Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


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.


 
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