V. SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
48. Our principal conclusions and recommendations
are as follows:
(i) We are deeply concerned that, in policy
statements by the Department and in public statements by Ministers,
tourism is subordinated in favour of more glamorous and trivial
matters. We recommend that the Department's economic objective
should be to foster the tourism, creative and sports industries.
The Department's Annual Report should provide specific information
on how its sponsorship results in enhanced economic performance
year-on-year in each of its sectors. Clearly, the economic objective
that we recommend must have repercussions not only upon the work
of the Department, but also upon its title. We consider the latter
issue later in the Report (paragraph 8).
(ii) The distribution of Ministerial responsibilities
within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport appears likely
to distort fulfilment of the Department's objectives. We recommend
that Ministerial responsibility for all media should be unified.
We recommended in our most recent Report on The Multi-Media
Revolution that such responsibility should be located in a
new Department and we hope that recommendation will be accepted.
If not, the need for the unification of media responsibilities
in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be all the
more important. We further recommend that tourism should be the
lead responsibility of a Minister in the Department, and that
the Secretary of State should concern himself with it far more,
in actions, in policy and in public statements (paragraph 11).
(iii) We do not doubt the enthusiasm of
Mr Banks on relations with the Department for Education and Employment.
Nevertheless, simply noting the influence of the Department for
Education and Employment is not enough. There ought to be co-ordination
between Departments in which the knowledge and experience of the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport in sporting matters is
fed into decisions by the Department for Education and Employment
(paragraph 13).
(iv) We note the Department's commitment
to enhance its influence within Whitehall and to highlight the
economic and cultural importance of the sectors which it sponsors.
However, a commitment is not an achievement and unfortunately
the Department has not enhanced its influence in the way it says
it would like to do. The Secretary of State should now make it
his highest priority to advance the Department both within Cabinet
and by taking a much tougher attitude in his negotiations with
the Treasury which has certainly not been achieved and may not
even have been attempted. There is considerable potential benefit
to the sectors which the Department sponsors from being at the
heart of one Department's objectives rather than at the periphery
of several. Nevertheless, we are concerned that "creative
Britain" provides an inadequate label for what should be
the Department's focus. In our most recent Report we judged that
the intertwining of technological and cultural factors in the
media and information technology sectors justified the establishment
of a separate Department of Communications. Concentration on "creativity"
also leads to a perceived undervaluing of tourism. The switch
from a symbolic to a descriptive title for the Department, while
understandable, has led to the omission of tourism from the title.
Although the Department has only recently been re-named, we believe
that a new name should be found for it which combines euphony
with a more comprehensive description of its responsibilities.
Since we are awaiting a response to our recommendation in our
most recent Report that parts of the responsibility of the Department
should be transferred to a new Department of Communications, we
do not regard it as appropriate in this Report to suggest a new
name for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. However,
depending upon the Government's response to that recommendation,
we recommend that this Committee should be consulted prior to
any decision being made about a new name (paragraph 17).
(v) We regard the autonomy in certain areas
of budget allocation granted to the Arts Council of England and
English Heritage and, no doubt, other bodies as letting the arm's
length principle go much too far. While Ministers ought not to
interfere in the allocation of grants by such bodies, it should
be their duty to ensure that these bodies are administered in
the most economic and cost-effective way possible (paragraph 28).
(vi) In general terms, the arm's length
principle has the potential to create a situation where Ministers
are assumed to have responsibility but in fact lack the power
to assert that responsibility. Lack of strategic control might
lead to piecemeal intervention. For these reasons we support in
principle the continued strengthening of Funding Agreements between
the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the bodies which
it sponsors to ensure that their work is aligned with the Department's
overall objectives, that measurable and meaningful targets are
set related to those objectives, that money is not wasted and
that top heavy bureaucracy does not result in administrators creating
and safeguarding their own individual power bases (paragraph 29).
(vii) We recommend that there should be
a presumption that instructions or requests by Ministers to public
bodies in addition to Funding Agreements, including notes of meetings
between Ministers and members of those bodies, be placed in the
public domain (paragraph 30).
(viii) We recommend that short commentaries
on the work of the Department's non-departmental public bodies
should be included in the main body of the Department's Annual
Report rather than annexed to it and that these should include
key performance targets for each body for the current and forthcoming
years and an account of performance against targets in the preceding
year (paragraph 31).
(ix) Mr Smith told us that the Government
was firmly committed to the additionality principle, believing
that lottery expenditure should not replace existing Exchequer
funding. We note that the decision to reduce the grant to the
National Heritage Memorial Fund by more than half in 1998-99 from
£5 million to £2 million is attributed to the Secretary
of State's view that, "with Heritage Lottery funds also at
its disposal, the National Heritage Memorial Fund could not have
priority for the use of scarce resources in a particularly tight
funding year". That seems to stand additionality on its head
(paragraph 37).
(x) We expect to consider the outcome of
the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's Comprehensive Spending
Review in due course. To assist in Parliamentary and public debate
on the outcome, we consider it essential that the product of the
Review does not simply provide a series of figures and objectives,
but sets out in detail the Government's conclusions on the rationale
for the distribution of public funds to the Department (paragraph
42).
(xi) It is of paramount importance that,
as part of the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the
Government reaffirms its commitment to the additionality principle.
It should also define its adherence to the additionality principle
more tightly by setting out its assessment of the extent (if any)
to which National Lottery funding affects the level of year-on-year
funding by the taxpayer for each of the sectors benefiting from
the National Lottery (paragraph 43).
(xii) In our view it is incontestable that
many sectors within the responsibility of the Department for Culture,
Media and Sport are under-funded. We expect the Government to
demonstrate in the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review
that it has recognised this. That outcome must reflect the value
of expenditure by the Department as investment with economic and
social gains, as well as benefits which will be felt in the minds
and bodies of people across the country, but cannot easily be
measured and matter no less for that (paragraph 44).
(xiii) Valuation of non-operational heritage
assets and consequential charging might create the impression
that assets held in trust for the nation were seen as potentially
disposable. We regard the notion of valuing non-operational heritage
assets as simply absurd. While we accept that the definition of
a non-operational heritage asset might need to be tightly drawn,
we can see no justification for the valuation of such assets and
consequent notional capital charging following the introduction
of Resource Accounting. Such a methodology, if adopted, could
weaken still further the financial resources of the Department
and the bodies which it funds or sponsors. (Paragraph 47).
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