Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 201-219)

2 FEBRUARY 2004

MR JON ROUSE, MR LES SPARKS, MS CAROLE SOUTER AND MS JUDY CLIGMAN

  Q201 Chairman: Good afternoon. Would you be so kind as to give your names for the record, please?

  Mr Rouse: I am Jon Rouse, Chief Executive of CABE.

  Mr Sparks: I am Les Sparks. I am a commissioner on CABE. I am also a commissioner on English Heritage. I was the head of planning at Bath for 10 years and Birmingham for eight and a half years.

  Ms Souter: I am Carole Souter and I am Director of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

  Ms Cligman: I am Judy Cligman. I am the Director of Policy and Research at the Heritage Lottery Fund.

  Q202 Chairman: I have given everyone else the opportunity to make a brief statement if they need to add anything to their written submission, otherwise we shall go straight to questions. Good. As NDPBs, how clear do you find the guidance you receive from central government departments on heritage-led regeneration?

  Mr Rouse: Reasonably clear and getting better, is the way I would describe it. Obviously it is not easy because you have two government departments each providing part of the package: DCMS the designation material and ODPM leading on the relationship between the historic environment and planning. The way the two processes of review have gone forward in parallel this time round has been a lot more joined up than perhaps it has been in the past.

  Ms Souter: I very much agree. We have a very broad definition of heritage, so of course we are also working with DEFRA on the natural environment, countryside and so on. We have good working relationships with all the departments we need to work with.

  Q203 Chairman: Do you think the guidance you receive is clear enough?

  Ms Souter: Yes. We are in a position where, as a lottery distributor, the guidance for us comes through our policy and financial directions as to those things we should be looking to do and looking at social and economic deprivation is one of our policy directions. Within that it is then for our trustees to decide how they distribute their funding on an individual case by case basis.

  Q204 Chairman: There seems to be some concern, with the change from conservation area partnerships and the move to heritage economic regeneration schemes. People have some doubts about how long these particular initiatives are going to last. Is there anything the government can do to provide reassurance about the sustainability of some of these funding streams?

  Ms Souter: The important thing for any funding stream is to make sure it is doing the job it needs to do at that particular time. That may well mean that over time you need to change the rules slightly, refocus, make sure you are hitting the button. From our point of view, our current townscape heritage initiative schemes which are our regeneration schemes in areas, are something to which we are committed and which is built on the conservation area partnership schemes of the past.

  Q205 Mr Betts: I think you heard the question I asked of English Heritage earlier about your working together. Do you think you work together effectively? What are you looking at in terms of the grant regimes to avoid the duplication of applications and the problems that incurs for people?

  Ms Souter: I think we do work together effectively, not least with English Heritage being our advisers on these schemes. One of the benefits of being able to work in parallel is that we have slightly different areas in which we can work. We are not bound by English Heritage's restrictions on Grade I and II* buildings, for example. We can look at any building which a local community feels is of value to that community and that gives us a broader canvas to work on. Where we can work together, it increases the benefit we can get for the money we have to put into a given scheme.

  Q206 Mr Betts: Do you not have a wider regeneration remit perhaps than English Heritage in terms of the sorts of schemes you are looking at? Does that create any differences?

  Ms Souter: Yes. It is true, in that we have a broader canvas, which we can work on, so we can look at schemes in areas which simply would not come within English Heritage's vires or key important areas. Working together is the best way of getting the most out of the money we separately have available for regeneration schemes. I do not think we have had any tensions in the past in that area. The churches scheme is another good example where we can pool our resources and make sure we have the widest spread of projects which can benefit from those resources.

  Q207 Mr Betts: Looking at the wider spread of activities you might support, I suppose people think of the lottery as giving money to lots and lots of different sorts of projects which can be appreciated by a wide range of people, because it is the wide range of people which contributes. How do you avoid getting into a position where you are seen as taking from the many but giving to a number of projects which are really only enjoyed by the few, they are a bit highbrow in terms of the people who might appreciate them?

  Ms Souter: There is a number of different ways in which we do that. First of all, we develop all of our strategy and planning in a very open and collaborative way; our strategic plan is based on a lot of consultation with the public and with representative bodies. We use mechanisms like citizens juries to make sure we are informing ourselves what people feel about heritage and what they feel is important. We also do a great deal of work at grassroots level. Our current strategic plan focuses on getting more small grants out to local communities and the majority of our grants in the last financial year were for less than £50,000, which is probably not something which is widely appreciated, because obviously the big projects tend to be the ones which get the most national publicity. Regionally and locally communities are probably much more aware of the smaller grants we give and the smaller projects we support, because they are widely reported and widely supported locally.

