|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 912-vi House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
PROTECTING AND PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE
Tuesday 25 April 2006
SIR NEIL COSSONS and DR SIMON THURLEY MR DAVID LAMMY MP and BARONESS ANDREWS OBE Evidence heard in Public Questions 297 - 394
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 25 April 2006 Members present Mr John Whittingdale, in the Chair Janet Anderson Philip Davies Mr Nigel Evans Paul Farrelly Mr Mike Hall Alan Keen Helen Southworth ________________ Memorandum submitted by English Heritage
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir Neil Cossons, Chairman, and Dr Simon Thurley, Chief Executive, English Heritage, gave evidence. Q297 Chairman: Good morning. This is the final session in which we will be taking evidence on the protection of heritage. We have before us this morning both English Heritage and the Ministers with responsibility in the Government. Can I begin by welcoming Sir Neil Cossons and Dr Simon Thurley from English Heritage and perhaps start off by asking you about the review of heritage protection and the measures that we are anticipating in the White Paper. You have said in your evidence that you believe that the reform of the heritage protection system is essential and is eagerly awaited by partners. I think the evidence we have received suggests that there is mild enthusiasm, but perhaps it is not regarded quite as essential as you suggest. Can you tell us what evidence there is that the present system is failing and where is the pressure for change coming from? Sir Neil Cossons: Chairman, good morning. I am Neil Cossons, Chairman of English Heritage, and we are delighted to be here. The Heritage Protection Review is something on which, as you know, we have been working for quite a long while and at its heart is our belief that the present arrangements are over-complex and difficult to understand by many people in the sector, so at its heart we see the Heritage Protection Review as simplifying and streamlining as a means towards aiding understanding and in particular, I think, getting a wider appreciation of the value of protective legislation on the part of people as a whole. Dr Thurley: If I could perhaps add to that, we believe that conservation has been regarded all too often as something that has been obstructive and as being something that has prevented people from doing things and held people back. Our view is also that that is a misplaced view, so what our core focus is as an organisation is to bring about what we describe as 'constructive conservation' and that is a much more positive attitude to the whole series of issues around protecting the historic environment. We believe that there are three things which are absolutely fundamental if we are going to achieve a much more constructive way of dealing with conservation. The first one of those is the Heritage Protection Review, and I will come on to that in a second. The second is a fundamental look at the way the philosophy of conservation is operated in England, and it is all too often still seen as a recipe for stopping things from happening, whereas we believe that what the process of conservation actually is is the management of change, so we believe that there has to be a philosophical change and we are leading the review and the consultation at the moment which will lead to a very important document which will be about how we believe the philosophy of conservation ought to develop over the next few years. The third element of constructive conservation is training and support for local authorities. What we see is the Heritage Protection Review within this wider package of changing philosophy, of support and training and support for local authorities, that it cannot be disengaged from those and we do not believe that we can get this much more positive approach unless we have all three of those things working together. Q298 Chairman: Certainly I think we have heard a lot of evidence about the need for a change in attitude, as you have described. The other thing we have heard a lot about is a need for a change in the level of resourcing which we will come on to, but neither of those things is necessarily going to be dealt with by structural change in a White Paper. Where do you think it is wrong at the moment and why do we need to be doing this? Dr Thurley: I think that Sir Neil is right, that it is too complicated. There are two principal types of designation, scheduling and Listing, and one of the main problems with scheduling is that it is a national designation and we are not alone in this country in having this problem. Quite often across Europe archaeology is then dealt with by central government rather than by local government and what that does is it divorces the decision-making about important archaeological issues from local people and from the local authorities and that somehow gives them the feeling that it is somebody else's problem. We certainly believe that a very, very important part of the Heritage Protection Review is making sure that the important decisions about people's localities should be made in the localities and it should not be for national government and a secretary of state to make those decisions on their behalf. Therefore, what that is all about is actually about making a system that people can own much more and also a system that is much more open and less secretive because, as I am sure you are aware and you will have heard evidence on this, the current system of Listing means that an English Heritage inspector can come and view your building without you knowing, make a recommendation to the Secretary of State and the Secretary of State can then List your building without you knowing and the first thing you know about it is a letter through your letterbox informing you of that. A system that does not allow people to participate, does not allow people to be involved in the decisions about their own assets is going to be a system that does have less respect and has less power and efficacy, so we believe this is really about giving people a much greater opportunity to be engaged both in the consent side and in the designation side too. Q299 Chairman: Before I move on, could I ask you if you are happy that one of the tiers, the Grade II* tier, is going to disappear? Dr Thurley: One of the proposals is that in order to simplify the list, instead of having Grade I, II* and Grade II, one will just have Grade I and Grade II, and probably most of the scheduled ancient monuments, the Grade Is and the II*s, will become Grade I and the Grade IIs will remain as they are. There is a benefit to this because those three classes are the three classes that are referred up nationally for consultation, so it will be very, very clear that if you had a Grade I category site or monument, you would, therefore, be liable to have your application referred to a national level. We just think again that it makes things simpler. It is not a downgrading in any sense and, if anything, it is an upgrading for the IIs. Sir Neil Cossons: By the same token, on my earlier point about simplification, the idea of having Grade II* is arcane from the point of view of the wider public understanding of what Listing means, so anything that simplifies and enhances the quality of categorisation is, we believe, constructive and, as Simon says, putting II* into category I simplifies it from the operational point of view and certainly simplifies it from the point of view of a wider public understanding of what Listing is and what it means. 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 LGOA who are the Local Government Officers for Archaeology. 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. Q320 Chairman: You, therefore, see the review as really an assessment of the modernisation programme that has taken place, not as a review to make a recommendation for further radical change? Dr Thurley: The terms of reference are not to make recommendations for radical change. I think that the review comes at an extremely good time and it will coincide with the report of your own Committee and I think that the review will give quite a lot of weight to what this Committee finds. It will be an opportunity to build on the improvements that we believe we have made and to see whether our partners whom we work with right across the country believe that we are improving. Q321 Chairman: Are you concerned that it may be another attempt to try to find efficiency savings to allow you to spend more on front-line services rather than actually increasing your grant? Dr Thurley: Well, we have no problem about making efficiency savings. In fact we rather pride ourselves that we have become a very, very efficient organisation. One of the reasons we have had to become efficient is because we have not perhaps had the grant-in-aid that we wanted, but that in a way is not a bad thing. We are not frightened of becoming more efficient and we strive to be an organisation that is excellent in every way, particularly in the management of our finances. Q322 Chairman: So you think there is still scope for more efficiency savings? Dr Thurley: I think it would be a dereliction of my duty as Chief Executive if I said that there was not scope. Of course we could always become more efficient. Sir Neil Cossons: We certainly see the peer review as an opportunity rather than a threat and I think the point that Simon made about it being something on which the DCMS and ourselves are at one provides us with the opportunity to demonstrate to the peer review team what we have done over the last four years and, we believe, get some quite powerful endorsement of the modernisation programme and its results. Q323 Alan Keen: You spoke right at the beginning about training for local authority people. Could you expand on that a little bit more please? Dr Thurley: Well, we launched a scheme that we called 'HEL Hal HELhhHELM' two years ago, which is Historic Environment Hish ahHsissot Local Management, another terrible acronym, which has a website which is available for various types of officers and actually members of local authorities who deal with the historic environment. It has about 120,000 hits a year on it. That is in a sense the core of that we are doing, but around that is a series of training sessions where we are training about 1,000 people a year and we are providing advice and guidance for local authorities too. I would say that I do not think it is still enough. We have reorientated our grant programmes so that we are putting twice the amount of money into supporting people in local authorities and others in dealing with the historic environment, so we are now putting