Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300 - 319)

TUESDAY 25 APRIL 2006

ENGLISH HERITAGE

  Q300  Paul Farrelly: Do you not think that there might be a danger of degradation because there may be a minority perhaps of frustrated owners of Grade II* buildings who face more restrictions under that category in what they want to do with those buildings than if it slipped down to Grade II?

  Sir Neil Cossons: Well, we do not think so, Simon, do we? We have looked at this in some detail and we believe it is a good move in the right direction.

  Q301  Paul Farrelly: There is sound evidence that it would not be a degradation?

  Dr Thurley: In practice, there is no difference between a Grade II* and a Grade I building in terms of the consent regime. Both are referred to English Heritage for advice at the moment. I actually own both a II* and a Grade I and, I must say, I have not noticed any difference in what I have to do with the local conservation officer.

  Q302  Paul Farrelly: I am not even lucky enough to own a Grade II thankfully! The question was not between II* and I, but between II* and II in terms of degradation potentially, a building slipping down.

  Dr Thurley: There is no suggestion that there would be large numbers of II* buildings that would be, as it were, relegated to Grade II. However, it should be said that the proposals would involve effectively a re-Listing of our Listed building stock and we would have to write new List descriptions of every single Listed building and that would result in some buildings that are currently Grade II being promoted to the new Grade I and possibly some buildings that are currently Grade II* being, in your words, relegated to the new Grade II, but that is something we should be doing anyway. That is something that we actually ought to be looking at because some of the Lists are quite old and need rewriting and looking at again.

  Q303  Paul Farrelly: Who would be doing this work?

  Dr Thurley: Well, the current proposal is, and of course the White Paper has not been published so we do not know whether the Government is going to take this or not, that in the future, if this were to go ahead, as Listed building applications came in, they would have new List descriptions written for them, so there are about between 30,000 and 35,000 applications a year for Listed building consent and the aim would be to rewrite the List descriptions of each of those buildings as they came up.

  Q304  Paul Farrelly: What about the present stock?

  Dr Thurley: The present stock would be covered under that, but they would only have their List descriptions rewritten if the owners were to apply for Listed building consent.

  Q305  Paul Farrelly: It is a potentially amazing amount of work.

  Dr Thurley: It is a potentially huge amount of work, but the benefits would be enormous because one of the other problems that we have is that the List descriptions very often do not make it clear why a building is significant and that actually does give problems for the owner because the owner is not fully aware of what he can or cannot do, what is important about his building and what is not important. Particularly when looking at buildings at risk, when looking at, for instance, churches, which we may want to come on to later, the List descriptions do not make it clear what adaptations to a building would actually be acceptable and what would not, so the new List descriptions will make, I think, everybody's lives a lot easier because it will give much greater clarity about what was important in a building and what was not.

  Q306  Paul Farrelly: You have also been running pilot projects to test the wider reform proposals and I think there is a concern out there and with us that some of these proposals may lead to, in particular, more unfunded burdens for local authorities and would also place a demand on skills that frankly are lacking at the moment. Can you just tell us a little bit more about the pilot programmes that you have been testing and what conclusions you have drawn so far?

  Dr Thurley: The DCMS have actually just commissioned a piece of work by a man called David Baker to have a look at the pilot projects and you may have seen his report. I certainly have, I was reading it last night. The overall result of his analysis of the situation is that there is a general view that these types of arrangements will be beneficial in the long run, but we have got 20 and we have chosen some quite different and quite difficult cases and there are quite a lot of things that we need to do to make sure that they are working properly, but the overall view of the DCMS's own research, which we welcome and support, is that they do have considerable potential to make life more straightforward and in the long run actually to save money.

  Q307  Paul Farrelly: Potential in the long run? In the long run clearly we are all dead, as the famous phrase says! What about the short-run implications?

  Dr Thurley: Well, like many things and many management agreements, you have to put a lot of effort upfront to negotiate the agreement before you get the benefits at the end, so if you take one of the examples, which is the Holkham Estate which is a big, historic estate in Norfolk, actually setting up the management agreement will take several months of negotiation with the owner of the estate, with the local authority and with us and that is a significant investment, but once that agreement is in place, it means that all three parties have to do far less work. The difficulty of course with the system is that to get these things in, you have to put in money, time and resources upfront to save money later and that is quite often the nature of trying to make things more efficient.

