Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
TUESDAY 25 APRIL 2006
ENGLISH HERITAGE
Q340 Chairman: That is a point which
applies more widely. One of the principal recommendations we have
received from a number of witnesses is that more should be done
to encourage maintenance rather than waiting until major repairs
are necessary. How can you try and encourage that to happen?
Sir Neil Cossons: The first point
to make is that maintenance is good value for money, whether it
is public money or private money, not only in that it avoids having
to engage in major capital expenditure at intervals, but in terms
of the protection of the fabric. It is completely silly to put
millions of pounds into taking old, original work out, putting
back the right materials that are new and then to come back 30
years later because that too has fallen into disrepair, so maintenance
is absolutely central to a responsible regime for managing the
historic environment. Now, there are difficulties, we know, in
VAT, and I do not want to go down that particular avenue, but
we know that there are opportunities for a more encouraging regime
on the part of the Government and the nation as a whole towards
that. The other one, I think, is recognising that need in our
own educational work in supporting that. Simon, I do not know
whether you want to amplify that.
Dr Thurley: We do have some specific
programmes, a number run with the SPAB, but also programmes of
our own, including the churches' ones that we are going to be
launching in two weeks' time, to address this. All I can say is
that I would agree with your point and we would agree with the
submissions made by other witnesses to this Committee that it
is a major area of focus and we need to focus on it more.
Q341 Chairman: Although you say you
do not want to go down that avenue, let me press you. It has been
raised by almost all the submissions we have had that the VAT
regime currently mitigates against carrying out repairs. What
have you done to try and press the Government to address the imbalance
between the rate of VAT on repairs against new building?
Sir Neil Cossons: My only reason
for having reticence about going down that particular avenue is
because I know everybody else has been down it before us. There
is unanimity across the historic environment sector about this
as something worthwhile, and that includes developers, many of
whom, of course, are engaged in handling historic buildings. There
is straightforward commonsense at the root of that, and we say
that at every possible opportunity. I think my last occasion was
at the launch of the Historic Houses Association educational programmes
only last week, which was nothing to do with VAT but it seemed
to be a good opportunity, with a good audience, to make the point
yet again.
Q342 Chairman: I was present when
you did.
Sir Neil Cossons: I know you were.
Q343 Chairman: However, you will
also be aware that there was an opportunity to address this, which
expired on 31 March, when the European Commission would have allowed
us to bring in a reduced rate had we asked to do so. Did you press
the Government to take advantage of that?
Sir Neil Cossons: Yes.
Q344 Chairman: Without any success?
Sir Neil Cossons: We do not know
yet.
Q345 Chairman: We do because the
deadline has now passed?
Sir Neil Cossons: Because the
deadline has gone. That is it, yes.
Dr Thurley: That presumably was
a comment not a question, Chairman.
Q346 Chairman: Unless you were going
to give me evidence to contrary.
Dr Thurley: Sadly not, Chairman.
Q347 Helen Southworth: You have described
yourself as England's leader in heritage education, but you appear
in your report to have had a rather mixed performance. Your report
says that "while substantial progress has been made in outreach
and events, the pace of delivery has been slower in education",
and the total number of educational visits to English Heritage
sites in 2004-05 was 6.14% lower than the target figure and 4.25%
lower than the 2003-04 figure. I wonder what you are actually
doing to build awareness of the historic environment in the schools
curriculum.
Dr Thurley: I can explain that.
The market for attracting school children to sites is, surprisingly,
incredibly competitive, and one effect of Renaissance in the
Regions, which you will know about, has been to make lots
and lots of regional museums have incredibly well-funded and very
professional and very attractive education programmes. Ironically,
what it has meant for a lot of other sites, like our own sites
and sites that have not benefited from some of the Renaissance
money, is that their school visits have fallen quite significantly.
We are one of the group of organisations that have, suffered is
not quite the right word, but have felt the effects of increased
investment in Renaissance. What we need to do is to offer the
same sort of educational experience as the Renaissance museums
are doing, and that, essentially, is to provide more on-site,
direct teaching. We have not done this before. What we have normally
done is we have given an education pack to the teacher, they have
come along with the school children and they have made up their
own visit to our sites. We do not feel that is good enough any
longer because that is not what schools seem to want, it is certainly
not what other locations are offering, so as from the beginning
of this year, we are running a new scheme which is offering talk
sessions at our sites, which obviously is considerably more expensive,
but, if we do not do that, we will continue the slippery slide
and we will lose more school visitors as they go to other places
which are better resourced.
Q348 Helen Southworth: Are you looking
at new technologies and new methods of communication in making
things accessible?
Dr Thurley: We certainly are,
and technology in our sites, as in all museums, plays an increasingly
large role in helping people understand and appreciate them. I
can give you examples but you probably do not need them.
Q349 Helen Southworth: I do not know;
I would be quite interested to hear them?