about £7 million worth of grant, and in some local authorities we are actually part-funding conservation officers and other historic environment professionals. There is a lot to do and I think we are doing a lot, but I would certainly say that we still have more to do. Sir Neil Cossons: And in areas where there is very specific need, we have made special provision, so, another acronym, HELP, the Historic Environment Liverpool Project, is in a city which has been in crisis over recent years, is undergoing extraordinary renaissance now and much of that of course based on the quality of its historic buildings, many of which are severely neglected. We have put our own staff into Liverpool City Council's planning office to help with the preparation of the World Heritage bid which was successful, with the definition of a sophisticated Buildings At Risk Register, which itself came off the back of The Liverpool Echo's 'Stop the Rot' campaign in which they were castigating the City Council for neglect of historic buildings. That will be a short-term involvement at a very deep level by us for a period of, say, three years and those people will then come out and our belief is that Liverpool will be able to cope then from the quality of the knowledge which it has in-house with its historic environment issues. We have a number of examples of that and usually it is a slightly smaller scale with local authorities where there are particular issues, short- or medium-term, which have to be dealt with Q324 Alan Keen: As you probably know, we visited Liverpool. Sir Neil Cossons: Indeed. Q325 Alan Keen: It is thrilling frankly and you deserve a tremendous amount of credit for your input into that and so does the local authority as well. I thought it was so impressive that that regeneration could come and link with the old buildings and the traditions of the port. Sir Neil Cossons: Well, England's finest Victorian city deserved better and we recognised that. Dr Thurley: Chairman, the inhabitants of Manchester might disagree, but perhaps we will not go into that! Q326 Alan Keen: What about the local authority budgets themselves? How are they coping? We all know that local authorities' budgets have been cut back everywhere really in order to force them to be more efficient. Overall, how are they coping with the demands that you would like to see them meet? Sir Neil Cossons: We addressed that in part in Simon's earlier answers about conservation officers. We know that there are areas of stress in local authorities and we see our work as being to encourage local authorities to move the historic environment higher up their agendas. Q327 Alan Keen: Do you think the DCMS has got the power to help get funding particularly for this aspect of local authority responsibility? It is a difficult area, is it not? Dr Thurley: Of course local authorities have to make their own decisions about their own priorities and I think it is difficult for either us or the DCMS to oblige local authorities to do anything in this respect. I think that the Chairman is absolutely right when he says that the level that we have got to work at is the level which encourages members in particular, but also officers, to value the historic environment, and we believe that if they value it, they will want to make sure that their historic environment services are properly funded, and that really is the thinking behind the Heritage Champions project that we have got. We have now got 181 champions which is almost 50% of all local authorities and we see that as our way in to try and persuade local authorities to give the historic environment a higher profile. Q328 Alan Keen: The point I have raised in earlier sessions is that in my own London Borough of Hounslow, we have got real icons like Osterley, Scion, Gunnersbury, Hogarth House and nobody is going to let them fall down, and the people in the boroughs are very good at looking after their own areas and we have got funding in the past for (?) against other people in the borough, but they are very good. I was going across the road on the Great West Road Golden Mile when the Firestone façade was knocked down, which was wonderful, though not as good as the A40 Hoover factory, but pretty good and that was knocked down one weekend. I was not in there at the weekend, I was across the road, trying to stop them, but that is the sort of thing that is not looked after, like the river frontage at Brentford and the canal where the Grand Union joins it. I have asked this question in earlier sessions: is there a role to make sure we get it all, that we catch everything in an area? Is there a role for schools because, if a local authority has not got the resources, should this be part of the school curriculum so that the future people who are going to look after it get involved at a very young age? Is there a part there and are you involved in any way? Has anybody really pushed this? Sir Neil Cossons: If you accept the argument that the historic environment is part of the DNA of the nation, it means something to everybody, it is part of all of us, and what underlies a lot of our philosophy in terms of how we have been developing the appreciation and understanding of the historic environment, particularly since the publication of Power of Place, firstly, it is our recognition that it is something which is important to most people in one sense or another and that that importance happens at a series of levels, and sometimes it is at the level of an individual community or even a street corner. Those are the areas, I think, where we see the opportunity to engage youngsters in educational programmes, school activities and visits and all that sort of thing is particularly effective. One of the other things that came out of the Power of Place work was the comparison that was made by the relative effectiveness of the natural environment lobby in terms of frogs and natterjack toads and village ponds and species in hedgerows, for which there is huge buy-in right through all levels and all parts of society, and the relative paucity of the ability of the historic environment people to achieve the same. I have no doubt at all that the need is there and that the desire is there on the part of people to engage. We would see our role as one of scene-setting, helping, initiating and enabling rather than direct engagement with the local communities, but that is at the heart of a lot of our education and outreach work. Q329 Helen Southworth: You referred earlier to the "best of the rest". For Members of Parliament and many other people based within a local community, it is very helpful for us to know whereabouts we are in either the best or the rest and I am wondering whether you have some sort of map or guidance that shows where there are comparisons in terms of heritage. The stuff you did at Liverpool was absolutely fantastic, although quite frankly it was not before time and Liverpool was having buildings drop by the day of absolutely fantastic quality, but many of us in our own local communities have other buildings, such as the north-west industrial heritage buildings that just do not have anybody around who knows how important they are or how to deal with them and they are seeing that somebody else is going to do it. Do you have a map for us that says where the best are and where the rest are up to? Sir Neil Cossons: We certainly carry around in our minds those that we recognise as good and we point others to them when they ask, so it is not a published league table. Q330 Helen Southworth: Why not? Sir Neil Cossons: It think it would be invidious if we were to do that because our desire is to raise the rest to the standards of the best and we do not think that is going to be done by castigating anybody. We think it is going to be more an opportunity to show by example. Q331 Helen Southworth: So how are you doing it then? Do they know which category they are in? Sir Neil Cossons: Well, we go to great efforts to congratulate the best and certainly through our regional offices, and it is worth remembering that regionalisation for English Heritage was one of the key steps in devolving responsibilities from Saville Row to the places where those responsibilities are both met and properly answered, so our regional offices and our regional staff are very close to local authorities of all types in their particular regions, so out of the Manchester office you will find people who will know every single local authority in the region, will be aware of all of the key pressure points and will know by name the key elected members, the conservation officers and the directors of planning in those areas. Now, that is, I think, the right role for us and we will offer help and encouragement wherever we can. Q332 Helen Southworth: So who should take the other role then, the one that identifies where socks need pulling up or whatever? Dr Thurley: Well, we do actually do that, but I think, as Neil says, as a national body going in and castigating people is not the way which we feel is the most effective way of trying to make things better, but there are local authorities that we feel have got significant problems and, when we find authorities like that, we do need to be involved. For instance, sometimes one of the ways that we do it is that when our Commission meets, they decide to go and meet in the particular town and have dinner with the leader and the key members of the local authority and actually address it head-on like that. There have been a number of occasions, Nottingham being one of them, where we have had a fairly difficult relationship on occasions and I think that that is the way we prefer to work. Q333 Mr Hall: In an earlier answer you have both referred to the Power of Place document which identified a serious lack of data about the built environment and in answer to Philip Davies you actually said that there is now significant quantitative and qualitative evidence which would build the case for the 2007 funding bid. Could you give the Committee an indication of what the actual cost would be for outstanding necessary repairs to the physical environment that you are responsible for? Sir Neil Cossons: For the whole of it, no, but elements of it, yes. For buildings at risk, I think we have got a price tag of £400 million. We publish an annual Buildings at Risk Register which has about 1,400 key buildings that are under serious threat and we take some off that list each year usually because they are protected rather than because they fall down. Of course a few go on to it each year, so we keep a running tally of what the cost might be of bringing those back into decent order and it, broadly speaking, is in the order of £400 million. Q334 Mr Hall: Is that just for Grade II Listed