Memorandum submitted by the National Council
on Archives
The National Council on Archives (NCA) was established
in 1988 to bring together the major bodies and organisations,
including service providers, users, depositors and policy makers,
across the UK concerned with archives and their use. It aims to
develop consensus on matters of mutual concern and provide an
authoritative common voice for the archival community.
The NCA welcomes the opportunity to give our
views to the Committee.
SUMMARY
The Committee should be aware that built heritage,
historic buildings and structures, do not constitute the entire
heritage sector and that both built and "moveable" heritage
comprise a whole. Moveable heritage, papers, books, objects, provide
us with the context surrounding the built environment, as well
as a much wider perspective on the development of our culture
and the history of ideas.
There are many complementary aspects between
the built historic environment and the moveable heritage sector,
especially the archival documentary evidence that enables the
built environment to be interpreted, preserved and restored in
a manner that is appropriate and historically accurate.
There are sections of society for whom the built
heritage sector is much less accessible than the moveable heritage
sector and these tend to be those communities most at risk of
exclusion.
The existing provision of responsibility and
funding for all heritage sectors is leaving large areas of our
heritage at critical risk of decay and loss. Additionally, it
cannot cope with the development necessary to release the potential
that these treasures hold for inter-domain capacity building,
community cohesion and commercial exploitation for the organisations
that safeguard them (which would offset their reliance on the
public purse in the long term).
There appears to be a lack of cohesion between
some government departments responsible for heritage, particularly
evidenced by the fragmented nature of their policy and operations.
In some sectors, there is a critical shortage
of conservators with the necessary skills to preserve our heritage
for generations to come.
1. What the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport should identify as priorities in the forthcoming Heritage
White Paper
Although the remit of the present inquiry appears
to focus on the built environment (historic buildings, museums,
galleries, etc.), it is worth reiterating that these buildings
do not constitute the entire heritage left to us. Indeed, to a
growing section of UK society, many of the magnificent Georgian
and Victorian civic and private buildings embody a legacy built
on the proceeds of practices now rightly despised, such as colonisation,
slavery and other enforced labour.
The so-called "moveable" heritage
sector, papers, books, objects and their repositories, can offer
a much more accessible way to understand our history for many
people. Archives, unlike libraries, hold original documents; the
authentic voice of the past speaking directly to people of today
without any intermediaries or interpreters. Archives, unlike museums,
expect visitors to access these original documents directly, touching
them and connecting with the past in a way that may relate specifically
to that person, through records of their own family, for instance.
The documentary evidence held in archives is
often essential to the appropriate conservation and restoration
of built heritage. It is the view of the National Council on Archives
that archival evidence is underused in the planning system but
is a vast resource offering accurate historic information and
context often not available elsewhere. This is an aspect of archives
that is being constantly researched and made available to planning
officers and conservators (see Journal of the Society of Archivists,
Vol. 25, No. 2, 2004 "A Cross-disciplinary Approach to
the Use of Archives as Evidence of Past Indoor Environments in
Historic Buildings", May Cassar and Joel Taylor, UCL Centre
for Sustainable Heritage).
The National Council on Archives believes that
the DCMS should identify as priorities in the forthcoming White
Paper those areas of our heritage, built and moveable that are
in most danger of being lost to present and future generations,
which at the same time have the most potential for being of direct
relevance to those generations. The DCMS, in preparing these priorities
should recognise the contribution which all aspects of heritage
can make, and propose a fair distribution of resources to support
them.
2. The remit and effectiveness of DCMS, English
Heritage and other relevant organisations in representing heritage
interests inside and outside Government
There are significant distinctive areas of the
public heritage sector that "fall between stools" and
have no organisation or department responsible for them. This
leads to a lack of strategic cohesion, a lack of core funding
and a consequent waste of public money in trying to preserve the
heritage with recurrent project funding which does not adequately
address the inherent accessibility and conservation problems.
There are other areas where government heritage
bodies seem fragmented in their policy and operations. In particular,
the NCA notices that this Inquiry, and this question itself, make
no reference to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)
which is indicative of a lack of cohesion between the two bodies.
3. The balance between heritage and development
needs in planning policy
The NCA believes that there is a vast potential
for using historic buildings and documentary evidence to inform
planning policy to make built developments more accessible and
sustainable. There are good examples of the use of existing structures
to meet today's needs in a historically informed and creative
way.
However, as always, the integration of good
planning policy and heritage requires resources, not only in the
shape of money, but also in research, expertise and talent. The
NCA is confident that not funding such planning policy is a false
economy, leading to developments that fail their communities and
lose large amounts of public money rather than thriving and becoming
commercial and community assets.