Dr Thurley: There are a number
of specific uses of technology. One of the things we find it most
useful for is helping people with disabilities, because a very
large number of our sites are very inaccessible to people who
have impaired mobility. If you go to see Dover Castle there is
so much you can do with ramps and handrails, but there are large
parts of the castle which, unless you are fairly able-bodied,
you never see; so a lot of our sites now have a whole series of
technological solutions to allow people who cannot physically
get to the whole site, or perhaps might be visually impaired or
have some other disability, to actually appreciate it by using
technology.
Q350 Helen Southworth: Are you going
to make those available, for example, to teachers to look at in
the classroom in an IT setting in the classroom before a visit
or as a marketing tool maybe?
Dr Thurley: Yes, some of our sites
do have the materials that are on site available on CD which can
be used off site.
Q351 Helen Southworth: How are you
going to know whether you have succeeded and whether you have
increased the number of people who are getting involved in heritage
and who are understanding their own environment?
Dr Thurley: Are you talking on
the very widest canvas now, or are you talking specifically about
English Heritage sites?
Q352 Helen Southworth: I suppose
in both, but if you actually split the two things up because so
much of what people are doing in the local authorities, for example,
is actually determined by what they feel and understand and know
about their local heritage.
Dr Thurley: We are one of the
DCMS bodies that are contributing to a big DCMS project, which
is called the Participation Survey, which is an incredibly ambitious
survey to try and ascertain people's views about culture, media
and sport. There is a significant heritage section of that and
it has had its first report and it is very, very interesting what
it comes out with. It demonstrates that the most popular activity
of the CMS activities is going to visit old places. The data we
have got from that will now need to be refined and we will need
to look at it more closely, and we will also need to put it against
our own surveys that we do, because obviously we conduct a lot
of surveys every year of different types to try and work out how
people are feeling, what they believe in, what they regard as
important, and so we have got an increasing bank of data on this,
which, as Sir Neil mentioned earlier, we are now publishing annually
in our report to heritage accounts.
Q353 Helen Southworth: Are you able
to take account of how many people are new to the heritage experience?
Dr Thurley: Yes, we are. We are
able to do that through the questions that we ask in the survey,
but also the direct questions we ask on our own sites. For instance,
one of the big things that we do every year is fund heritage open
days, which happens in September, and we are making a special
effort there to try and calculate who is new, which people are
coming who would not normally come. It is one of the things that
has the ability to capture people's imagination. We regard that
data as very important, and we are collecting it.
Q354 Helen Southworth: One of the
things I have noticed with particular pleasure is the way the
heritage open days are moving into heritage open weeks because
there are too many people turning up.
Dr Thurley: Which is tremendous,
I agree.
Sir Neil Cossons: Just looking
ahead to the next Heritage Counts, each year we have a theme on
which we concentrate. Last year it was the heritage in the rural
environment. This year it is the meaning and value of the historic
environment to local communities; so that will again give us an
additional handle on the level to which there is involvement and
participation in heritage activities in the community.
Q355 Helen Southworth: Can I ask
you something slightly different. What do you think is the importance
of the public realm in terms of supporting, developing heritage
sites and getting investment into heritage sites?
Sir Neil Cossons: It is breath-taking
when you see it rolled up, and again "the best of the rest"
argument applies. If you think, for example, of the work put in
as part of the regeneration of Grainger Town in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
in which we were a partner with the local authority and One NorthEast
and others, one of the most extraordinary aspects of that was
the fact that the public realm part of that marvellous part of
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne was severely degraded, and part of our insistence
was that we wanted to see that improved with the right quality
of materials, and so on, as a means of setting off the historic
buildings and historic setting. You can see the same thing going
on in Liverpool, which you probably saw on your visit, where they
concentrated in those key areas on the right sorts of materials
and very high quality urban design.
Dr Thurley: May add to that, if
you will allow me. One of our most successful and most popular
campaigns that we are running at the moment is called "Save
our Streets", and it is a campaign to reduce the visual intrusion
of street signage, bollards and railings, particularly in conservation
areas. It has been hugely popular and very effective. I was in
York launching the York one just a few weeks ago and there were
1,400—if I have got the figures right—signs in the
York central conservation area, 600 of which have been hacked
down and thrown into a skip.
Sir Neil Cossons: That is by the
authorities.
Dr Thurley: Not by me personally,
I hasten to add, Chairman.
Sir Neil Cossons: It is one of
those areas where, of course, we work closely with CABE as well,
because we see very closely eye to eye in terms of quality of
urban design, which are often public realm issues which are central
to the well-being of the historic environment and the setting
for new buildings as well.
Q356 Helen Southworth: Have you carried
out any economic appraisal of the impact of public realm on investment
in heritage or user sites, first of all, and, second, do you have
an opinion about how much that is understood by ODPM and local
government?