buildings or is that everything? Dr Thurley: Grade I and II*. Q335 Mr Hall: Have you done an assessment of those buildings which are outside that classification? Dr Thurley: One of our aims in our strategic plan is to achieve more or less, I think, what you are asking about which is some sort of quantification of what it would cost to put what are nationally regarded as the significant buildings and sites into a secure condition. We at the moment only monitor the ones that we have direct statutory responsibility for, which are the II*s, but we are working with lots of local authorities to try and encourage them to maintain registers and we have run a number of pilots for scheduled ancient monuments as well, so our aim is certainly to try and quantify that. With specific building types we are also doing it and on 10 May we are going to launch a campaign for places of worship. We have actually now done a quantification of what the annual repair bill for places of worship is, Listed places of worship. Q336 Mr Hall: With this list, are you treading water, are you making progress, or is the list getting bigger? Sir Neil Cossons: I think we are making progress in some areas. We have been with the great English cathedrals for 12 or 13 years and, arguably, they are in the best state they have been in since the 13th Century. Now, that does not mean to say that the job is done, it never will be, but it means that we were able to strategically tackle an issue of cathedrals and their maintenance and repair, but while we were concentrating on that, the emerging crisis of English parish churches where congregations were diminishing and the cost of maintaining the roof was not has highlighted other areas of need and that is what we will try to tackle in the Inspire campaign. Q337 Mr Hall: If I can put the question in a slightly different way, are the number of buildings that require repair work, essential and necessary repair work, is that list growing or is that list diminishing? Dr Thurley: For the register that we maintain, we use 1999 as the base year and we have taken off that register 36% of the buildings. Now, when I say "we" have taken them off, I might just rephrase that and say that 36% of the buildings have come off. Q338 Mr Hall: Is that because they have fallen down? Dr Thurley: No, because they have been restored. We have made a significant contribution to that. Over the last five years we have put £31 million worth of grants into buildings at risk on that register, but what happens is that every year when we take 300 or 400 off, another 300 or 400 come on. Now, a slightly smaller number come on than we take off, so the number is diminishing, but the real problem is that there are a hard core of very, very difficult buildings when 3% of the buildings on that list actually account for the vast majority of the £400 million and these are buildings with what we describe as 'significant conservation deficit'. In other words, the amount of money you need to spend on them is far, far greater than the value of the building after it would have been conserved, so there are some very, very difficult buildings on that list which it is going to take a lot of, I am afraid it can only be, public money to sort out. Sir Neil Cossons: That in a sense sets the agenda for English Heritage because, if you look at the wider issue of buildings and their recycling within the historic environment, most of the money of course comes from areas which are not English Heritage. If you think of the huge efforts to regenerate the Lancashire textile mills, many of those have gone back into being used often as residential accommodation and developers like Urban Splash and others have made a spectacular contribution there to the protection of the historic environment in its wider context, so too has money from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Therefore, what we try to do is assess where our money is most required strategically and it is some of these critical buildings which are highly important in historical or architectural terms, but where the payback in a straightforward commercial sense is non-existent where we have to concentrate our efforts. Q339 Mr Hall: I interrupted you when you were referring to the Inspire agenda that you have got in terms of historical churches and cathedrals. We have had evidence on this, as you well know, and one of the concerns is that parishioners are getting older and congregations are getting smaller and the burden to preserve and conserve these buildings is falling on a smaller section of the community. What can you do to help? Dr Thurley: Well, not to spoil our announcement on 10 May, but we actually agree with you that there is a problem. We have been working with the HLF in our joint grant scheme putting substantial amounts of money, more than £25 million a year, into what I would describe as 'remedial work' for parish churches. Now, what our campaign will be highlighting, I think it is, next week or the week after is that actually we believe that more needs to be done in terms of maintenance. We have managed to quantify the annual cost of maintaining parish churches and other places of worship and we think it is about £185 million a year. We think that once you have put in all the contributions from the congregations, from the denominations and ourselves, there is a £118-million-a-year shortfall and we do not think that that £118-million-a-year shortfall can be reduced by simply patching up the problems once they have happened. We think the way to deal with it is to make sure that the place is properly maintained in the first place, so we will be making some proposals for various schemes which will hopefully reduce that annual maintenance deficit by making sure buildings do not fall into disrepair in the first place. 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 2004/5 was 6.14 per cent lower than the target figure and 4.25 per cent lower than the 2003/4 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 accounts, 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 historical 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 1400 - 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 ten 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. Witnesses: Mr David Lammy, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, and Baroness Andrews OBE, a Member of the House of Lords, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, gave evidence. Q360 Chairman: Can I welcome David Lammy from the DCMS and Baroness Andrews from the ODPM. Thank you for coming to give evidence to us and also thank you for coming to listen to our previous session, which I hope you found helpful. Perhaps I could begin by asking you about the proposed reforms of the Heritage Protection System, why you think it is necessary to make the changes and what evidence there is of the failures of the existing system? Mr Lammy: I think it is important to set the changes in the context of the last five years, and in that sense both the Power of Place, a Force for our Future and what English Heritage has been saying in its English Heritage accounts are important. We have heard in the last session about access and education, we have heard about the contribution that English Heritage is making around regeneration. The other strand that comes out of that work is protection and conservation. It is clear that we have been able to make some changes without legislation. We have been able to notify people when their houses are listed. That was something we were not doing before; it just suddenly happened to you. We have been able to avoid duplication and transfer some of what my officials were doing in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to English Heritage to avoid the duplication that existed previously, but there are things that we need to do with legislation, and, indeed, that comes out of what the heritage sector said themselves of the consultation. There were over 500 responses and, overwhelmingly, they said that we needed to move towards a more simplified, transparent and accountable arrangement in relation to heritage protection, and so what comes out of that is the Historic Environment Record and a new designation regime, unifying our consent regime but also looking to see how we can support local listing, because of the appetite that exists in the country, and how we can, with larger assets, through looking at the pilots, work out managed agreements for the historic environment. Those things require legislation. I think it is a good thing to have a debate on heritage protection in the House, something that has not taken place since the formation of English Heritage decades ago; so I think the time is now appropriate. Q361 Chairman: Can you give us an indication when you expect the White Paper to be published and when you are hoping for legislation? Mr Lammy: I would want to publish the White Paper after you have reported, and I anticipate that would be in the autumn. Q362 Chairman: And legislation? Mr Lammy: Legislation is down to other people in other parts of the system, so I cannot say when that legislative slot might be found, but obviously that would follow in due course. Q363 Mr Hall: One of the most important things the Government could do is to make sure that the White Paper addresses the problems that have been caused with PPG15 and PPG16 in the light of the Shimizu ruling, which I think was totally and utterly bizarre, by the way. Can you give the Committee an assurance that that will happen? Baroness Andrews: Yes, I can. We are conscious of the anxiety that has been caused by the decision, by the delay and, of course, advising on PPG15 is going to be a very important way of addressing a number of changes across the planning system as well as what the HPR itself is going to pick up. We will certainly be taking account of Shimizu, hopefully restoring the levels of control that were in place before and hopefully delivering a much stronger, clearer planning statement for heritage protection generally. Q364 Mr Hall: Could that happen in advance of the White Paper or does it have to wait? Baroness Andrews: No, I think it does have to wait, for the reasons why Shimizu has to wait on the Heritage Protection Review itself. In order to take account of the broad sweep of changes that are coming forward, waiting for the White Paper actually will then ensure that we are completely consistent. Everybody knows the values which underpin the White Paper, which will be reflected in new PPG15 and its appendices, so we will have a very clear account of how we want to see that implemented. Q365 Mr Hall: In the meantime we still have to suffer the consequence of the judgment and the damage that it is doing to some of