Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280 - 296)

TUESDAY 18 APRIL 2006

HERITAGE LINK

  Q280  Chairman: How much access to ministers do you get?

  Ms Case: We talk to DCMS ministers. We have had a DCMS minister at each of our last two AGMs to talk to our membership. We do not get very easy access to other ministers, though certainly education ministers have been quite keen to put us in touch with people in their department and work in their department that they think we can help with.

  Q281  Alan Keen: You have answered most of the questions I was going to ask already so could I just move straight on to ask if the Government have had discussions on the Cultural Olympiad with your sector?

  Ms Case: The DCMS has had one meeting with us about what the historic environment might contribute to it. I think at the moment we are in a state of some frustration, with a feeling that we want to contribute on the one hand, and a worry clearly, that the Olympics is going to suck money out of the sector in some sense. That is not just Government funding but construction skills and all that sort of thing. Also at the moment there does not seem to be anybody for us to engage with about what the historic environment could offer in the Olympic context. Certainly some of our members have some quite interesting ideas, for example about the regeneration of East London, but at the moment do not know who to engage with about it. We are due to have a meeting with the DCMS representative on the Olympics Operating Group after Easter when we hope to find a way of opening those doors and facilitating those conversations because I think it would be a pity if when we talk about the legacy in terms of the regeneration of East London for the Olympics, it was just a lot of splendidly designed new buildings (which wearing a different hat I am sure CABE would be interested in ensuring) but equally if it did not do something for the existing heritage of those areas which can add to the sense of identity and distinctiveness of those communities.

  Q282  Alan Keen: There is a great opportunity to have a link with a historical area even without many iconic sites. What ideas have come up from your area?

  Ms Case: The Heritage of London Trust certainly has been thinking about it quite seriously and at one stage had a thought about whether you could take a corridor from Central London going toward Newham and Stratford and identify where there were buildings of importance to those communities which could do with some maintenance and being refreshed. That is the sort of thing they have been thinking about. I think it is important that we are talking about doing things which will have an impact for tourism around the Olympics but also for those communities on-going after the Olympics so that it is not simply something which happens in 2012 and then stops being of benefit.

  Q283  Alan Keen: So is there anything you would like us to put in the report on that?

  Ms Case: I think finding some way of ensuring that the historic environment can play its full role and that if one is talking about the cultural programme it is not just about festivals and opera, however important they are, but it is about the fabric of these communities.

  Q284  Paul Farrelly: I have got a quite separate question from what Alan was talking about but come to think about it you have sparked off another bugbear for me! I am the MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is in North Staffordshire if you have not quite gathered that so far, but when I am in London I have the privilege of living in Hackney. At the moment there has been a big rumpus, which might be one of many small rumpuses across London but being in the local area I know about it, about the approach to the new Tube which is coming to Dalston in Hackney which is being driven by the Olympic timetable so that it actually gets achieved, but building the 18-storey tower blocks in the meantime is going to demolish lots of sites near there which have got great cultural and historical interest to local people. I think there is a second injunction there at the moment that the local group has gone to court to get to stop Hackney Council deliberately neglecting the area in the hope of demolishing it because of the Tube and so on and so forth. That shows the local engagement. However, when we sat here with Ken Livingstone in our Olympic evidence-taking session he made it pretty clear that local groups like that are not going to get too much sympathy from him, and neither presumably are yourselves, because nothing should stand in the way of progress and the timetable being achieved. The same question that Alan was asking, what co-operation and access do you get to the London Mayor?

  Ms Case: We have not ourselves gone to the London Mayor, in part because we see our role as being "national" rather than "regional", but again I believe that those of our members who have tried to talk to the London Mayor and the London Development Agency have found it a rather frustrating experience for those sorts of reasons.

  Q285  Paul Farrelly: Thank you, Chairman, for bearing with me, I just wanted to give some publicity to OPEN, the organisation that is fighting for that historic environment. That is O-P-E-N, Chairman! I will send them the page of evidence. These are issues that are maybe replicated across historic parts of East London, if not West London.

  Ms Pugh: Can I just say that Heritage Link is very keen on local engagement in the planning process and it is the subject of our most recent research. The title of the research was called Why Bother? You do wonder sometimes how the local communities have the courage to go on and on and on when they get such a disappointing response.

  Q286  Paul Farrelly: You say "Why bother?" The real question I have been asked to ask here is I detect a certain level of despair from your evidence when you urge there should not be any dilution of the current level of statutory protection for heritage assets. That does really smack of some despair because surely the issue is how can it be strengthened?

  Ms Case: If despair was the message that you got, I do not think despair was the message that we intended to give about the level of statutory protection. Like everybody else who has given evidence to you, our real concern is about the resources that may or may not be available to deal with whatever system emerges. You have already had a conversation this morning about the number of conservation officers and their skills in a traditional sense. I am very conscious of the need for them to have communication skills if they are to engage with local communities. I think one of the difficulties is that quite often local authority officers, whether they are conservation officers or archaeologists, use language which does not make much sense to small local groups which are not used to that planning language, if I can put it like that. If we are to engage local communities we need conservation officers and others who are skilled in talking to people and letting them have their say and understand what is being said.

