Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 267)
TUESDAY 18 APRIL 2006
HERITAGE LOTTERY
FUND
Q260 Alan Keen: Following questions
from Philip Davies, you talked about engaging the public and,
after all, that is who we all represent really. We heard Paul
being very disparaging about the local authority representative
who has some responsibility for this field that you are dealing
in. There must be some worrying gaps, are there not? I represent
the western half of the borough of Hounslow and I live in the
eastern half. We have got Syon House and Osterley House and some
other bits and pieces in between. I can understand the Friends
of Chiswick House in London going to make representations, rightly
so, to make sure that that house (thank goodness) is being looked
after again very well. How will we fill the gaps in between in
areas where they have not got Syon House like we have? Is there
a role for schools, for instance? I was intending to say universities
but there is not a university in every area so that would leave
big gaps. Is there a role for schools to help co-ordinate and
look at what really should be looked after in a particular local
authority area? Are you concerned about these holes?
Dame Liz Forgan: I never thought
of schools. That is an interesting idea. One of the frustrations
looking right across the UK as we do is to see where local authorities
have really concentrated on how to access Lottery money, have
really looked on their heritage as a resource and figured out
there is a lot of money available to look after it properly, and
then resourced the capacity to ask for it. They tend to be, broadly
speaking, the local authorities which are better resourced to
do everything and the ones that do not have that system in place
are the ones that need it most. There is a limit to the extent
to which we can compensate for that. What we do is to look in
every region of England and every nation at an index of combination
of heritage lack and the number of times they have come to us
for money. We have identified cold spots in each of those regions
and we target those with particular development resource to go
and work with people to make sure that they have the ability to
ask us for money. That is the problem. People just cannot ask
us for money because they do not know how to frame it and they
have not got the resources to put it together. That is our contribution
to this. I have had this conversation with the Church of England,
for instance, and I have said to them, "Why don't you invest
your money in a nationwide resource to enable little tiny parish
churches to come to us for money? It is not up to us to resource
that; why don't you resource that? For every pound you put into
that you would reap many more pounds in response", and they
are thinking about it. I think if you were looking at a national
strategy, one of the ingredients, along with conservation officers
(who are part of this story), is just to find a way in which every
local authority had the resources to ask for Lottery money, to
put it at its simplest, because they do not at the moment.
Q261 Alan Keen: Paul has already
mentioned that local authorities are starved to a certain extent
in order to make them more efficient. In the last few minutes
you have mentioned disability access and that is something they
should be doing and they will obviously concentrate, if they have
not got too much money, on things they are forced to do rather
than things that they would like to do if money was no problem.
I recall when the Lottery first started that Sport England were
not allowed to be proactive; they had to wait until people applied
for money. That meant all the cricket pavilions in Surrey and
Sussex got all the money. I am playing cricket this afternoon
so I am not against cricket receiving help, but you are able to
be proactive now and you are doing that. You said that you had
not thought about schools being involved. Universities would be
the natural source but as there are not universities in every
area. I think it is a critical part of young people's education
to understand history. Do you think there would be room for that?
Is that something you would like to look at as a possibility for
filling those gaps?
Dame Liz Forgan: We do a lot of
work with schools. At least, we do a lot of work with heritage
organisations to enable them to work with schools. I think that
has been a transforming feature of the HLF's life. We have funded
more education spaces—and I am sure the number is in here
somewhere but there are hundreds of them all over the country—so
that schools can now take children to see museums or landscapes
or whatever and there is somewhere safe and dry for them to eat
their sandwiches at lunch time and be taught in because previously
that was not the case. So from that point of view we can help.
The answer to this problem is manyheaded. One of the contributions
that we have started to make was when we devolved the organisation
some six or seven years ago so instead of everybody living in
Sloane Square and doing the work from there, we physically devolved
the organisation so there is now a presence in every English region
and every nation. That means that it is possible for human beings
who work for the Heritage Lottery Fund to engage directly with
people in regions who can then ring up and say, "We don't
know how to do this. Will you help us?" and we do. That is
not at a systematic level within the statutory framework which
is the bit that is missing here and there. So we do our best to
plug the gaps but it is never going to be thorough until there
is a statutory backing for it, I am afraid.
Ms Souter: I think it comes back
to the small grants point, if I can just make that point. Very
often an area that is not applying to us is not applying to any
other funder for anything else either. So if our development staff
can find a way of making contact and identifying the folk who
can have a £25,000 or £30,000 grant to do a heritage
trail or a local history map or something like that, that can
be the first time and the first way, and from that you may get
two or three people who come out of that project who think that
they could go for some other project for something else, which
might not be heritage related at all, but it has given them the
confidence to know how to access resources and they can build
on it from there on in.
Q262 Alan Keen: You say yourselves
that vital tasks remain "still undone" and yet you are
going to face a reduction in your funds. What remains undone and
how are you going to try to tackle that with even less funds than
you have got at the moment?
Dame Liz Forgan: We work very
hard with the statutory agencies to try to get closer than we
were to a definition of need. It is really quite hard to put your
finger on reliable data about what the need really is in all the
sectors that we deal with. However, we are making some progress
and getting there. We have spelt out some of that in what we have
said to you. We simply have to keep our heads in respect of a
diminution of funding and what we are anticipating is that in
the years leading up to the Olympic Games, which coincides with
a couple of other aspects of our funding (it is not only the Olympic
Games), that we will be looking at a diminution of funding which
we hope will come back again if things go well for the rest of
this year. We just have to look very clearly at priorities. To
cut the message short, what the trustees have decided is that
they will manage this dip in funding by essentially a policy of
the biggest applicants taking the hardest hit so the reduction
in spending will be greater for people who are asking us for £5
or £10 million than it will be for people who are asking
us for £50,000 or half a million. We will just have to apply
the criteria and do what we can and remember that it is still
a very considerable amount of money and try to manage the views
of people out in the country so that we do not send a message
of panic around the place to say, "Don't bother applying
to us because we have not got any money." So it is quite
a tricky business of managing demand. We need to explain to people
that we are going to have less money so they will have to think
very carefully about what they apply to us for but without turning
off the taps and stopping people asking us for things they probably
ought to be asking us for.