our historical sites? Baroness Andrews: Yes, I could not dispute that. One of the things I have been asking, not least your own experts, in fact, and English Heritage, is whether we have evidence as to the impact of Shimizu, whether we have been collecting it systematically. There is clearly a range of anecdotal evidence of damage. There is not much systematic evidence, and I can understand why, because, of course, it is operating at a local level, but the sooner we get it put right the better. Q366 Philip Davies: Could I ask if you think that world heritage sites in particular, as our sort of flagship heritage, need some additional protections, as many people have given in their evidence, including English Heritage, and, if so, will that be incorporated into the White Paper as well? Mr Lammy: The answer is, "Yes." I think it is important that they are brought into line with the new designation regime. They obviously are a material consideration, but I think overwhelmingly MPs that come from those areas that are world heritage sites - the All-Party Group it self and I have done quite a lot with the world heritage community, as it were, in this country over the last few months - want to see that, and, again, without legislation we would not be able to make that change, and so I do want to see that. That does not mean, of course, that there is a necessity for increased or changed protection. I do not think people are calling for that. That would make things very difficult for cities like Bath, where virtually the whole city is listed, but it does mean that they should be identifiable through a new designation arrangement definitely. Q367 Alan Keen: With the introduction of the Heritage Protection Reforms, what do you think will be the main impact on local authorities? Baroness Andrews: There will be two new statutory requirements placed on local authorities. First of all, they are going to have to operate the new unified consent regime. What I think we would want to get across essentially is that this is not a new burden. When we look at what can be achieved by combining scheduled monument consent, which is a very minor part as far as Listed buildings are concerned, we will be looking at new ways of working and not new burdens on local authorities, because we are bringing together disciplines which, as the Atkins Report shows, in the best local authorities are already establishing very interesting successful disciplinary ways of working, but obviously getting that right under the new unified consent, which we very much welcome, because its fits in with many of the things we are doing for the reformed planning system in terms of greater simplicity and focus, is obviously going to be the main task for local authorities. The second thing, which I will refer back to David, is, of course, the Historic Environment Record. The question there is whether, in fact, every local authority should have one, not whether, in fact, they should have access to one, and that is the preferred route and it is commonsense in terms of both the size of the task and the natural usefulness in terms of what access it will give you, because it covers so much of the country already, but that is, of course, another area of very interesting and exciting development, I believe. There are two other optional opportunities for local authorities too. I noticed earlier, Mr Keen, you referred to local character, local listing arrangements. Of course, one of the things we are looking closely at is what else we might be do to build up and support local listing arrangements without actually making them national, without confusing them with a national designation system, because they are not about that, they are about very well loved local landmarks and buildings. So that is something that we want to address as well through the process. The fourth option is the question of the management partnership agreements which have been piloted by English Heritage and which David will be largely responsible for but which local authorities will be able to opt into as appropriate. Q368 Alan Keen: Have you attempted to cost the effect on local authorities? Mr Lammy: When we consulted and began to look and ask the sector: "How can we better protect our historic environment?", it is right to say that some of the options on the table would have meant a significantly increased burden and there would have been costs attached to that. I also say within government that the compact we have with our local government colleagues is that where we place extra burdens on them we resource those extra burdens, and that must be part of the White Paper going forward; but let me just say that part of the consultation, one of the options on the table, for example, was where we looked to see and support local listing. Do we make that statutory and mandatory? Were we to do that, it would have cost implications. Another point of consultation and discussion was: do we make the Historic Environment Record? I know what Helen raised before, which is: "How do local communities really take stock of what they have and support what they have and know what they have?", but if we place that as a requirement on all of the 150 plus local authorities, then that too has a financial impact attached. We are looking at other ways of doing it. Access to an Historic Environment Record that may either be kept nationally or regionally is an option that would be less expensive. Kay has already mentioned the unified consent regime. That, I think, requires a new way of working, as opposed to an added burden, simply because when you look at the amount of applications there are around scheduled monuments across the country - we are talking about three per authority - that should be able to be absorbed within any new arrangements. There are areas where we have to analyse the evidence very clearly, and certainly that would be the case with the pilots where we have the managed agreements particularly, but we are not saying that that is statutory, we are saying that that is available to you, it is an option available to you, it is a way of working should you require it. I think we have to bottom-out and see where we get to on the Historic Environment Record, particularly when it comes to costs attached for local government. Q369 Alan Keen: You probably heard me express concerns with English Heritage, even within my own local authority, about the difference between the iconic sites, which are definitely going to be looked after somehow or other, and the rest of it. Not only is there a variation within local authorities that I am concerned about, but there is a danger of massive differences between the ways that different local authorities look after the environment. Should it really be statutory, because it does worry me? How do you think you would cope with those variances? Baroness Andrews: You are absolutely right. There is wide variation. Only half of all local authorities, I think, keep a local list, which is significant. One of the things that has interested me in your inquiry is, in a way, establishing the gaps in knowledge about the way local authorities actually work, the information and intelligence they have at their disposal, the information we have, that English Heritage has. There are a lot of gaps in what ought to be a clearer picture which would allow us to make more guidance more efficiently and more help more effectively available. I think it is at that level that we need to be looking for change and improvement. I do not think that putting a statutory framework around either local listing or, indeed, around local authorities would necessarily be appropriate. What we need is to work out why some local authorities are so much better than others. What is it that they are doing, either with their professional staff, with their resources, with the way they are using their planning systems creatively, with the way they are actually designating their conservation areas, how they are handling their consent regimes? We need a lot more hard knowledge about how to promote best practice, and I think that precedes notions of statutory requirement. Mr Lammy: I think there are two aspects to this. First, the overwhelming thrust of government across Whitehall is not to place new burdens on local authorities. It is to see the continued revival of the locality and to see these decisions made locally. If you had the ALG here, or the LGA, they would be saying that they would be deeply concerned were we talking about placing new statutory burdens upon them. I think the second thing to say is also that, if we were to place a new statutory burden or requirement on them, then the case for that would have to be significantly made out and would have to be required. If you look at the backdrop of where heritage finds itself in 2006, I do not think we could say that that was the case. We had 60 million visitors last year to our heritage sites, a huge success (as you have already heard) in the heritage open days, a huge success, over-anticipated, with BBC shows like Restoration and Time-Team. Heritage is in a strong place with the public and sitting alongside what we have been trying to do to encourage local champions and local councillors to better understand and take this up through the HELM project funded by ODPM. The way forward must be to support locally, to encourage locally, not just to encourage through means of training and workshops but also to encourage financially. English Heritage also support conservation officers to the tune of 1.75 million a year and require match funding to increase the number of conservation officers, but that must be the way forward, not to choose the statutory option, which in a sense is a quick fix but adds to the burdens that local government are saying they really do not want. Q370 Mr Evans: To get it clear in my mind, is it intended that the impact of these changes on local authorities would be cost neutral? Mr Lammy: No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that where there is a measurable impact that we can agree, then the resources must follow; and we are doing that analysis, of course. Part of that analysis is the Atkins Report that was published that was talked about earlier, and we would hope to provide much of that evidence alongside the White Paper in the autumn. Q371 Mr Evans: So if there are extra costs, they will be costed out fully by your department and the full 100% of the resources will be passed on to local authorities? Mr Lammy: That is the undertaking that I have made. I have acknowledged where there has to be an understanding of what flows from the consequences of the policy arrangement that we get to, accepting that policy has changed vis-à-vis local listing, is changing