  Sir Neil Cossons: The philosophical framework within which those pilots are exemplars is entirely based on our belief that conservation is best served by going for a managed solution rather than an adversarial one and that involves, as Simon says, input at the beginning in order to achieve savings and I think greater sign-up and buy-in later on because, as managed processes, if we take the Piccadilly Line, for example, which is one of our pilots, we will become more familiar with handling what are quite complex buildings and so will the owner in terms of his understanding of what their conservation entails. Therefore, an intensive period at the beginning we believe reaps benefits later on.

  Q308  Paul Farrelly: Do you have an estimate of the financial burden that you will incur through that and also the financial burden upfront that local authorities will incur?

  Dr Thurley: That is part of the research that is going on at the moment. We do not know and I think we have to be quite open about that, that we do not know, but it should be set in the context of our own activities because what we are increasingly trying to do is what we call `pre-application work'. In other words, we are trying to come to agreement with owners before their application is submitted to local authorities as to the benefits and disbenefits of any particular scheme, so our own case work right the way across the board we are trying to move forward before the applications come in so that, when the applications come in, it is simply a question of ticking them through. This is part of a wider trend and it is expensive in the short run because in the short run you are both doing the pre-application stuff and you are doing the, as it were, post-application stuff, but that bulge of work theoretically, and I believe it will happen, will pass and we can deal with most things in pre-application.

  Q309  Paul Farrelly: What do you think local authorities should be doing in particular to prepare for this? Where are they lacking in expertise? My local authority has lost its conservation officer because he has gone to go and tout for developers and that is a pattern that is affecting many other local authorities which are pretty much cash-strapped around the country.

  Dr Thurley: I think the first thing that should be said is that both the Baker Report and another report which has been commissioned by the DCMS from Atkins has shown that the local authorities broadly welcome the concepts behind HPR. There are anxieties, as you rightly say, about resources and we too have anxieties about resources. We do know that there are local authorities who see the historic environment service they provide as being of low priority and we do know of a number of local authorities at the moment who have lost staff exactly as you say. Clearly this is one of the issues that will need to be resolved and worked through in the timescale of the White Paper.

  Q310  Paul Farrelly: One of the reasons my local authority has lost staff is because it is a two-tier authority and we are at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to everybody else snapping up everybody else and not least because of some of the regeneration quangos that the Government has secured around the country, so at this time of major setting up of other structures of regeneration, we are setting up another set of reforms and, too right, there are going to be pressures on the resources. How do we resolve that?

  Sir Neil Cossons: Well, in the generality we have been encouraging the appointment of heritage champions amongst elected members in local authorities and there is considerable sign-up for that and we bring heritage champions together from time to time to provide at member level a fuller understanding of the values of the historic environment and of the role of the local authority in it. One of the advantages we have is that there are the best and the rest of course amongst local authorities and the best are very, very good. They can themselves provide outstanding exemplars of best practice, so there is a better sign-up and understanding on the part of elected members which we see as an important part of our work to encourage, train, assist and then the training of officers as well in which we would see it as a very useful part of our work to help the capacity-building capability amongst local authorities as a means not only of putting the responsibility down to the local authority level where it should be, but preventing feedback into our own offices of issues that are essentially local issues that should be determined locally.

  Q311  Paul Farrelly: Do you and the Department, working together, actually have an up-to-date picture, a snapshot, of current capacity and levels of expertise by, for example, local authority conservation officers and also archaeologists?

  Dr Thurley: We know the broad picture across the country. We know that on average there are 1.7 conservation officers per authority and each of those has to deal with about 1,200 Listed buildings and about 30 conservation areas. That is the sort of average picture across the country. There is a whole series of bits of research done by an organisation called ALGAO who are the Association of Local Government Archaeological Officers. There is also work by the IHBC, the Institute of Historic Building Conservation, but there is no comprehensive once-and-for-all piece of research that tells us what the situation is. I think that you are right in pointing out that there is a problem. The sort of skills that we need from people now are very different from the skills that were needed before. We do need people with a much greater awareness of issues of regeneration, a much greater understanding of the economics of the market and we need people who not only have archaeological skills, but also skills in historic buildings, and the training that exists at the moment does not really give us that. We do have a number of schemes and projects on the go at the moment to try and make sure that in the future the right sort of people will be turned out by the training institutes, the colleges and the universities, but right now there is a shortage of the right sort of people.