  Q208 Mr Betts: You have a particular remit to look at schemes and get involved in activities which reduce economic and social deprivation. Do you have a particular target for that? Can you demonstrate you are achieving that fundamental objective?

  Ms Souter: We have a continuing monitoring of where our funds are going across the country and we are aiming to ensure an equitable spread of grants across the whole of the UK. In the last 12 to 18 months we have introduced two or three development staff into each of our regional and country teams to go out and look at those areas which combine low levels of heritage lottery funding in the past with evidence of economic deprivation. We are working very hard to get those communities to think of themselves as communities which can come to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding. It is very early days yet to be able to demonstrate the extent to which that is working, but we are clear already that a lot of communities are coming forward now and saying they did not realise they could apply and now we have gone out and spoken to them there are many more applications from those areas.

  Q209 Christine Russell: May I ask CABE some questions? I was quite intrigued to read in your submission that you recommend perhaps considering for listing buildings which you describe as having a community worth. What do you mean? Cherished local landmarks like the village pub or the corner shop?

  Mr Rouse: A little bit like that. I will tell you where this comes from and why we reached that tentative conclusion. Basically, if you map where conservation areas and listed buildings are against levels of deprivation, using the indices of deprivation, what you find is that it is almost an exact correlation and the richest areas have the most listed buildings and conservation areas. That is partly a reflection of the fact that heritage does add value, people like living in areas which have lots of heritage. There is always a danger that can almost become self-perpetuating and add to the divide. We come across situations where even planning inspectors within more deprived areas which have less recognised listed buildings and conservation areas, allow things through which would never have been allowed through if it were anywhere near a conservation area. Over the years how does an area of relative deprivation with very few historic assets which can be listed in terms of their architectural and historic significance protect its own historic identity? We just wondered, in terms of the system, whether community worth, the value a community places on a building or an area, should not somehow be recognised more clearly within the system. Did it just have to be something which was down to the experts or could communities have a voice?

  Q210 Christine Russell: Is that not going to lead to mega inconsistencies across the planning system? You are going to have a building in one area which is afforded protection, whereas the same building in another area has no protection at all.

  Mr Rouse: To be fair, within our response we do not say it is a perfect solution, we say that there are problems and it could lead to a lot more appeals. What we were trying to drive at there was how to stop a two-tier system from developing, whereby there is protection in richer areas and anything goes in poorer areas. We had a case in Leicestershire a few months ago in an area where the local population were trying to stop Kentucky Fried Chicken painting the Colonel's face on the roof of a shop. The planning inspector gave that firm the go-ahead because it was not near or in a conservation area. Where are the protections for communities which do not have access to an historic environment as defined by the experts?

  Mr Sparks: One of the things being looked at by the review of the designation process at the moment is the relationship between statutory designations at a national level and local designations made by local authorities. There is a big opportunity to develop the latter in respect of buildings which, looking at them strictly on the basis of their architectural and historic criteria, may not merit listing, but which, are very important within a community. Local people frequently come forward looking for protection for a building because it has some significance for their community. They get a rebuff when they are told it is not of the necessary standard. We could develop this aspect of local listing to very great benefit.

  Q211 Christine Russell: You must be able to see the dangers. I can think of a community where perhaps MacDonald's want to come and convert the local chapel which is a local landmark. What you are then going to do is put the local authority in a planning appeal situation, are you not, up against the monied lawyers from MacDonald's?

  Mr Rouse: We accept the difficulties. What we are trying to drive at is that this two-tier system exists and the gap is getting wider. How do areas of deprivation which do not have many historic buildings protect their local identity?

  Q212 Christine Russell: May I go on to ask you about all the, some would call it additional layers of bureaucracy, let us say, interested parties who are responsible for the built heritage? You have English Heritage, from whom we have heard, you have Heritage Lottery Fund and now CABE have set up the Urban Panel.

  Mr Rouse: You have the chair here.

  Q213 Christine Russell: That gives design advice, I believe. What is that doing that English Heritage is not doing?