vis-à-vis the HER and that no new burdens are placed through the consent regime. Acknowledging that backdrop, if there are costs, then they would come from my department to meet those costs. Q372 Paul Farrelly: I wanted to pick up on something that Baroness Andrews said a moment ago as to why in some areas it is good and why in some areas it is pretty appalling. If you have a champion in an area who builds capacity, then in our environment now, where there is a lack of skills and a lack of finance to pay for those skills even if they were available in some local authorities, you get virtuous circles in certain areas and vicious circles in other areas that are trying to break out of that historic lack of ability or placing priorities on conserving the built heritage. In my area I am the patron, and I apologise for saying this yet again, Chairman, of Urban Vision, which is the architectural centre for North Staffordshire - it could equally be called the architectural and heritage centre for North Staffordshire. That was seat-funded by CABE but went for its main funding to a regeneration zone that was funded by the RDA - not your department, the Department for Trade and Industry. The delays and bureaucracy in getting the money out of them after they had agreed to set it up meant that, within 18 months of operation, we had to go back cap in hand, and you have an RDA that says, "Actually we do not get measured on outputs for design or anything to do with quality really, so we cannot commit to giving you money." It is a hand to mouth existence for bodies like this to exist. Your department has been very good in terms of housing market renewal in saying that this is a core need for our area, or areas like mine, where we have not got the resources of individual councils and you so you draw on this centre of expertise and not inflated management consultants' rates. It is a hand to mouth existence and we are forever trying to get money every three years; but design and heritage are not time-limited issues by definition, so what we would like to see is your department, particularly DCMS, championing those efforts and I would like to hear more about what you are doing to help build capacity and encourage those people and support those people who quite often do it for nothing themselves. Mr Lammy: I would go back to saying that English Heritage have a fund that supports conservation officers and levers in funds to ensure that local authorities can have those conservation officers. That is the first thing. The second thing is that pressure is applied locally when local councillors are informed, and local officers are informed in that sense, and HELM is key to that process, and we have seen real growth in that project. I think 181 local authorities and individuals are now engaged in that particular project. Let us see where we get to with the Atkins Report. Indeed, we are doing another survey. The 1.7 conservation officers was a survey in 2002 and it will be interesting to see where that figure is now, but it is right to acknowledge, I think, a couple of things within the figures. One is that when you look at the 85 authorities that have conservation officers and are leading in this area, I think you identified that there can be different arrangements at district and unitary level, and there are authorities providing services for smaller authorities; so we have got to unpick a bit of that. There are also authorities contracting out their services, and we have got to understand that as well. There is financial support in this area, and we want to see growth. I think, by virtue of actually having a heritage protection debate and having that debate in this House and having that dialogue with local government, we are bound to see an improvement over the next period. Baroness Andrews: In relation to a couple of the key words that you used - championship, leadership - they are extremely important. Leadership from ODPM, working with DCMS is very important, something that I am passionately committed to, as the rest of the department is, and there are very exciting opportunities, I think, working through the HPR to demonstrate that and to appear on joint platforms, not least with David. Championship, through the champions that you are familiar with, actually going through the officer level, I think, is crucial as well, but in terms of building capacity, we do it in a number of different ways and some of them are actually quite difficult to detect sometimes because they go in through the planning system itself and they improve the processes. I am thinking, for example, of the Planning Delivery Grant, which, as an end local authority, is to achieve a massive increase in some instances in their staffing, and 45% of that has gone on staff, half of that has gone on specialist staff. It may not show up in the various direct statistics in terms of conservation officers, but the fact that you have more planners and, more interestingly, planners coming from different disciplines, because the new planning schools are actually recruiting from disciplines as different as languages and philosophy, not just from geography, the built environment discipline, and so we are looking, possibly, at more generic skills across planning. Another way in which we are seeing capacity building, we have got this Academy for Sustainable Communities and in evidence English Heritage talked about the new skills that were needed for regeneration, and you referred to the importance of regeneration, and, of course, we are looking at place-making in a new way now in this country in terms of building regenerative communities and new communities, and we need new skills. The Academy for Sustainable Communities in its curriculum will have the capacity to look at how heritage skills all fit together, and I think that is a great possibility, not least because the new head of the academy is closely linked, as a peer review I understand, to English Heritage's own review; so there is a lot of symmetry there too. We have to look, sometimes quite deeply, into the processes to look for where there can be additional capacity grown. Mr Lammy: I am ably corrected that in my efforts to be cautious I said 85 conservation officers. I should have said 700. There are 85, of course, Historic Environment Records, and I think you can say that those are the local authorities that are leading. Paul Farrelly: I know, Chairman, there are some wider questions you would like to prompt on the championship aspect, but if I can just leave you with this point on capacity building. Quite often these organisations have been championed as a cry of desperation because it is not happening within the local authorities. The great thing that has been achieved with this and other originally CABE funded organisations around the country is that they have not had an adversarial relationship with local authorities but they provide expertise and their role has been recognised. The difficulty is the funding, the role is not recognised higher up the chain, and actually these are new ways of providing capacity that should really not be time-limited in their funding. Q373 Helen Southworth: There has been a fairly recurrent theme in the evidence that we have been getting in this inquiry, which is that DCMS is ineffective in standing up for heritage interests in government; so I give you this opportunity to give us some hard evidence for DCMS's effectiveness in this area. Mr Lammy: I think you can probably see that we are working very closely with our ODMP colleagues and would not have been able to get to where we have got to on heritage protection and conservation to move towards the White Paper and then towards legislation without that joint working. I think it is right to say also that on education outside the classroom and on the Engaging Places initiative, which is really examining the built historic environment in the classroom, we had to work very closely with our DfES colleagues as well. I think it is right to say also that we should recognise the contribution of Defra and ODPM in the funding agreement for English Heritage and we should acknowledge the Defra resource that has gone into the historic environment, particularly through their rural funding base in which we have seen 90 million go into this area. Paul has also raised the work of our RDAs and, indeed, the work of English Partnerships, which also goes to benefit the historic environment. So I think when we look at a package of activity, I think when we acknowledge that there are more people than ever before visiting our historic environment, when we relate that to the participation survey, the Taking Part survey which we are constantly trying to better develop and deepen, when we look at the efforts that have been made by the sector to address Britain's ethnic minorities feeling engaged and feeling able to take part in the historic environment, I think of the work of the Black Environment Network, I think of the Anglo/Sikh trail and I think of huge regeneration with the historic environment as a key component of that, whether it is an Oxford, whether in Liverpool, whether it is up in Newcastle. Right across the sweep, this has taken more than just the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; it has taken close working with colleagues across Whitehall and close working with local government. That is not to say that you have not heard, and I have read all the transcripts, some of the people that have come before you saying, "We would like to see more work done with our churches, or more work done around VAT." You have got to unpick, I think, what people who have not been as successful. Equally, I have heard people say that, were we in another department on the consultation we are currently doing on the Lottery shares, for example, heritage might lose out because DCMS is the sponsor department for the Lottery. I think these things cut in a number of ways, but I think on any objective assessment heritage is in a stronger place in 2006 than it was around the timing we are doing the quinquenial review of English Heritage, and that has been because we have been working very closely indeed, and the fact that Kay and I are here before you I think is testimony to that. Q374 Helen Southworth: You have told us about where you have got to today, but, as a follow up, what do you want to see from those departments as the strong champions of heritage over the next five years? What is your shopping list? Mr Lammy: I think that there remains progress to be made in the area of regeneration, and we would certainly hope to see, for example, in the Thames Gateway, in the Olympic build, that heritage is factored in, that the built environment is on the table, and we are taking that