Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 136)
MONDAY 8 DECEMBER 2003
JANET BIBBY,
STEPHEN JOHNSON,
GERALD OPPENHEIM
AND MARK
MCGANN
Q120 Andrew Bennett: Come
on then, tell us when?
Ms Bibby: A ten-year, medium term.
Q121 Andrew Bennett: Ten from
now or ten from when it started?
Ms Bibby: Ten from now, in terms
of we want to move communities forward. This is not about living
in the past, this is about moving communities forward.
Q122 Christine Russell: In
my constituency, along with probably hundreds of other constituencies,
hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs were lost in the eighties
and nineties, in my case they were mainly jobs in the steelworks,
in north-east Wales. Why should the coalfield communities be treated
as a special case when the old steel communities have not been,
to the same extent, by all your organisations?
Ms Bibby: I think the coalfields
have a long history as the engine of the nation's industrialisation,
and the settlements which grew out of that have an unparalleled
reliance on a single industry. I think the difference in that
really is that it was not just about employment but also it was
as a paternalistic provider of shelter, social welfare, recreation
and often financial and retail services. Therefore, when the industry
went into decline, with nothing in place to alleviate that, the
massive problems, the unemployment, the physical isolation and
the poor infrastructure created a legacy of deprivation which
has become entrenched. That is not just the physical effects,
that is also attitudinal, therefore there is a real job for significant
regeneration activity.
Q123 Christine Russell: Is
that mindset still there, do you think?
Ms Bibby: I think so, yes.
Mr Johnson: From a heritage perspective,
I think it is our job to reflect the whole history of the nation,
and the coalfields themselves were a history of about 150, 200
years of the nation. When I look at the coalfields areas I do
not see just the coalfields areas, I see the landscape that was
there before the coalfields started being exploited and I see
the landscape that is going to be there in the future. Therefore,
I think we have got a long-term interest in what is happening
in coalfields areas, as we have got a long-term interest in what
is happening for tin-mining in Cornwall, or for lead-mining in
the Pennines, or actually for peat extraction in the Norfolk Broads.
They are all aspects of landscape which have been shaped by people's
use of it.
Q124 Christine Russell: Is
that because the landscape was more attractive than the landscape
where the steelworks were?
Mr Johnson: No, I do not think
it is more attractive. I am sorry, I am expressing a personal
view there. It is not necessarily more attractive. What we are
trying to do is say, "Look, there are things of value to
people here, because this is the tradition, this is the culture,
this is your background, and what we want to do is build on that
past in order for you to have a better future."
Mr McGann: I do not want to speak
for Gerald, but I think both the Community Fund and NOF, when
we set up Fair Share, would agree with you. We were only interested
in coalfield areas where they were both disadvantaged and had
not received average funding. If they were not disadvantaged and
if they had received better than average funding then they did
not benefit from Fair Share. Because coalfields do tend to be
a pretty good proxy for the kinds of areas which are disadvantaged
and which do not receive their fair share, therefore they did
rather well out of Fair Share. I think we would agree, that this
approach is best. Barnsley is different, I think, because that
was focused on as a coalfield area.
Mr Oppenheim: Just to pick that
one up. That was our first attempt at doing a bit of geographic
targeting in an area where we had not had many applications, and
we knew levels of disadvantage were very high and we would have
expected more to happen. I think the point for us is that we have
a duty, in our policy directions, to respond to applications that
come in on their merits. When we were constructing Fair Share
a couple of years ago, with colleagues at the New Opportunities
Fund, we decided, and I hope it helps to answer your question,
as well as making a case for supporting the Fair Share areas,
also to give ourselves a target of making sure that the top 100
most disadvantaged areas in England continued to receive the sort
of median average level of funding that we had been providing
historically, to try to make sure that we did not end up with
more areas slipping below over time.
Q125 Mr Betts: Is Fair Share
working in every area then?
Mr Oppenheim: Fair Share is working
in 77 local authority areas in England.
Q126 Mr Betts: Has it been
successful in every area it is working in, shall I say?