Q263 Alan Keen: Will the Big Lottery
play a part?
Ms Souter: I think it might well
do. We have already got a joint parks programme with the Big Lottery
which we launched recently where they are putting £90 million
in to sit alongside the money that we have traditionally given
to parks. That is a very happy combination of interests. We have
run a parks programme for a long time and we will know exactly
how to do it. They have said, "This is an area we are interested
in too. Let's put the parks work together." We are talking
to them constantly about whether there are other areas in which
we might be able to do that as well. We can sit alongside the
Big Lottery quite comfortably because we are able to focus on
the social areas which are important to them, but they do not
have heritage directions so there will be always be very large
areas of what we do that are only proper to us and which are not
easily sitting within what the Big Lottery Fund can do. So we
work very closely where there are areas of overlap but I think
also we are very clear that there are things that are really important
to us which do not sit very easily with them.
Q264 Paul Farrelly: Could I have
a supplementary question to the line that Alan has been taking
because this is very close to my heart, coming from an area like
North Staffordshire where the real concern is about vicious cycles
in one area and virtuous circles because of capacity in other
areas. Potentially that will get worse as those cities are doing
very nicely and want to be city regions. In some areas we are
already at the bottom of the food chain in terms of cherry-picking
people who have either expertise in conservation, for example,
or expertise in getting money out of bodies like yourself and
we are left with just bones to pick over. Liz, you said you are
already advising the Church of England to set up a body that could
resource parishes. You would have thought the Church of England
would have done that already and could very well look after its
own. Unless your funding increases with the number of grants it
is going to be a zero sum game and for those people who are going
to get three quid for every pound put into capacity building some
people down the food chain are going to get 30 pence, so it is
not going to be worthwhile for them. Without creating an overweening
bureaucracy, how proactive can you be in looking at your stats?
Take my area North Staffordshire—they are so well below
par in making bids and getting grants—would you like to
be proactive and help or do you rely on those areas for a light
bulb to go on and for people to look at the stats themselves and
think, "God, we are rubbish. We should go and talk to the
Lottery funders to see what help they can give us to do better."
How can you strike a balance?
Dame Liz Forgan: We come into
contact with most of the RDAs and most of the local authorities
one way or another and whenever we do we take the opportunity
to say (in slightly more tactful terms, I hope) "There is
an opportunity here. Please think about heritage as an asset and
not as a difficulty," because very often local authorities
with the worst problems simple see heritage as another problem.
Q265 Paul Farrelly: Absolutely.
Dame Liz Forgan: We will be missionary
in taking any opportunity to say, "Think about it in a different
way. Don't think about it as a problem. Think about it as one
of your natural assets and invest in developing it. We can help
you in the following ways . . . "But in the end they are
the responsible authorities and they have to take their responsibilities.
When you get to the point that an actual application has come
to us, as it often does, from a local authority which essentially
has not got a clue, we will then really go into intensive care
mode and surround them with every resource we can do to make sure
that that project gets delivered in an area which really has nothing
else going for it. We cannot do that very often because we simply
do not have the resource ourselves, but here and there when it
is quite clear that it is the local authority which is just not
able to put its back behind what needs to be done to deliver a
project and it is a project that really needs to be delivered
in terms of the people and heritage of that place, we will get
closer than we would otherwise do to make it happen.
Q266 Paul Farrelly: Sadly, I have
lost my tact over five years of having to deal with my RDA. I
find that being tactless is the only way to get something out
of them. Is your main focal point the RDAs because your resource
is limited?
Dame Liz Forgan: We will work
with anybody who looks as if they have half an interest in taking
that forward.
Ms Souter: Realistically we have
two or three development staff per region but they will, as Liz
says, work very closely with a local authority that has shown
any interest in a project to get them to the point where there
is something viable.
Q267 Chairman: You referred to your
hope that post the Olympic dip you will go back to the previous
position. There is of course consultation going on about that.
Are you given reason to believe that you will at least get the
current 16.6% to enjoy?
Dame Liz Forgan: I am very grateful
to you for raising that question because it would be wrong for
me to leave this room without hoping very much that when the Committee
comes to consider its report it might give some thought to this.
It is a very important moment for us. The Department's consultation
on the future distribution of Lottery funding has closed. They
are in the throes of making a decision. We are promised a decision
in June of this year and at the moment, as would be quite proper,
we have no undertakings from anybody about what the outcome of
that is likely to be. We have guidance that we hope we will continue
to be a good cause. The question of the shares of the various
good causes however is absolutely up in the air. I think it would
be an absolute catastrophe for the heritage of Britain if the
Heritage Lottery Fund were not to continue to receive at least
the share that it currently does of Lottery proceeds. The difference
that that money has been able to make has been simply extraordinary.
On the whole looking over the last 11 years of all my predecessors,
the record of the spending of that money is a pretty good one.
There have been few, if any, disasters. As an organisation we
are pretty efficient. We cost the least in terms of our administrative
overheads of any Lottery distributor. I think we have grounds
to be reasonably confident in the performance of the organisation
but, more importantly, confident in the needs of heritage, and
anything that you feel able to do to support the argument that
this support should continue we would be extremely grateful for.
Chairman: I am sure we will wish to express
a view! Thank you very much indeed.
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