Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
2 FEBRUARY 2004
MR SIMON
THURLEY AND
MS DEBORAH
LAMB
Q120 Andrew Bennett: The Victorian Baths
in Manchester are obviously very popular in terms of people voting
for them to be preserved. How many of those people who voted for
them to be preserved would want to use them? If you are a kid
close to those baths, would you not prefer new baths with a water
chute and various other fun items rather than the nostalgia of
the Victorian Baths?
Mr Thurley: That is certainly
a problem and as far as I am aware the proposal with the Manchester
baths is only to restore one of the swimming pools not both of
them because everyone thinks there is no point in having two pools.
The other space will be used for something else. There definitely
is evidence, particularly for that building, that people do want
to use that swimming pool; there is no doubt about it.
Q121 Chairman: So you do take into account
the existence of other similar examples when deciding to list.
Mr Thurley: Certainly. There are
two ways recently that buildings have been listed and one of them
is through the thematic surveys we have done, by looking at university
buildings, schools, factories or whatever it is. The other way
is through requests from the public to have something listed.
What we would probably do at English Heritage is to try to encourage
you to move away from thinking about listing too heavily. We do
not regard listing as the crucial element in heritage regeneration.
It is important, it can be important, it can be used as being
important, but the absolutely fundamental issue is what happens
afterwards, once you have identified what is important in an area.
It might not just be historic listed buildings; it might actually
be buildings which the local community find very important. It
might be a pub at the end of the road, it might be the Town Hall,
it might be a library, things which are not listed but which are
the historic buildings which start giving character to a place.
Q122 Chairman: Are you never worried
that listings are used inappropriately to prevent change of use?
Mr Thurley: We are continually
worried about that and that is one of the reasons why we welcome
both the revision of PPG15 and PPG16 and also the heritage protection
review by the DCMS. It is an old-fashioned system and we do believe
that it could be used in a much more positive way than it has
been in the past.
Q123 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you think
the parameters under which you consider listing are too tight?
Mr Thurley: They are not articulated
clearly enough. I know that there is nowhere you can go to and
find the parameters written down and I think that is an extraordinary
state of affairs and there should be an agreed set of parameters
which are agreed with the Secretary of State and those are the
ones used by everybody.
Q124 Sir Paul Beresford: Are you suggesting
parameters to the Secretary of State?
Mr Thurley: That has not happened
yet, but I am sure as part of the designation review that will
be one of the things which happens.
Q125 Sir Paul Beresford: Could you send
some suggestions to us?
Mr Thurley: It is probably most
appropriate for us to work through the channels which have already
been set up, the DCMS.
Q126 Mr Betts: You said a couple of minutes
ago that buildings did not have to be listed to be important as
part of heritage regeneration, but in fact when you come to deal
out grants as an organisation you generally tend to concentrate
on Grade I and Grade II* buildings; it is quite rare for anything
else to get a grant. There is probably an impression that it goes
to the grand buildings in the country and not necessarily to an
industrial building or a parade of shops which might be quite
important in themselves in helping regeneration of a wider area.
Ms Lamb: We have a number of different
grant schemes and all of them are constrained by the resources
available. In terms of the grants which are available for particular
individual buildings, those are limited; that is just a way of
rationing the resource, in terms of the highest designations and
also buildings at risk. Those are the things most in need of the
money and the resource and in fact for many regeneration schemes
it has been our putting grant money into certain buildings at
risk which has been part of the overall scheme, stabilising them,
which has helped them to provide the basis for further regeneration.
We do have other grant schemes as well, in particular the Heritage
Economic Regeneration Scheme (HERS), which is precisely the sort
of scheme which focuses on small high streets, focuses on areas
of commercial and mixed use, frequently in areas of deprivation.
Those schemes are targeted on those sorts of areas and they can
help to lift that very small scale regeneration which is also
the kind of area which is quite frequently missed by some of the
bigger regenerations.
Q127 Mr Betts: Just picking up on the
Heritage Economic Regeneration Scheme, would you confirm that
actually a very small percentage of your budget goes on that in
total? Perhaps we could hear what it is. Secondly, have you not
actually stopped giving grants under this scheme?
Ms Lamb: The Heritage Economic
Regeneration Scheme is about £9 million a year in grants.
We are currently reviewing all our grant programmes and seeing
where priorities should lie for the future.
Q128 Mr Betts: So you are not giving
grants under that programme at this stage.
Ms Lamb: Yes, we are at the moment.
Q129 Mr Betts: You are giving grants.
Ms Lamb: We are at the moment,
but we are reviewing it for the future.
Mr Thurley: We work extremely
closely with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Heritage
Lottery Fund have a wider spectrum of things they can grant aid
than we. We are actually restricted by statute. If you look, for
instance, at our church scheme which we operate jointly with the
HLF, it enables us to grant aid places of worship regardless of
their listing and is much more targeted on the social benefits
we can get out of that. We work very closely with HLF on that.