Mr Oppenheim: I would not go that
far. It has been very successful in many but there are still a
few areas where, 18 months to two years in, we are aware that
the financial targets that we have set are not yet being met,
and that is a reflection really of everything we have been saying
earlier on about poor infrastructure in some local authority areas
for the voluntary sector. Until that is built up, we are not going
to see that flow-through of money that we might expect to see
in other areas. We have had some enormous successes so far, in
some authorities in Yorkshire, for example. Wakefield is one example,
where the money is just beginning to flow through in the way that
we would have expected it to, and there are many others like that
as well, but it takes time.
Q127 Mr Betts: As I understand
it, the successes so far are about ensuring that the coalfield
areas get their fair share of the funds on a current basis, but
they are not at this stage making up for the historical underfunding
and underprovision. Is there a plan to deal with that as well?
Mr Oppenheim: No, there is not.
It would be hard, I think, in one go to reflect the historic position
in the allocations we make. What we know, as was being said earlier,
is that the amount per capita going into coalfield areas pretty
well has doubled, from £19 to £38 per head over the
last six years or so. There is still a way to go to bring it up
to that level, but Fair Share runs to March 2005. We will have
to take stock, as I suspect we will, with the New Opportunities
Fund, there will be one distribution body by then, to see what
else needs doing.
Q128 Mr Betts: Fair Share
applies just for the Communities Fund and New Opportunities Fund.
Is there a similar scheme for other funds?
Mr Johnson: What we are trying
to do is not to try to even out our expenditure across the whole
of the country. Indeed, the Heritage Select Committee, the Culture,
Media and Sport Select Committee, when they looked at us, said
that actually it was unrealistic for us to try to do that because
there are places like London, Edinburgh and Cardiff, which have
national museums, which actually require a greater amount of funding.
What they said we should try to do was increase our expenditure,
increase the number of applications we receive from all areas
of the country and find things to do which were not just capital-based.
I accept some of what John Cummings has said.
Q129 Mr Betts: It is very
general, finding things to do. Are you setting yourselves targets?
Fair Share at least seems to have a civic objective in place.
Mr Johnson: The targets we are
setting ourselves are to say let us look at all those areas, and
they are not just coalfield areas, which are underfunded so far,
because some of them are close to a town, some of them are in
other areas of the country. What we are doing is looking in those
areas at how we can send in our development teams, our people
who actually are influencing applicants to come in and ask for
us, to try to stimulate applications from those areas. We are
trying to increase the number of good applications we get from
there rather than saying necessarily there is a funding target
we can actually have.
Q130 Mr Betts: Is it working?
Mr Johnson: It is working in some
areas. It is working extremely well in Easington, as it happens,
because Easington was one of the areas that we chose to put our
development teams into and really they have been upping the ante
in Easington and we are getting in applications. We have done
the same for Blyth, up in the North East. It is happening in some
areas, and we are putting emphasis into making sure that does
happen.
Q131 Christine Russell: Can
I ask you, Mr Johnson, how easy it is to convince local people
that spending money on Heritage Lottery schemes is worthwhile
when many of the communities face severe problems of continuing
unemployment and poor health, issues like that? Do you get a lot
of stick from some people in the coalfield communities who say,
"Well, you're putting all this money into this Heritage Lottery
project. Wouldn't the money be better spent tackling unemployment,
educational failure, poor health?"
Mr Johnson: I think people realise
that, as an agency which has money voted to us to spend on heritage,
we have got to spend it actually on heritage.
Q132 Christine Russell: How
do you justify that?
Mr Johnson: Our view of heritage
is getting very dangerously wide, I have to say, is how I would
describe it. I think that what we are funding is all sorts of
things, which are not health and education or employment, necessarily,
but they are using heritage assets in ways which can benefit a
wide range of population today. One good example is the way we
have dealt with our Urban Parks Programme. Here are urban parks,
underfunded by local authorities, because they just did not have
the money, they tend to be our applicants. What we have tried
to do is say, "Look, let's look at this legacy of Victorian,
Edwardian, early 20th century parks, that are there in towns and
cities, and actually sometimes in village centres, let's try to
do something with those and let's make them vibrant, up-to-date,
usable by people today, so that everyone can enjoy them."
What we are trying to do is invest in that kind of infrastructure,
in order, for the future, actually to have something to use.
Q133 Christine Russell: Hand
on heart, you can say that you are encouraging people in the coalfield
communities to look forward as well as looking back?
