we could do more to fill by reaching out to people who have dreams and who want to try to help preserve our heritage. I would welcome an opportunity at a later stage to look for ways in which that might be achieved. There are obvious financial implications, but they need not be excessive, and I hope that my hon. Friend will consider the matter.

That brings me to a more general point that should be taken into account when discussing the Bill--matching funds. In a recent debate on tourism, I talked about the problem of matching funds. I draw the House's attention to an example that I cited then: a proposal to give Kennet and Avon Canal Trust £25 million from the HLF. That was welcomed with enormous enthusiasm in Wiltshire and elsewhere along the line of the Kennet and Avon canal, but since the announcement was made, it has become clear that the matching funds needed to enable the scheme to go ahead are considerable--around £7 million has to be found from local sources, and that is not an easy task.

I put it to my hon. Friend that, sooner or later, we shall have to revisit the question of matching funds. If we have decided that a project is sufficiently worth while for us to devote £25 million to it, are we really saying that, if it proves impossible to find matching funds, we do not want the scheme to go ahead at all? We are in danger of appearing to say that. I hope that there will be some flexibility in assessing the quality of projects. They should not be assessed in the context of determining whether there is enough local enthusiasm.

There is always tremendous local enthusiasm for such projects, but there is a limit to the sum that we can ask local authorities to provide out of their necessarily limited budget. There is a limit to how much we can ask the private sector to contribute at local level. All hon. Members know of the constant pressure on the larger employing companies in any area to provide funding for charitable and voluntary organisations. There is a limit to what local fund raisers can raise. A canal stretching

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100-odd miles from Bristol to London is not a local project and will not be easily funded locally to the tune of about £7 million. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will have some thoughts on that subject, if not this afternoon, some time during the Bill's passage through the House.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) mentioned access. Of course we would agree that when we give money to, for example, historic houses, it is right to insist on public access--that lottery money cannot be used to prop up a house for its own sake.