Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520
- 536)
SIR JOCELYN
STEVENS, MS
PAM ALEXANDER,
DR ERIC
ANDERSON AND
MRS ANTHEA
CASE
520. In what percentage of cases do you follow
up your objection to a development by going along to the subsequent
public inquiry?
(Ms Alexander) We try very hard only ever to advise
call-in where we feel we will be able to put in the resources
necessary to following that up at the public inquiry. Occasionally
it is not possible, but we always take the view that if we are
willing to say it is so important that there should be a public
inquiry, then we must put the resources in to make sure our case
is argued.
Chairman
521. Can you give us some figures as to how
often you actually appear at those inquiries?
(Ms Alexander) I do not have them to hand. We can
certainly write to you with the information.
Dr Ladyman
522. We have received evidence that many English
Heritage officers are unsympathetic to the needs of building owners,
do not take account of the intended use of buildings in making
their decisions and, perhaps, even a suggestion that they are
not really up to the job. Do you accept that? If you do, what
are you doing to try and address it?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) I do not accept that. I think
it could have been true a long time ago but we have, in the last
few years, gone to great lengths to train our staff. I spray-painted
on the interior wall, as you go into English Heritage, when I
arrived, saying "Do not forget that the heritage belongs
to the people and they pay your wages". The staff saw that
as they came in. This was an attempt to begin to improve, shall
we say, our customer care. The last grant scheme which we revised,
was our secular grant, which goes to private owners largely. It
was the most customer friendly document we have ever put out and
it was extremely well-received. What I am saying is that I think
what you said was true of English Heritage ten years ago but I
do not think it is true now.
523. I hope you had planning permission for
spray-painting the wall, by the way. My own experience, though,
is that inspectors can sometimes not take full account of the
cost of what they are suggesting to people. The niceties of what
they are requiring for preserving the heritage parts of buildings
can often be the difference between a project being commercial
or not. Yet English Heritage are quite prepared to place these
expectations on developers, even when English Heritage or the
Heritage Lottery Fund are not putting money in to provide the
additional costs. How are you going to address that?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) It is a difficult problem. We
were set up to protect England's heritage, and that is fundamental.
Therefore, when we come to an application which is going to damage
England's heritage we try to find a way round, and only block
that development if there is no other solution and we believe
the building to be extremely important. That, almost certainly,
means serious alterations to Grade I or Grade II*. You have heard
my Chief Executive say that by far the greater proportion—90
per cent—of applications go through, and that is out of
a total of something like 19,000 applications we receive every
year. What happens, inevitably, is that the ones that we do not
approve get the publicity and the ones that are approved and go
straight through nobody hears about. We are always going to have
to say "No", when we believe that is right for the heritage,
but we say it very, very much less often than we used to.
524. Can I just ask one more question, Mr Chairman?
I declare a slight interest in that I have a Grade II* listed
house and I have to say that English Heritage were very helpful
and did not cause me any problems at all, but I know many Grade
II listed buildings where there have been problems because of
this commercial aspect. It seems to me, quite often, that the
inspector takes a view, which is often a different view to that
of the local authority, the local authority's planning officers
and all the planning committee have seen the properties and have
formed their view. Your inspector has formed his or her view—that
is one person—and then reports to an expert panel, who do
not visit the site, which then makes a recommendation to the Secretary
of State or the Minister, who does not visit the site. So, effectively,
the view of one inspector can determine whether something goes
ahead against the wishes of a lot of people who have actually
been present at the site. Is there anything you can do there to
try and solve that problem?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) In order to avoid confusion
we only become involved with Grade II houses when demolition or
severe alteration is involved; we do not get involved until that
point. Until that point, it is entirely up to the local authority
to make the decision. When it gets to Grade I and II*, then our
inspector will report back and go through a process which we are
quite satisfied with, inasmuch as we have very knowledgeable and
extremely experienced advisory committees from outside English
Heritage. They advise Commissioners on important decisions having
satisfied themselves. If they are not satisfied they do visit
the site. We do not make a really critical decision without rechecking.
525. When we are talking about urban regeneration,
a scheme is being questioned on heritage grounds, that scheme
may have vital commercial importance for the whole town and that
individual scheme going ahead may be such a generator of prosperity
for the area that lots of other heritage buildings get indirectly
protected as a result of it. Yet I have seen no evidence from
English Heritage that they are prepared to take that into account
when making their decision. Is that my wrong perception, or should
you be taking that into consideration?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) Your perception is right, but
it is not true. English Heritage is perceived very much to perform
in the way you have described. The reason is that when something
goes wrong it gets publicity and the 90 per cent of things that
go right do not. Our press cuttings every day are an inch thick
and which shows how much intense and personal interest by hundreds
of people there is in the heritage. They have all got cases and
they all go to their newspapers if they want to complain.
Chairman
526. I can understand it is a very sad life
with many people criticising. Very briefly, you can stop the bulldozers
but you are totally ineffectual as far as decay and neglect are
concerned. What are you doing to push the local authorities to
use their enforcement powers where owners just let the building
rot away?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) The Chief Executive reported
about the Buildings at Risk Scheme, which we published last year
for the first time. We named and shamed the local authorities,
and the private owners—much to their rage in certain cases—who
were responsible for Grade I and Grade II* listed buildings at
risk.
527. What effect has that had?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) This has had an amazing effect.
Local authorities have felt bound to examine buildings at risk
under their control or ownership. I think, when the next report
comes out this summer, you will see that a great deal of work
has been done. Many local authorities have said they were not
aware that their buildings were at risk, etc, and they have been
shamed into doing something. This is not at all popular, and I
have received some very rude letters, but I think it was the right
thing to do.
Chairman: That is some good news, then.