Mr Johnson: I think we are. That
was the flavour of the piece of work which we did, with CCC and
CRT, when we did this piece of research a couple of years ago.
What we tried to do was say, "Let's find out from people,
if we're branded in terms of heritage, what actually they would
like us to spend our money on," and they came back with all
sorts of ideas, which we are now trying to follow up, and we are
trying to make sure we do.
Q134 Chris Mole: Many of the
coalfield areas do not really have a clear economic role any more.
What role can you take in identifying a role for them?
Ms Bibby: I think, in terms of
finding an economic role, the secret is to create diversity in
the economic base and improve the quality of jobs in the areas.
For the Trust, obviously, we need to reconnect people with mainstream
economies, people on estates who are disconnected from that mainstream
work. I think if that work is not done then people on the estates
will never be engaged, and that will always pull down the economic
and social make-up of an area, because it will always affect it.
We need to work more on skills, and paradoxically the mining industry
was a great provider of skills training, so not only did people
lose that but they lost a lot of the skills training and found
themselves in need of reskilling. Things like SKILLSbuilder, where
actually we redeploy miners at risk and people who are being made
redundant directly into the construction industry, where there
are huge skill sector shortages, are fundamental to creating that
economic base for the coalfields.
Mr Oppenheim: The position that
we are in, in the Community Fund, is that really we can support
only much smaller-scale enterprises, and we have made a few grants
now, quite interestingly, to organisations which are, I suppose
you could call them, sort of village companies, or village
enterprises, organisations which are trying to set up one or two
units which might house a local printing company or do some local
training to help people get back into the jobs market, to retrain,
reskill. I think those are fairly small activities, again, spread
over three years, but they begin to add up to something a bit
more, and obviously we hope and want to encourage them to be successful.
Mr McGann: I think it is important
to note that, the lottery is not, in its essence, about economic
development, although some, such as the Eden Project in Cornwall,
which is in a clay mine, have had a huge impact on the local economy.
That though was reliant on a local idea. I think the Lottery is
good at supporting this kind of big capital project—although
there have been some notable failures, of course. I think the
Committee ought to note that the new body, which will emerge out
of the NOF/Community Fund merger, will have a strong remit to
continue funding this kind of big transformation capital project.
I think it is here, as well as in the smaller projects, that the
Lottery will continue to have an important effect on areas which
are down on their luck.
Q135 Chris Mole: Have you
got an investment in the Earth Centre in South Yorkshire?
Mr McGann: No. I think that is
the Millennium Commission. We will take on the legacy of such
successes as the (- inaudible -).
Q136 Chris Mole: I shall not
press you on that one. Can I ask what role the Heritage Fund is
going to have in supporting job creation and Lottery funds?
Mr Johnson: I think our role is
rather more indirect. I think we do support museums, parks. For
example, looking at parks, we do try to make sure that where we
are investing in the capital of an urban park we are getting a
promise out of the local authority concerned that they will make
sure that is maintained for the next ten, 25 years. Normally they
do not like giving those kinds of promises because they would
like not to have to, but we do try to pin them to the wire and
say, "Look, you must make sure that there is added support,
more staff to make sure the park is safe, more staff to make sure
the park actually is properly looked after," gardeners, and
so on. Another area which I think we do look at is the economic
regeneration of towns. Our Townscapes Programme, which we say
is part of economic regeneration, is there to provide that support
for communities by investing in the townscape, by investing in
the spaces between the buildings and giving people four indicators
which we are trying to look at. One is quality of life, where
we are trying very hard to work out what quality of life means.
The second is the townscape improvements themselves, the way in
which we are refurbishing buildings and refurbishing spaces. The
third is what it does mean in terms of economic regeneration,
how many businesses are relocating, how many jobs are being created,
and we are trying to track that over time. Fourthly, we are trying
to give people that confidence about themselves and find out what
they think about the places and what the image of that town or
that village or that townscape actually is. We are tracking all
that, and we started that in 1998, and we are tracking that through
the programme. Five years is just about up and it is about time
that actually we had a first report on how we are doing, but in
ten years' time we shall have a better report because we have
set some baselines.
Chairman: With that, can I thank you
all very much for your evidence and call the next set of witnesses.
Thank you very much.
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