  Mr Sparks: I am glad you asked me that question. The Urban Panel was actually set up by English Heritage originally, but it is now a joint CABE/English Heritage Urban Panel. It is a collection of very distinguished—apart from me perhaps—people from a range of backgrounds: architects, planners, engineers, historians, archaeologists, people from regeneration backgrounds, development backgrounds. We go and visit historic towns and cities, hopefully at an opportune moment in their life, when something of significance is being contemplated. Our remit is to go there as friends to look at what is being suggested.

  Q214 Christine Russell: Do you invite yourselves?

  Mr Sparks: No, we always make sure we are welcome and we are invited. We may engineer the invitation, but we would never go anywhere we were not welcome. We have always been welcomed, wherever we have gone. We go there to listen to what people have to say, what they tell us about their town or city, what they are trying to achieve there. We do not go there to preach or to tell them that they have got it wrong, but we go there perhaps to share the collective expertise which we have gathered from previous visits in order to provide suggestions about other solutions which we have seen adopted in other places. What we are focusing on is not a design review service; this is about looking at the strategic development plans, master plans, the overall approach to how you get the best out of the historic environment, the place which has been inherited from the past, in order to steer the place forward to a confident future.

  Q215 Christine Russell: How do you get on when you try to sell good, modern design in an historic environment to local people?

  Mr Sparks: Increasingly with very willing acceptance. Often people struggle with what is good modern design, but increasingly these days people recognise that our towns and cities need good modern buildings to exist alongside treasured old ones.

  Q216 Christine Russell: Do you think we are genuinely going to move forward rather than just be building pastiches of houses?

  Mr Sparks: Yes. We went through a period where perhaps we were in a bit of a cul-de-sac during the 1980s. It was an over-reaction to some of the most unfortunate excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, where buildings which were very bad buildings were not necessarily bad buildings because of the architecture per se, but because of the relationship between that architecture and the historic environment; the relationships were wrong. I do not believe pastiche has really won many hearts and minds.

  Q217 Christine Russell: It has local people.

  Mr Sparks: Not always; no. I think a lot of people feel that in the end it is not really very convincing. I am increasingly meeting local people who say they would really like to have some good modern buildings for their town.

  Mr Rouse: We are also fans of and passionate about good traditional architecture. What we are against is bad pastiche, not pastiche per se. There are some very good examples of traditional schemes done with great craftsmanship and with great ingenuity, using the right source materials and creating environments which are absolutely fantastic to be in. The problem schemes are those which fall somewhere in between. They are neither brilliant, modern, contemporary architecture, nor good traditional architecture, they are just bad pastiche.

  Q218 Christine Russell: How concerned are you about what seems to have happened on some schemes where you have had renowned architects coming in, putting forward original designs, everyone has been very pleased, attention has turned away? What you have actually ended up with is a fairly mediocre design because those renowned architects have not seen the scheme through to completion.

  Mr Rouse: This is absolutely right and we have published guidance on this called Protecting Design Quality through the Planning System which gives planning authorities a blow-by-blow account, including draft policies, draft decision letters, draft conditions, draft planning agreement statements which they can use to stop that happening. That is incredibly important. It is very difficult to stop through intellectual property protection or copyright. It is very difficult to stop through planning law which is concerned primarily with uses and not with the hand of the architect. There are mechanisms and we have been through them all and brought them all together in one place in this document.

  Q219 Andrew Bennett: Both organisations have been in existence long enough now to make a difference. If we look at the period you have both been in existence, the deficit in the number of people with training and skills in planning and conservation has got worse and worse.

  Mr Rouse: You are absolutely right and I have said as much very publicly and vocally. It is now some five years since Lord Rogers' urban task force reported. He said that skills were the number one deficit, both in terms of urban design and conservation. The reality is that we have seen very little done about it as a result. We are now all waiting Sir John Egan's report on how we solve this skills deficit and the most important thing is that we act very promptly because we have wasted enough time already.

  Ms Souter: We would entirely agree that a good level of skills is absolutely crucial to the quality schemes we are looking to see. We do ask for training plans in our bigger schemes. We do ask people to demonstrate how they are going to share skills and lead to the growth of skills, but it is not something which one body is going to do on its own. The Egan report will be important, but the work which is under way with the various training bodies to look at appropriate schemes is going to be incredibly important for all of that.


 
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