seriously. We want to see progress following the Heritage Protection Review, capacity at local level, increased local listing and the ability of a large, if you like, portfolio of land-owners, whether that is British Waterways or whether that is London Underground, able, through new management, to deal with their assets in a more efficient way and in a way that is more cost-effective to them, and we want to see the continued growth of the sector. As I say, I think the picture is a positive one, but it can get better. We want to see more educational outlets. You were asking English Heritage about access and education. They have made progress. I think we could go further, and I suspect that all of you would acknowledge also that we can go even further in engaging all of our population, both socio-economically and ethnically, in this great story that is Britain's heritage. Organisations like the HLF, I think, have widened and opened the door to that discussion. I have also talked about public value and how, in a sense, we can move from a basis that is, yes, statutory in terms of the department's relationship with English Heritage, that is, yes, based on academic opinion around our historical and architectural interests but, I think, also in the twenty-first century has not just to be more simple and transparent, which is what we are doing effectively with the Heritage Protection Reform, but also has public value and the public are able to say what they value also in their local environment and we find new mechanisms for doing that. That is the future, and that will take effort, yes, across Whitehall but also amongst the sector itself. Baroness Andrews: May I add something to that, because I think it is so important. One of the ways in which the planning reform is paralleling the Heritage Protection Reform is in the emphasis on openness. People know what is going on and have a stake in being informed very early on. One of the changes that we have made in the planning performance is to require a stage of community involvement from every local authority as part of the local development framework plans, so that people at a very early stage know what is going on by way of change and development, not just that their views are taken seriously but they know what their rights are in that process and the local authorities know how to account for that. Given how attached people are to their local environments, how they become so enthused and active in protection and development issues, I think this is a very positive step forward and it matches all the things that we are trying to do through the HPR itself in making sure that people have the right information at the right time to be properly informed and to take an informed decision. Q375 Helen Southworth: This is a question for each of the departments. We have heard about "the best and the rest", but we also know that usually there is "the best, the rest and the abysmal". What are each of you going to be doing to make sure that we do not have parts of the nation that have poor response to the built heritage, that do not comprehend heritage as an economic driver, that do not regenerate and perhaps, most importantly, do not give their population access to heritage? What are each of you going to do about that? Mr Lammy: I think I have outlined, and we have had some discussion on, the HELM initiative, which in the end is about local councillors themselves and local people themselves determining issues around the historic environment, and I think that is vitally important. I think, if you look at the RDAs, and I have visited the south-west region on eight occasions since becoming minister, there you have a strong regional development agency using the historic environment to best effect, notwithstanding areas where they and others would like to have seen more progress than that of Stonehenge. I think also in the north-west there is a strong Regional Development Agency that well understands these issues and the issues of importance to local people and is making progress. English Partnerships is making progress. I think that there have been issues in our rural communities, both in the funding from Defra and the engagement of a lot of people across the sector. I think of the contribution that Prince Charles has made to craft skills and the work that English Heritage has been able to put in. The work of our Sector Skills Council has grown our craft skills right across the piece, and so my own view is that we are doing that work, there is more work that must flow in that direction and, indeed, English Heritage themselves are better equipped, following their quinquennial review, to lead and shape much of that work in the priorities that they set themselves as our statutory advisers. Baroness Andrews: It is a challenging question, and I think there are many ways in which you could answer it. If I can talk very briefly, I think it is extremely important that we at ODPM communicate our enthusiasm for the creative possibilities of planning in the new planning system because that puts regeneration and heritage very much at the heart of what can be achieved. Just as we want to see the planning process moving to the centre of the local policy process, so we want to see heritage and regeneration expressed and evidenced as part of what drives social and economic regeneration. Part of that is about the messages that we send. I am engaged at the moment on a grand tour of planning offices and councils around the country to talk about what we all want to see. Some of it is about communication and about making sure there are very clear consistent messages. The other thing I think about is what agencies and resource we have to make things work better. For example, local area agreements have the capacity to bring funding streams together, have the capacity to bring the statutory and voluntary sectors together in new ways so we will actually get more value for money and it is shown to be a better way of working. We can get more out of the resources that we are using because LEAs are now spreading nationwide, and we have got some expectation of that. Then, I think there is a whole series of issues about proof, showing what works and celebrating what is being done. You were talking earlier about the role of education and the way in which we should be looking at the education curriculum in DCMS. It is absolutely vital to see that as part of the right of every child to know the memories of the community and how they fit into that. When I go round the country it is a great privilege to see regeneration projects, and I see young people and old people together working on building the collective memory of small neighbourhoods which have been refurbished; for example, the refurbishment of a local park, which can turn around an area which has an impact beyond any scale of investment. We need to make those stories and what they mean very clear to people who are reluctant to do it because they have not got any direct experience and they do not see the necessity for it. A lot of that is about enabling our colleagues in local government to go forward and tell their own stories but also to show that they have the evidence. I think again of the work of the DCMS and the Atkins Report, which is all building up a better picture of that and showing by comparison that it does not take that much more resource and effort to get a much bigger and better result. Mr Lammy: Obviously you are concerned with the historic built environment, but there are also huge players in the field ‑ the work of CABE, the Prime Minister's Better Public Buildings award - and we are in the midst of a huge building programme across the country and also the huge and significant contribution of the Heritage Lottery Fund right up and down the country where our public realm, our parks, our buildings and also our buildings and historic environment play a huge feature in pursuit of their values. Q376 Philip Davies: Can I just press you a bit further on the level of influence within Government for promoting heritage. You mentioned that you worked closely with DfES and we heard recently that the GCSE in archaeology had been scrapped as a subject. Can you give us any evidence that in your discussions and in your liaisons, that these other departments take any notice of what you say? Nobody doubts that you discuss these issues with them. What there is a doubt over is whether anyone takes any notice of your lobby into these departments. What do you think about the loss of GCSE archaeology as an example of that? Mr Lammy: If you take the Engaging Places initiative and the three pilots in three regions of the country, then we would not have been able to go forward without the engagement of us, of CABE, of English Heritage and DfES colleagues in taking forward, piloting and looking at the built environment in schools in that context, and then building off the back of that once we have learnt next year what the results of those pilots are. If we take education outside of the classroom as a way in which we have been able to ensure that the built environment has been part of that, if you look at the Building Exploratory in Hackney, it is a wonderful resource, not just for Hackney children but for London in helping those people understand the historic environment, education has played a feature there. In the end, GCSEs and their uptake are about individual choices. I was with kids in London Fields with a scheme sponsored by the Museum of London last summer who were on a dig. There is a dig in my constituency. There is an appetite there. How we configure that changes over time and is very much about meeting the needs of the population as it exists today. I make no comment on archeology within the curriculum. That depends on the appetite amongst young people to sit that particular subject at GCSE level. That does not mean that there is not activity going on in local communities across the country. It does not mean, for example, that we have not got the Young Roots programme, which is an excellent programme funded by the HLF, working with young people dealing with their historic environment in ways that are relevant to them. Q377 Philip Davies: Are you saying that all of the organisations that have contacted us saying that the DCMS is not particularly effective at promoting heritage within government are wrong? I will just give an example. Last week we heard evidence from Heritage Link in answer to a question that Paul Farrelly asked (I believe it was) about whether they could give any specific names of people in the DCMS or ODPM who were really championing heritage - and I stand to be corrected and I have not got the exact quotes in front of me, I paraphrase - but I think the reply was "We