Dr Thurley: We have carried out
an appraisal. We have conducted for many years a series of grant
schemes, which are quite low level, which set out to try and regenerate
the centre of mainly small towns and historic area schemes, and
we have published two surveys of this, both of which are called
Heritage Dividend I and II, which tries to put figures, in pounds,
shillings and pence, on the effects of relatively low level but
very focused heritage investment in just lifting the quality of
the area. We believe that we have managed to demonstrate that
it is very effective. When we have been in discussion with ODPM
and others about the Thames Gateway, it is one of the things that
we believe is going to be very important for these little historic
towns, little historic nodes, we call them, right the way through
the gateway, to invest in their historic centres just to bring
them up to give those places a sense of place and being. We believe
what we have done and what we have managed to quantify being really
very important, and we do believe they will be influential in
thinking about how you make new places.
Q357 Helen Southworth: What about
local government? Is there work to be done in convincing local
government that the investment will pay dividends, or is it widely
understood?
Dr Thurley: I think that there
is an increasing understanding of the role that heritage can play
in regeneration locally. We have seen in our work again and again
that people have come to us and been using our arguments against
us, as it were, or with us, so I think there is increasing recognition.
I do not think that the battle, if it is a battle, is entirely
won, but there is no doubt that many local authorities do see
their historic environment as an asset that can be exploited.
Q358 Chairman: Finally, Helen referred
to the need to influence ODPM and, indeed, to offer an education
curriculum. You have also referred to the fact that the Treasury
might have been persuaded to look at the VAT question. Neil, I
know you attach particular importance to trying to resolve the
Stonehenge question, which, of course, is a matter for the Department
for Transport. How effective do you think the DCMS is in putting
the case for heritage across the rest of Whitehall?
Sir Neil Cossons: I think this
is an issue both for English Heritage and for the Department.
We are in that sense mutually reinforcing. I come back again to
the point I was making earlier about data. We believe that the
department should be a powerful advocate for the historic environment,
and we believe it is our job to load the gun which they fire,
and that, I think, focuses our attention on their role. It is
not only, of course, for DCMS, it is for ODPM and for DEFRA as
well. We are unique, I think, as an NDPB, in having our funding
agreement signed off by three secretaries of state, and that is
illustrative of the cross-departmental importance of the historic
environment. It was sponsored by DCMS, but we work very closely
with ODPM and DEFRA, and one of our objectives is to ensure that
all three departments, first, understand the value of the historic
environment and then can be powerful advocates for it, and that
is what lies at the heart of our putting data into the hands of
ministers to enable them to make their case more strongly and
more powerfully.
Q359 Chairman: And other departments,
like the Department for Transport and the Treasury?
Sir Neil Cossons: Indeed so. You
mentioned Stonehenge, and Stonehenge is a major heritage issue
for the Department for Transport and is an area in which we are
working hard now to get an understanding. We have an opportunity,
uniquely, I think, and I can remember quite a large part of the
campaign to sort Stonehenge out. I think the first Chairman of
English Heritage saw it as something he might achieve; so did
the second; I am the third and we have still a year to go, but
I think we have in the current DFT Highways Agency proposal a
proposal for an on-line solution to the A303, the removal of the
A344 and the introduction of the visitor facilities and access
arrangements, which is the joint project between ourselves and
the National Trust, which is excellent. It is interesting that
as yesterday approached—the closing date for consultation
on the road scheme—a large number of the bodies that have
been consulted have fallen behind that proposal, and so, for the
first time in the lifetimes of any of us, there is a degree (and
I use the word degree carefully) of unanimity about the current
proposal being the right one. We know that it is going to cost
a fair amount of money. That has to be set in the context of what
alternative schemes there might be, and we know that there is
no support for the northern and southern routes which are in the
consultation proposal because of the environmental damage that
they would entail, and even the bored tunnel route and the difference
between its price and the covered tunnel route is not that huge.
Set against that is the opportunity cost of not doing it, and
it will take between five and seven years for us to be at the
point at which we are now with the new scheme having been submitted,
having been through public inquiry, having had all of the environmental
assessments carried out and having been in front of the Minister
ready to press the green button, plus three years for construction.
We either take the opportunity now, grasp the nettle now, this
summer, of getting something out of the last 10 or 15 years of
work and expenditure, or we see the people of the south-west suffer
an inadequate A303 for another decade, another eight million visitors
enjoy or endure the national disgrace which was identified by
the Parliamentary Committee in 1993. It is a critical two to three
months for us, and my feeling is that the nation has to do its
duty by Stonehenge by restoring the dignity of the monument, providing
access to that site of world-class quality and it has the opportunity
to have that up and running in time for the Olympics.
Chairman: Perhaps that is a good way
for us to turn to the Ministers. Thank you very much indeed.
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