Examination of Witnesses (Questions 238
- 239)
TUESDAY 18 APRIL 2006
HERITAGE LOTTERY
FUND
Chairman: Good morning, everybody. As
this is the first day that Parliament is back after the recess
we are a relatively small but, nevertheless, extremely high quality
group. I am particularly pleased to welcome the Heritage Lottery
Fund as the first witnesses for this particular session. It is
true to say that I think the vast majority of submissions that
we have received have acknowledged the huge importance of the
work of the Heritage Lottery Fund so we were obviously especially
keen to hear from the Fund. Can I welcome Liz Forgan particularly,
the Chairman, and Carole Souter, the Director, and invite Philip
Davies to begin the questioning.
Q238 Philip Davies: At a recent conference
David Lammy said that the heritage sector was "perceived
as experts talking to themselves". He said that heritage
management was about "encouraging and drawing out local skills,
knowledge and experience of place rather than dictating what is
of cultural significance". What do you think can be done
to enable the local skills, knowledge and experience to influence
the management of heritage protection?
Dame Liz Forgan: You have landed
us right in the middle of our perhaps favourite topic, so thank
you. In the last eight or nine years, one of the things that the
Heritage Lottery Fund has sought to do has been to look fundamentally
at who decides what heritage value is, who manages it, who it
is for and who feels that it belongs to them. I think we have
much work to do but we have begun to widen the sense of who this
is all for and about, whose opinion about heritage value matters
and who ought to be involved in managing it. We have done that
by making it a pretty firm condition of our support that local
views are invited about what happens, that the definition of heritage
in itself is not made by experts but it is fundamentally about
what matters to people, what people wish to hand on, what people
value sufficiently to hand on. The first step in this story has
been to broaden the definition of heritage in the very first place.
The second issue, of course, then is one of competence, of who
feels able with sufficient skills to manage the heritage, to look
after it. It is clear that there is here and there, across the
countryside, a serious deficiency of heritage skills and competence
in the complex activity of managing and running major heritage
sites. We have attempted to put our own money behind a big programme
of skills education. It is at a very early stage and if you want
to know more of the detail I will ask Carole to tell you more
about it but clearly that is an important ingredient in all this.
David Lammy's description of the heritage as "experts talking
to experts" is one which we have sought systematically to
broaden. Please do not misunderstand me, the role of experts is
very, very important but what we have sought to do is to make
a dialogue between expert knowledge, which is indispensable for
certain parts of managing the heritage but also to put that in
the context of a broader, much more democratic definition of what
heritage value is and who should look after it.
Q239 Philip Davies: Do you agree
with David Lammy's description then?
Dame Liz Forgan: I think possibly
it is historically applicable but certainly I do not think that
if you took a snapshot of the heritage today that would still
be true.
|