  Q287  Paul Farrelly: We have discussed at length the proposal of having statutory conservation officers in each authority and the side effects of how that might not work and alternatives which try to attain the same outcome. There was a suggestion earlier, again echoed in parts of this inquiry, that local areas should be able to draw on committed resources for this in terms of architectural heritage centres. Is that something that you are also in favour of?

  Ms Case: My experience of architectural heritage centres, including the one in Hackney for example, is that they have been very good at engaging their local communities and in particular in beginning to engage young people. Going back to the question Mr Keen asked earlier about schools, if you can get young people to understand about the nature of the historic environment, the street pattern, why it is like it is, I think you are hopefully going to have a generation which will be much more at ease in having discussions about planning and development and that sort of issue.

  Q288  Paul Farrelly: Final question—is it a frustration to you, as it is to many people involved in backing these sorts of centres, that heritage by its very definition is not a time-limited issue nor is design, but these bodies quite often after many great efforts setting the things up suddenly find that after three years they have to go cap in hand trying to scratch around for money to carry on the job?

  Ms Case: I think that is a frustration to everybody who depends on that sort of funding from government or local government. It is a fact of life.

  Q289  Paul Farrelly: More priorities. Kate, have you got anything to say on how we can improve things in terms of strengthening the statutory protection on the ground?

  Ms Pugh: I do think the resources and skills are the main issues. That has come up from our members in responses to the heritage protection field. How exactly you do that has been discussed enormously but it is only now really being discussed by DCMS and ODPM. There are some issues—not small—in the change in legislation. Certainly we have within our membership the Joint Committee of the National Amenity Societies who are at the sharp end of the actual protection. I agree with Anthea that education and community involvement are going to be really important over the next decade or so and how to get the best out of the community to facilitate their involvement is something that obviously we are very interested in. So first of all you need the statutory protection but then you need the impetus and public interest in it to make it effective.

  Q290  Chairman: Do you think the Government properly understands how to deal with essentially what are a huge number of voluntary bodies made up of people who do this out of love? You in your evidence stress the importance of the voluntary sector throughout the role of maintaining the heritage. Is that something that is properly understood within government and do they deal with it as effectively as they might?

  Ms Case: I think it is a challenge for the DCMS to deal with the voluntary sector. Perhaps that is why we get these criticisms about there being too many bodies or not being able to get its act together. My perception is that for most of the other cultural sectors the DCMS deals with, there are more statutory bodies or more big organisations for them to deal with. If you take the museums sector, for example, there is the statutory Museums and Archives Council, and there are the big national museums as well as the local authority ones so it cascades down. So the normal method of intercourse, if I can put it like that, between the DCMS and its sectors is between the two public sector bodies with the levers, the carrots and sticks as it were, which apply to relationships between two public sector bodies. I think that the historic environment voluntary sector poses different issues because how does it engage with us? It does not have levers or has not found yet the right levers to engage with us. The funding levers are held by English Heritage in so far as there are any. We pose a challenge in terms of finding a modus vivendi, in which we can engage fully with them and they can engage fully with us. Whether that is better or different in other government departments where there are a lot of voluntary agencies (the Home Office is probably the one that springs to mind) I do not know, but I certainly feel that for our sector we have not yet found the right framework.

  Chairman: A final question from Paul.

  Q291  Paul Farrelly: Just a very quick question about VAT. Everyone is delighted that the Chancellor has extended the scheme for churches in the Budget. You have written to him about zero rating VAT on historic repairs. Have you had a response from him or the Paymaster General?

  Ms Case: We have not had a response from him. We have had an informal conversation with the Paymaster General and we are following that up by going to talk to her, but I think that it is the issue on which the sector is more united than anything else. It is one of the things which could contribute to the "stitch in time" maintenance issue, but even if nothing is done on the tax front, if you take the grant scheme for listed places of worship, in a sense the principle that underlies that is the same principle as you could apply to any of the non-trading charitable bodies or private owners in the historic environment sector.

  Q292  Paul Farrelly: What will you say to the Paymaster General if she tells you this will just be a nice little tax break for the upper and middle classes? "We have given to the ecclesiastical classes but we—"

  Ms Case: I suppose they have given a tax break to the ecclesiastical classes if one is looking at it like that. I think what we shall be saying to her is if you think that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for listed places of worship, why do you not think it is a reasonable thing to do for other categories? I think there is a real issue for the Treasury because they are clearly going to be worried about leakage, but if we all put our thinking hats on we ought to be able to find a way in the same way listed places of worship are satisfactorily ring-fenced (or at least nobody has ever said that they are not) of ring-fencing building preservation trusts or other sectors within our sector.

  Q293  Paul Farrelly: When you go to see Dawn with your two or three or four-page memorandum about how ring-fencing can work, would you send that to us as well?

  Ms Case: Thank you.

  Q294  Chairman: Is it not too late though?

  Ms Case: The deadline for the thing I wrote to the Chancellor about, Annex K, is passed, which is why I think having the conversation has to be now probably about extending the grant scheme rather than changing the tax system.

  Q295  Chairman: You were worried specifically about the opportunity that existed and you got no joy?

  Ms Case: We had no reply.

  Q296  Chairman: You had no reply. Can I thank you very much for your time.

  Ms Case: Thank you very much.






 
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