have high hopes for David Lammy who seems to say the right things but we could not come up with anybody in ODPM who appears to be promoting heritage at all." It is hardly a glowing reference really. Are all these organisations wrong? Do you not accept that you really could do a lot more? Mr Lammy: With respect, that is a contradiction because you said that they are currently with DCMS and they have high hopes for me. That is a contradiction. If there is a suggestion that they should be with another government department then you would have to name what that other government department would be. When you unpick some of that comment I suspect that the other government department might be the Treasury and I suspect that there are stakeholders right across the system that would like their sponsor department to be the Treasury. So let us be honest about where we sit and let us be honest about the huge progress made and about the advances that we can make through heritage protection reform. Q378 Paul Farrelly: I did ask the questions and that was a pretty accurate paraphrasing. Baroness Andrews, can I say that it is an issue of communication, as you have said, particularly if ministers are relatively new to posts with a great and wide range of responsibilities, so I am very glad to hear about your communication tour to planning officers around the country. Could I warmly invite you to North Staffordshire to talk to our planning officers, where you will be greeted and treated by myself and Mark Fisher, my close friend and neighbour who is a former Culture Minister and other colleagues, so I welcome that. Baroness Andrews: I warmly accept. Q379 Paul Farrelly: But it would be remiss of me not to put this question bluntly: some of the evidence we have heard is that the DCMS is not seen to be a champion and does not have the clout, so we should take the responsibility for heritage out of DCMS and put it into ODPM. I picked up my wife's copy of Building Design magazine last night. It has always got a number of provocative articles in it as the trade weekly for architects, but the editorial said that we should transfer it out because the Department has not got the clout. Some people have said put it with ODPM because it reunites planning and heritage and that has some logic to it. I have an unease about that, principally ‑ and this is no reflection on individuals particularly English Partnerships who in my area are working on local and regional issues - because I have a perception of ODPM as being more interested in relaxing the planning laws than championing a tightening of the interpretation and application of planning laws that they are supporting, as it comes down to good design and the quality of our built environment. I spend half my time fighting blots on the landscape in the form of half a million square foot warehouses where design is not uppermost in the minds of industrial architects around the country. Where do you come from on this particular issue? Does it fit ill in your Department, David, being divorced from the Department which has responsibility these days for planning? Mr Lammy: Paul, I think you have heard evidence, from my recollection of the transcripts, I think it was Heritage Link that said that they would be concerned if, for example, heritage sat with ODPM because heritage issues would get swamped by planning issues. Q380 Paul Farrelly: That is so. Mr Lammy: There are definitely people within the heritage sector who believe that the protection and conservation of our heritage is absolutely key and they want a department that has that as a priority and as a mandate, if you like, in their relationship with the statutory adviser, English Heritage. There might be great concern were you to move heritage to another department, particularly a department with planning responsibility, a department that has, by definition, to have a relationship with developers and the construction industry, that there might be a very obvious and clear conflict in the exercise of those duties. So I think on my reading of the transcripts that was also understood and that is why I said provocatively "if not with DCMS, then where else to?" I suspect when you unpick that it is actually to the Treasury. The other point which I think is quite important is what is our assessment of where we have got to. If we go back five or six years we were in a place in this country when people were almost writing off the heritage. They were writing books about "Theme Park Britain". There was a cynical air about heritage. We had had a quinquennial review of English Heritage that said there needed to be transformation and reform, and they have undertaken that, and that there needed to be efficiency savings and changes in the way that they run their back‑room operation. There still needs to be closer engagement with the harder-to-reach communities on heritage, but up and down the country, in this hearing today, we have heard examples of huge heritage success stories in our great cities but also in rural environments. I can think of the support in my own constituency in Tottenham that English Heritage has given to the Tottenham High Road and the townscape there. Those examples were not freely on the table five or six years ago. So we must also acknowledge the progress that has been made. I hope that my Department has played a role in that and the key work that we have been able to do with partners in other government agencies to take that forward. Q381 Paul Farrelly: David, you have put your finger on another source of great unease about the suggestion of a transfer. There you have it, Baroness Andrews, for your tour, straight from the lips of a government minister that the overriding perception of any heritage responsibilities landing in your department is one of conflict. It surely should not be that perception, should it? Baroness Andrews: No, and it is a completely wrong perception as well because we take our responsibilities for the protection of the heritage very seriously, and they are very robust. If you look at the range of controls we have ‑ building controls, conservation area controls and so on - they are robust. I can tell you from experience that the planning application process is extremely vigorous when it comes to observing and placing all that in its proper context. When we now have a plan‑led system of reforms and you see the place that the heritage has in our overarching PPS1, which is our formative statement of planning, when you see it working through the protection of our town centres, PPS6, our rural communities, PPS7, and PPS15 which will realise and modernise, and then through the local development frameworks - and it has got to be clear there, it has to be clearly developed in our supplementary documents - it is a very robust system, but it does not mean that it is swamped by planning. What it means is that planning is proactive tool to create the sort of spaces we all want to live in. In the middle of that is the value that we put on the character of places in which we live, which is the heritage. What we have achieved through those reforms is a much clearer and a much more generous definition of the role that heritage plays in place and also, as we have said this morning, about the economic and social benefits that are derived from that. It is auditing that and celebrating it which will actually feed that appetite which the Atkins Report itself said is so interesting, so clear, and now goes beyond the professionals. I think that is the most optimistic statement in that report. Paul Farrelly: Chairman, that is music to my ears and the invitation is on its way! Q382 Chairman: Can I quickly ask the Minister then, as a specific example of the clout of DCMS in Whitehall, Sir Neil referred to the opportunity to resolve the national disgrace in the next few months that is Stonehenge. Are you confident that it can be resolved and will you persuade the Department for Transport? Mr Lammy: It is not about persuading the Department for Transport. It is about working together. Q383 Chairman: It is about finding the money. Mr Lammy: It is about working together on what has proved to be a significant challenge. You are right to mention the money in that, Chairman, because of course the money went up considerably from what was anticipated so I think it was right to stop, to look, to consult, to review (and the review and consultation has only just ended) to see how we can proceed henceforth from that place. I am clear, having been down to Stonehenge, that we must solve the problem, and it is hugely significant to the heritage community and to the heritage of this country, but we have to solve it in a way that demonstrates value for money for the British taxpayer, and that is where there have been difficulties. There have been difficulties within the heritage community itself about the solutions, and those solutions have different fiscal outcomes, and then when we land on a solution there looks to be some inflation in the cost, so we have to work through that. There is a lot of effort going in and, if I might say so, I think Sir Neil is doing a great job to keep this one very publicly on the table, and let us look to see where we get to by the autumn. Q384 Chairman: It will be a good test for your planning. Mr Lammy: As it has been for my six predecessors. Q385 Chairman: Indeed. Let us hope we can do better than that. Can I ask you about the priority which you attach to heritage within the DCMS. I heard you yesterday at Question Time talking about the increase in resources that have been given, for instance, to the arts and your colleague Dick Caborn will tell us how much the increase to sports has been. These are considerably greater than the increase that has gone to the architecture and historic environment division of your Department. Would it be true to say therefore that heritage is seen as less of a priority within the DCMS? Mr Lammy: We have been clear on our priorities vis-à-vis sport and the inheritance that we had there when we came into office. I think it should also be acknowledged that within the arts budget there are areas that have a direct impact on the historic environment. I am thinking there of things like Creative Partnerships where we have some Creative Partnerships in our schools where heritage is playing a feature there. The important thing to remember vis-à-vis heritage is the overall envelope. A key plank of what we said when we came to power and the resulting action was that we wanted free entry to our national museums. That costs the Department just over £140 million every year and that is because, of course, our museums play a key part in our national appetite for heritage and access to heritage. Indeed, that budget has gone