  Q312  Philip Davies: Just before we move on to heritage protection, can I just ask if you think there would be any additional protection for World Heritage sites specifically and, if so, what that might look like?

  Sir Neil Cossons: Yes, I think we do feel that World Heritage sites deserve better than they get at present. The designation of World Heritage sites is of course material in the planning process, so to that extent they are better regarded than would be an equivalent area that was not a World Heritage site, but, as we refine what HPR might represent in detail, I think certainly we need to look at what provisions there are for World Heritage sites and determine what is possible and practicable. I do not think we have a more detailed view on it at this stage.

  Q313  Philip Davies: In terms of funding, virtually every submission we have heard and received has noted that your funding has gone down and pointed out how damaging that has been to their particular organisation. Could you tell us what arguments you are putting forward to the DCMS to secure a better settlement in the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review?

  Sir Neil Cossons: Can I set the context for the funding of English Heritage because I have been Chairman for six years and one of the things that I was asked to do by the then Secretary of State was to bring together representatives of the wider historic environment sector to report back to government on the management of the historic environment and that appeared in the form of a report called Power of Place. One of the things that we discovered, what many of us had known, but now had serious evidence of, was the lack of quantitative data right through the historic environment area. Much of the argument in support of the heritage historic environment has been based on emotion and not enough of it on sound evidence. One of the results of Power of Place was that there was a government response of course and we have been each year producing an audit of aspects of the historic environment called Heritage Counts and that is for the first time giving the Department, ourselves and the wider heritage sector the serious evidence that enables us to make a persuasive case. Even more recently the Department's own participation surveys indicated the levels of engagement with the historic environment on the part of people at large. I think one of the big issues that we have all had, and it is common to the sector, it is common to English Heritage and it is common to the Department, is that we have not been serious enough in the way in which we have engaged with each other in terms of the arguments that we can deploy, so in the run-up to 2007 we feel confident for the first time really that we will have the quality of information available to us to make a persuasive case.

  Q314  Philip Davies: How confident are you that that will be listened to and that you will actually get a much better funding settlement or do you think it will fall on stony ground, your request for more funding?

  Sir Neil Cossons: I am confident that it will be listened to, but I do not know how stony the ground is going to be and that of course applies right across government in a whole range of areas. What I am confident about is that the nature of the relationship in terms of our mutual understanding of the wider issues in the historic environment between the DCMS and ourselves is better now than it ever has been and that, I think, must be good for both parties.

  Q315  Philip Davies: Well, I hope that it does not fall on stony ground, but, if it does and the worst comes to the worst and your funding continues to decline, where would the cutbacks in services be most likely to be made?

  Dr Thurley: We have, as you know, a published strategy and we have costed that strategy so that we have the resources from the current spending round to fund that strategy. It is one that we have agreed with government. If, for some reason, we do not have the resources to achieve everything on that, we will have to have the discussion with, first of all, DCMS, but then after that ODPM and DEFRA as to which of the things in our strategy they regard as being less important and we would have to stop doing those things. I do not think we have ourselves, as it were, a hit-list, but we would have to discuss that with our funding partners.

  Q316  Janet Anderson: You have gone through some fairly major restructuring in recent years. I wonder if you could just tell us in what way you feel that the modernisation programme has made English Heritage a fitter organisation and perhaps you could also tell us a bit about what has happened to staff numbers since, say, 2002?

