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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