Q130 Mr Betts: Is there not almost a
case for amalgamating the two grant regimes so there is only one
grant to apply for? At present there are two lots of forms to
fill in and two organisations and by all accounts some organisations
do not even bother to try to apply for them because what they
get out of them at the end is not worth the effort they have put
into it.
Mr Thurley: We do now have a joint
scheme for churches, which is a great step forward. We are currently
discussing with the HLF what other schemes we can amalgamate.
You are absolutely right, what is absolutely crucial here is that
the end user has something very clear, very simple and they can
find out where they can get the money and what the criteria are.
The greater the rationalisation we can do, the better.
Q131 Christine Russell: I know you want
to move away from the listing issues, but can I move you back
to them. We have been given examples and told about what happens
when a major development scheme is scuppered at the eleventh hour
by English Heritage coming along and listing a building. Could
you just talk us through the existing system of what you do when
you decide to spot list a building?
Mr Thurley: The first point to
make is that over 90% of listed building consent applications
which come to us are passed. So we are talking about a 10% area,
which are the ones where there is some sort of debate. The debate
comes in one of two areas. It either comes when the planning application
comes to us, or it actually comes when there is a question about
spot listing. The current legislation means that anybody, any
member of the public, can write in at any moment and ask for a
building to be listed. We, legally, are obliged to go and examine
it, to apply the criteria which we talked about a moment ago to
that and recommend to the Secretary of State—
Q132 Christine Russell: So anyone. You
do not go to the local authority and check their views.
Mr Thurley: Anyone.
Q133 Christine Russell: If you get a
call from anyone you immediately set this investigation into action.
Mr Thurley: The request goes to
the Secretary of State, because we do not list. The listing is
done by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State gets a
request. We are her official advisers. She turns to us and what
it is our job to do is take the criteria, go and look at the building
and then report back to the Secretary of State whether the building
meets the criteria or not. On the basis of that the Secretary
of State will decide—
Q134 Christine Russell: May I just ask
you what you do when the local planning authority has given a
planning consent?
Mr Thurley: I will come onto that
in one moment. I am talking about the system at the moment. The
Secretary of State will then decide whether to list or not. She
will then say yes or not and if it is yes, the building is listed
and that action, spot listing, can happen at any point in the
development process. Both the DCMS and we recognise that is a
very, very unsatisfactory situation, but that is how the law stands
at the moment. We do not believe that is the right way forward.
The DCMS do not believe that is the right way forward and I know
in fact that officials in the ODPM do not think it is the right
way forward. The proposals for the reform of the system may introduce
some mechanism which prevents spot listing happening whilst the
planning permission is actually being considered by a local authority.
The thing you are worried about, if we can get the change in the
law, will not happen any longer. We believe that is really important.
It gives us an incredible amount of grief, because the criticism
we get is very often caused by a member of the public asking for
spot listing and we, having said yes, it meets the criteria, the
Secretary of State saying she cannot do anything about it because
it meets her criteria and it is listed, then it does cause a problem.
Q135 Christine Russell: And you have
said that to DCMS. So in your submission to the consultation,
you have said you believe there should be no spot listing. At
what stage does that happen? Does it happen at the point when
the developer first goes into the planning department and says
he is interested in developing X, Y or Z on this land, or does
it not happen until a formal planning application is submitted?
Mr Thurley: What I can talk about
is the principle, because I do not have at my fingertips the precise
details. The principle needs to be that whilst something is in
play as an active planning application, you need to have a moratorium
on suddenly whacking listing into the middle of it. This is all
part of our belief that we should not actually be waiting until
a planning application arrives on our desk to be discussing these
things. What is really important is to get discussion up front,
pre-application discussion. The reason that 90% of all applications
coming to us are passed straight through, very quickly, is because
we have been successful in driving a large number of applications
right up front. Before they come in as an application they have
been discussed, we have looked at them, everybody has agreed and
it is just ticked through. If we can get the other 10%, we shall
be very, very happy.
Q136 Christine Russell: So we already
have nearly half a million listed buildings in the country. What
scope do you think there still is for more buildings being listed?
Mr Thurley: A very small number
of buildings a year are added to the list and a number of them
are taken off the list every year as well. If you look at the
growth in listed buildings over the last 20 years or so, they
have not actually kept pace with the number of buildings being
built in the country, so they are not actually increasing as a
percentage of the buildings there are in the country. The principal
effort has been diverted to post-war listing and about 300 post-war
buildings have been listed now and that is where the main effort
is.
Q137 Christine Russell: Give us one or
two examples, off the top of your head, where you have listed
buildings recently because they are part of a potential regeneration
scheme?
Mr Thurley: I am not sure you
have the right two people here to answer that question.
Q138 Chairman: Could you send us a note?
Mr Thurley: With ease we could
give you a thorough briefing on that. I am sorry, we just do not
have that here.
Q139 Christine Russell: I am told Parkhill
flats in Sheffield are one example.
Mr Thurley: That is an extremely
good example of the way that listing, far from hindering regeneration,
has been a positive spur to it.
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