  Sir Neil Cossons: In the generality, the modernisation programme in English Heritage, which has run over the last five or six years, has, I think, made us a much fitter organisation, fit for purpose in terms of the changing needs of the historic environment and enabling us in particular, I think, to focus on the key areas that are priority areas for the historic environment in general and, therefore, for us. That has meant that we have had to change the nature of our people in order to be able to have expertise in areas which in some cases we did not have before and to be a little more relaxed in some areas where we might have a mismatch, but what I think we have now got is an organisation which is very closely attuned to the needs of the wider historic environment market and that is a good thing. It has also, I think, given us a quality of flexibility that we did not have in the past and we have, I hope, been able to protect the particular quality by which we are most valued by most of our partners and that is the quality of our expertise because it is that core of knowledge which feeds into all our work, into our grant-giving, into our statutory work, into the operation of our properties and into the advice that we give to others. That has been something which we have been very keen not just to protect, but to move on into areas where we know we were weak, and one thinks, for example, of education and outreach as an example where we were decidedly sub-standard and we now believe we are up to scratch. Simon, you could probably fill in some of the detail on that.

  Dr Thurley: I do not know how much detail the Committee would like to hear, but I think that in terms of principle what we have been trying to do is become more, as it were, people-focused rather than buildings- and archaeology-focused and recognise that the only point in having these wonderful sites and monuments and the wonderful history of our country is because people can enjoy it. I think there is always a tendency with an organisation that is full of experts for the experts to concentrate on what they really know about which is bricks and mortar, the stratigraphy in the ground and roofing materials and all the things we are expert in, and what we have to realise is that this is only valuable because people value it and at the heart of our changes has been a reorientation in that direction, so we have taken out a lot of bureaucracy and we have had a lot greater focus on regional delivery. Constructive conservation that I mentioned earlier has been a major part of that, trying to work upstream with planning applications, talking to people before they put their applications in rather than waiting for them to come and us just saying, "Well, we don't like it". That has resulted in about 11% of our staff turning over, so we lost about 11%. Quite a few of those posts we replaced with different types of people, as Sir Neil said, but at the end of that I think we have got a body that is able to work in what I describe as a more constructive way, and that is what we were trying to achieve.

  Q317  Janet Anderson: I certainly think that the regional emphasis is very welcome indeed and, as a Lancashire MP, I very much welcome that. What has all of this done for staff morale, the staff you have now? Has it had an effect?

  Sir Neil Cossons: I think there was a drop, and there always is when uncertainty exists in an organisation. One of the things that we were very keen to do was to reduce the period of uncertainty during the modernisation process so that we could feed back as quickly as possible into the new structure and, in particular, to the people who were going to be an integral part of the new arrangements clarity and certainty as to what the arrangements would be that followed on from that. My feeling is that the organisation is in pretty fit fettle across the board.

  Q318  Janet Anderson: Some people think that English Heritage tried to spread itself too widely in many ways. I am just wondering in what areas have you found the greatest danger of conflict between your many different roles as regulator, as adviser to government, grant-giver, et cetera, and how do you manage those potential conflicts? Is it something that you would like the peer review, which has been recently announced by the Minister, to address?

  Dr Thurley: One of the reasons behind our modernisation programme was the quinquennial review that was completed in 2000 which actually raised many of the issues that you have just mentioned and our modernisation programme was very much in response to that and it was trying to make our internal management much, much clearer. There was what then was called `matrix management' where everybody sort of did everything. We have now managed to separate the functions and we have got much, much clearer responsibilities and accountabilities through the organisation, and that does mean that we are far less likely to find ourselves in the circumstance where our various different functions actually conflict and, in areas where they might conflict, we have put in place various mechanisms to make sure that we can sort that out before it gets too difficult. Of course the most important thing we have done is the preparation, submission and agreement of our strategic plan which makes very, very clear and public how our resources, £165 million of resources, are being divided up between those various areas of responsibility and the plan makes provision, as we go forward, to continually look at that balance of resources and to continually ask the people whom we work with whether that balance is actually right and, if it is not right, it has provision for us to move resources around to make sure that we can put them where the needs really are, so I am pretty happy with that at the moment.

  Q319  Janet Anderson: Do you think the proposed review is a good idea or do you think it might cause unnecessary delay over the expected White Paper?

  Dr Thurley: I think the review is excellent. We jointly commissioned it with the DCMS. We have spent quite a lot of taxpayers' money; we have spent over £13 million on our modernisation programme in terms of redundancy, in terms of new IT systems and in terms of all the things we have done. I think it would be quite improper for us not to have a thorough review to see whether the criticisms that were levelled at us in 2000 had been met or not, so we and the DCMS are absolutely at one in thinking it is a very good thing.


 
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