4. Access to heritage and the position of
heritage as a cultural asset in the community
The NCA firmly believes that access to heritage
is being limited because of funding, and that the entire heritage
sector is not fulfilling its vast potential as a cultural asset
of all communities because of this. For instance, a survey carried
out in the north-west of England in 2003 found that 29% of archival
holdings are un-catalogued. It would take one professional archivist
an estimated 299 years to make this material fully accessible.
As long as backlogs like this exist these collections will remain
inaccessible to the public—a great waste of archives' huge
untapped potential.
There is still no provision for public on-line
access to the statutory list of historic buildings, preventing
key aspects of engagement with the historic environment. There
is a need for more funding to digitise historic environment records
for England (which lags behind Scotland and Wales—see http://www.rcahms.gov.uk).
We are sure that English Heritage would find this valuable.
English Heritage is doing a good job in working
with the other home nations but its task is far more daunting.
This is a massive collection, responsibility for which is spread
across a variety of funding sectors —TNA holds key records,
as does English Heritage's regions and the NMR, plus local authorities,
universities etc.
For the general public with an interest in history,
local historians as well as professionals, this is a vast underexploited
resource, with legal and evidential as well as cultural and educational
value. Finding appropriate funding to allow it to be exploited
is a key challenge for the sector.
5. Funding, with particular reference to the
adequacy of the budget for English Heritage and for museums and
galleries, the impact of the London 2012 Olympics on Lottery funding
for heritage projects, and forthcoming decisions on the sharing
of funds from Lottery sources between good causes
Through English Heritage, DCMS sponsors one
of the biggest public archives outside of The National Archives.
Yet, despite this, public awareness of their right to access this
is extremely limited, and this is primarily because of the lack
of funding to develop this asset.
It is the view of the NCA that many historic
collections are at present housed in historic buildings which
do not adequately provide conservation level accommodation for
these collections, thus placing them in danger. At the same time,
those historic buildings require a better level of maintenance
than organisations that care for moveable heritage collections
can often afford, as their core funding has to be spent on collection
care.
It seems obvious to the NCA that these needs
should be tackled holistically. There are examples of collections
housed in the buildings for which they were collected and designed,
eg The British Museum or The Bowes Museum. But there are many
other examples where collections are housed in buildings that
just happen also to be historic for other reasons, and these synergies
should be encouraged, as they provide a home for collections in
appropriate surroundings and a use for valuable but otherwise
unused buildings.
While the NCA fully recognises the need to make
a success of the London Olympics, we would be concerned if the
necessary funding were found at the expense of other parts of
the heritage sector which are already under-funded.
6. What the roles and responsibilities should
be for English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, local authorities,
museums and galleries, charitable and other non-Governmental organisations
in maintaining the nation's heritage
The NCA recognises the vital role HLF has played
in funding major improvements in archive services, and hope that
they will be able to continue fulfilling this role. We see the
need for MLA to play an enhanced role in representing the views
of the sector to government, where the concerns of the sector
are not always recognised. In many ways, the NCA views the existing
structure of roles and responsibilities to be adequate. However,
there are some areas where the present coverage is significantly
failing.
The failure of The Archives Task Force (2004)
to secure any funding at all was viewed by the archives sector
as evidence of government's disinterest and lack of appreciation
of their contribution. This should be seen in the context of the
awards, additional to core funding, of £100 million Renaissance
in the Regions programme for museums and £13 million to the
Framework for the Future programme for libraries to realise these
domains' vast potential as community cultural assets.
Despite the duty to preserve the nation's moving
image heritage being given to The British Library by law, the
responsibility for UK film archives is presently lodged with the
British Film Institute via UK Film Council whose main preoccupation
is, quite rightly, the generation of new films. Consequently,
they do not grant the BFI any funding for film archives. The film
archives themselves are each funded differently, struggling to
obtain support from local councils, interested higher education
institutions and the Lottery funders to supplement the minimal
funding they receive through the regional screen agencies to keep
their activities going. Because of this lack of joined up thinking,
these film archives are now facing critical funding gaps and possible
closure within the next 12 months.
7. Whether there is an adequate supply of
professionals with conservation skills; the priority placed by
planning authorities on conservation; and means of making conservation
expertise more accessible to planning officers, councillors and
the general public
In some areas, there is a critical shortage
of professionals with conservation skills. In film archives, for
instance, which preserve film footage that often contains the
only pictorial evidence of some historic areas and buildings and
how they were used, there is a significant lack of conservators
with the necessary skills to preserve the various formats in which
the material has survived. In order to make this material more
widely accessible, all film archives now have a systematic programme
of digitising their material, but the original format must be
made stable before this process can happen. Indeed, these digitisation
and accessibility programmes themselves are in danger of being
halted altogether because of the lack of core funding the film
archives receive. This has not been adequately addressed because
of the labyrinthine structure of responsibility for the film archives
(see above).
17 January 2006
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