up from £384 million to £423 million into the next fiscal year. You have got to link that alongside the £130 million that we give to English Heritage a year. £130 million for an NDPB within the department is a lot of money. It sits alongside the work of other government departments, and that includes ODPM. We have heard about the work of RDAs and about the work of English Partnerships. We know that Defra has put £90 million specifically into the rural historic environment. Then on top of that sum you must add the £3.3 billion that the Heritage Lottery Fund has made to the heritage sector over the last decade. So against that backdrop, fiscal decisions have to be made, but there is no doubt about it, there is more money in heritage now when you look at the combination of all that effort than ever before. Q386 Chairman: But it is also going down? Mr Lammy: In relation to English Heritage, it is important to reflect on where we were in previous spending rounds. We had stated priorities. We had a quinquennial review that suggested that reform was needed. That reform has been embarked on. There have been efficiency savings of just over £28 million, some of which English Heritage has been able to put back into the operation. English Heritage has received funds for specific projects. We have heard about HELM where ODPM have funded that to £100,000. They have been able to reform their IT network. They have been able to grow their membership to 600,000 people across the country. They have been able to renew some of their properties. They have been able to concentrate on their education facilities. They have been able to move, as Simon fairly outlined, to a more transparent arrangement that is not just about experts but is about engagement. During that journey and during the reform that the quinquennial review found that they needed to make, it would not have been right to put lots of extra funds into the organisation. It is important to bear in mind also that on huge national priorities like our cathedrals the Cathedrals Fabric Survey has shown huge progress because of what English Heritage has been able to do. So that is the backdrop, that is where we have arrived at. We now move to a peer review, as I have said to the Committee, and we will see where we get to. No minister anywhere in Whitehall can give financial undertakings as you move into another spending round, but that is the overall envelope within which I think we are operating. Q387 Paul Farrelly: I was just remarking on the figures here because from the figures it seems that the whole budget for sport in the country is only £24 million more than the budget of English Heritage, so there is a different way of looking at this as well. I wanted really just to look at the issue of VAT which unites the heritage sector. Not everybody who is looking for VAT relief is suggesting that it needs to be a blanket relief; it could be clearly limited to avoid unjustified middle and upper class subsidies and the like. It could be limited to organisations such as charities or building preservation trusts. I was just looking, David, at one of your Parliamentary questions where you deftly sidestepped ‑ and I do not know whether you have played rugby before but you deftly sidestepped ‑‑‑ Mr Lammy: I did actually. Q388 Paul Farrelly: --- the issue by saying: "Together with ODPM, we will keep the impact of VAT on repair, refurbishment and maintenance of buildings under review, but to date the case for change is unproven." That seems to imply that the departments have gathered some evidence on this or reviewed or modelled the effects. Would that be the case? Mr Lammy: Actually I think it is to the contrary. We have been able to make progress where on residential properties people could indicate that they are making alterations and there is VAT relief under those circumstances. There is also VAT relief that attracts to charitable causes. Where there is a case that is being made by parts of the sector is in the area of repairs and the case has not been made out to Treasury that, in a sense, that would be cost effective, because in terms of private ownership it would generally benefit those in high income and middle income brackets, and as they look across the piece they have to make those determinations. I might also say that this is an area where we would have to be in discussions with our colleagues in Europe and gains specific to the heritage sector might mean losses in other areas like new construction and other things. So in the end this is a determination that Treasury colleagues must make. That is not to say that they have not looked favourably upon parts of the historic environment like the listed places of worship scheme. That gets that money back, as it were, to our faith populations so that where there are alterations they can get that zero or five per cent rating. It is to say, however, that the case has not been made for blanket zero rating across the piece. Q389 Paul Farrelly: That is quite interesting because you have said that you have not made the case, so there is no document within your Department that has been submitted to the Treasury to make the case? Mr Lammy: Hang on, let us just be clear on that. I am in constant dialogue with colleagues in other departments, and that would include the Treasury, and we have been in constant dialogue on this issue. They have made a determination. In the context of your question you point to those that might benefit and in their overall analysis of our VAT regime they have not found the case made out to move forward to the extent that parts of our sector would like, but they have been able to make progress in other areas that have benefitted our sector. Q390 Paul Farrelly: Can we be precise then: a case has been made but you have not persuaded the Treasury. Is that more accurate? Mr Lammy: The Government is at one! There is constant discussion within Government and the case that I put is quite simply that such a change is difficult to make just in the context of the historic environment without repercussions for other sectors and that, rightly, is the preoccupation of colleagues in the Treasury, and I suspect why this has not found favour. What has found favour, and did indeed once again in the last Budget, is being able to recoup some of that money and get it back particularly to parts of the historic environment like our faith communities and like our churches. So in that dialogue I can well understand why colleagues in the Treasury have reached the decision they have on the basis of the information that they have available to them and on their preoccupation with the overall envelope within which we make decisions about VAT. These are technical discussions that we would be required to have with our colleagues in Europe, and that is not obviously the primary concern of those in the heritage sector. Paul Farrelly: I am very glad to hear that the Government speaks with one voice, although my two colleagues here might have something to say. Q391 Chairman: Minister, you will be aware that there was the opportunity from Europe to reduce the VAT rate and that 80 heritage organisations wrote to the Chancellor asking him to take advantage of that opportunity. You presumably would be supporting those 80 heritage organisations in making that case? Mr Lammy: They are entitled to make the case. If that is what you mean by my support, they are entitled to make that case and that case is entitled to be heard. Q392 Chairman: In the hope you might be championing it. Mr Lammy: That does not mean that the conclusion of that case will be one that they would necessarily want because of course progress in that area might have big ramifications for where we have got to on new construction and the VAT arrangements. Inevitably that is a preoccupation of the Treasury and indeed I should be aware of that with my responsibilities for architecture. It is not a preoccupation of some of the heritage community that are calling for blanket VAT relief. That is the assessment that has to be made. Q393 Paul Farrelly: I wanted to be precise. In my question I did not ask for blanket relief, but there are clearly reliefs that could be targeted at specifically defined organisations, perhaps as a way of promoting those organisations, for example, building preservation trusts. I am quite sure that the Treasury would be absolutely confident with its worshipful places scheme that there are not that many tax‑dodging vicars around the country, but with organisations such as BPTs or other organisations, they will want make to sure that there is a limit to the potential for abuse. In that context, has your Department made any case for a more limited form of relief that is not blanket but limited to certain forms of organisation? Mr Lammy: As I have said, we have been able to make progress on the listed places of worship. We have been able to make progress on alterations of residential homes. We have been able to make progress vis-à-vis charitable organisations. That is some progress in terms of our VAT arrangements. We have not been able to get to a place where there is zero‑based rating and relief for repairs, and that remains of some concern in the sector, but that has implications for other parts of the VAT regime. It would be unusual to restrict that kind of VAT relief to one sector, notwithstanding where we would get to with our European colleagues. So that is the picture. It would not be right to say that there has not been progress in some areas, but it is right to say that in this area there would need to be more evidence, in fact, as to why the sector themselves would not be able to make the repairs that are necessary because this also sits against a backdrop in which I have said more people than ever before are visiting our historic environment. This sits against a backdrop in which we have and English Heritage has been able to make a substantial contribution, for example, to the fabric of our cathedrals, and the surveys there bear that out. They are moving on now to look more closely at parish churches. It sits also against the huge impact that the HLF has made. £3.3 billion, by any estimation, is not a small amount of money. So I am sure all of those things are preoccupying the number-crunchers in the Treasury, as they should. Paul Farrelly: Chairman, I am conscious of time, and so I will take it from that answer that you have tried but not been entirely successful, sir. Q394 Chairman: Ministers, there are many other questions that we would like to ask you but I am conscious of the time so I think we should probably draw a line at that point. Can I thank you both very much for giving up your time this morning. Mr Lammy: Thank you. Baroness Andrews: Thank you very much indeed. |