Christine Butler
528. Mrs Case, there are severe problems with
the administration of heritage programmes. These include the differing
calibre of Heritage Lottery Fund case officers (one), the lengthy
decision making process (two) and the very different information
requirements and timetables between your organisation and English
Heritage. What are you going to do about these three points?
(Mrs Case) I think that if one looks at the position
in terms of our processes they have significantly improved and
I think that the Culture Select Committee, when it looked at this
last year, found evidence that that was the case. In particular,
we now have processes under which people get a first response
to their application—which rules out the no-hopers, if I
can put it like that—within two months, and we aim to get
a final decision—
529. Is that the Ombudsman screaming? Is that
what you are saying?
(Mrs Case) No, the cases get assessed against our
key criteria and those which clearly are not going to match up
to those key criteria are rejected at that early stage. We can
then put more effort into assessing, as rapidly as possible, the
applications which do look as if they are going to meet our criteria.
There we have a target of turning round cases, on average, within
six months. Certainly, over the last year—
530. Six months is a long time. How do you know
whether this is because the application does not meet a key criteria
but it is, nevertheless, a good application, and if you got back
to them in some way to say "If you did a bit of redesigning
here it is eminently something we would wish to consider"?
(Mrs Case) We clearly have to have criteria in order
to treat the applications which come before us fairly. We cannot
just make up the criteria—
531. If you just send them back, having done
a tick list—and we all have experience of this—you
know very well if they were better advised they may have presented
differently and it would have swum through. We are presently getting
people down into my constituency to so advise groups. Maybe there
is a failure there. I gave you three points and, notwithstanding
the report last year, it seems to me that those three points are
still valid points this year. So could you just explain how you
are going to improve on those situations in future, rather than
vindicate something that has been going on over the last few years?
(Mrs Case) I think some of those changes have been
put in place more recently than the last few years. We clearly,
in terms of the calibre of our staff, have a continuous training
programme in terms of their capacity to handle cases, which is
the first of your points. The other thing which we are doing,
which we are piloting in two areas this year, is to have a much
simpler application process for smaller grants (that is grants
under £50,000), where we hope that by asking people for less
information and dealing with it more quickly we will be able to
deal with some of the delays which have taken place in the past.
I think it is also the case that there are a large number of schemes
where, often, reflecting the advice that we have on those schemes
from the statutory agencies—whether they are English Heritage
or the sister Historic Buildings Agencies in the other countries
of the United Kingdom or the Countryside Agency—we do go
back to people to explain why it is we cannot approve the particular
proposals that have been put to us.
Chairman
532. What about revolving funding? The Phoenix
Trust put evidence to us that if you came up with a bit of revolving
funding that would help. Are you looking at that?
(Mrs Case) Until recently, I think, until the change
in the legislation, it was very difficult for us to do revolving
funding—if, by that, one means putting money into something
where one did not know, as it were, what the future applications
would be like—because we did not have powers to delegate
decision making. I think if we now, in the light of the change
in the law, had an application for a revolving fund-type situation
we would want to see clearly that we are satisfied that the criteria
which the fund would apply to future cases were ones which would
enable us to feel comfortable about letting the decision be taken
by somebody else. I think we would also need to think about how
long that process should go on in order for us to be able to take
a view, after five years or something like that, as to whether
this was a sensible use for this tranche of lottery funding, or
whether there was some other need which ought to take priority.
533. You are at least looking at it. Sir Jocelyn,
you made a bid but I did not let you have a chance, at the beginning,
for the Renaissance Fund. We understand the case for the Renaissance
Fund. Would you be as keen on a Renaissance Fund if you had to
put your own money into it, rather than looking for other people
to put money into the Fund?
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) Yes[1].
534. You would? So there is no problem. You
put the money in and that is it.
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) We do not think there is a need
for a new programme and Hilary Armstrong agrees with that. We
would like our existing programme to be better funded.
535. That is the question I asked. If you put
your money into it.
(Sir Jocelyn Stevens) If we were given another £10
million a year, based on our performance over the last five years,
we would generate £40 million and, therefore, we would be
able to invest £50 million a year on urban regeneration,
using our existing administration. That is the most effective
proposal that we can possibly make—or anyone can make—to
the DETR when they decide how the Renaissance Fund should work.
So £10 million to us, and £40 million from others. That
is how we have always worked it and that is how we would continue.
536. Dr Anderson, would you like to put some
Lottery money into this Renaissance Fund?
(Dr Anderson) We would not like to hand £10 million
just like that to my neighbour on my right. Sorry, Jocelyn. At
the moment we reckon we are putting fully £50 million a year
into it ourselves. Our Townscape Heritage Initiative is in its
second year. We have spent £17 million on that this year,
we have just announced that is going to continue for an extra
two years after the initial three we had originally said. We have
an Urban Parks Scheme which has been going now very successfully
for three years, £135 million has gone into largely inner
cities through that and that is going at a rate of £30 million
a year so we are nearly up to £50 million there. We have,
of course, quite a lot of money jointly with English Heritage
going into churches as well. It is perhaps worth saying that this
last year we have specifically targeted three of our programmes
at the areas of maximum deprivation, so our Township Heritage
Initiative, the Urban Parks Programme and the Joint Places of
Worship Scheme, at least where it does not refer to the fabric
of Grade I and Grade II* listed churches but to improving churches
for community use, have all been targeted at the 50 most deprived
areas. So we think we are already helping you to deliver a lot
of the targets you have in mind. We are very happy to go on doing
that but we would rather not give our money to somebody else to
spend on our behalf.
Chairman: On that note, thank you all very much
for your evidence.
1 Note by Witness: We already put £6 million a
year in our own similar scheme. Back
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