Examination of Witnesses (Questions 93
- 99)
TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2006
INSTITUTE OF
CONSERVATION, NATIONAL
COUNCIL ON
ARCHIVES
Chairman: I welcome Alastair McCapra,
chief executive of the Institute of Conservation, and Jonathan
Pepler and Ruth Savage from the National Council on Archives.
Q93 Mr Sanders: How can the profile
and funding of local authority archives best be improved?
Mr Pepler: There are a number
of issues about local authority archives which affect their profile.
The first point to make is the very narrow statutory basis on
which it has built up, which is primarily a section of the Local
Government Act 1972 that requires principal authorities to make
proper arrangements for the archives and records in their care.
That is quite a narrow base on which to build a network of services
which provides the backbone of archive services across the country.
The other issue which comes to the fore quite often is that no
element of archive services is considered in the comprehensive
performance assessment, or whatever process comes after that.
Inevitably, I think that when local authorities are under pressure
financially they will focus on those services and aspects of them
which feature largely in the CPA and related matters. Those are
the two principal issues on which I would focus. I think that
local authority archives are working hard with MLA and TNA in
partnership to develop the profile of their services. They are
major participants in the Archives Awareness campaign which is
now in its fourth year. If Members of the Committee are not familiar
with it, that campaign was designed to focus on raising the profile
of archives with a network of events across the country. This
year some 500 events across the country are arranged under the
Archives Awareness campaign. There is local media coverage. That
is a very useful way to focus the efforts being made and give
them a national framework.
Q94 Mr Sanders: If it is not part
of the CPA is anybody out there studying the difference in performance
between different local authorities to judge whether some are
good, less good or very poor?
Mr Pepler: For about 16, 17 or
18 years crude financial data have been collected by the Chartered
Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.
Q95 Mr Sanders: That tells you only
what has been spent, not how the authorities have been performing?
Mr Pepler: Other surveys have
been made. The Public Services Quality Group has been carrying
out regular surveys of users to get their responses to the services
they have been given. Those have revealed some very useful data
over the past four or five years. The last one was published only
very recently. In terms of user satisfaction, the levels are enormously
high—well into the nineties. The limitation of the PSQG
survey is that it focuses on those people who come through the
door, and this morning the point has been made that an awful lot
of people never darken our doorstep at all. I think that there
are moves in hand to try to monitor and get feedback from remote
users about their perception of the quality of the service they
are getting, so the survey is extended to that extent. The last
point I make is the one made by Mr Kingsley in his presentation
in relation to the self-assessment survey just completed. We hope
that that will be a very useful tool for getting a feel for how
services are performing. There are a lot of variations in the
size and scale of services offered across the country. Some are
very small. About 18 borough and unitary authority archive services
have a staff of three or fewer, so there is considerable variety.
There is no uniform standard of provision across the country.
Q96 Mr Sanders: Should it be standardised
across the country or should it be left locally? After all, it
is local government, so let local areas decide.
Mr Pepler: I believe that there
is scope for some standardisation. That is the sort of outcome
which is expected from the self-assessment exercises. The point
made earlier is that these are not stand alone services; they
are part of a national network of archive services, making provision
across the country, and readers will go to wherever the sources
are that they want; they will not necessarily use their local
office. There is an expectation that they will find roughly the
same resources and facilities wherever they go. There is a case
for some agreed standards.
Q97 Mr Sanders: Turning to conservation
and care of collections, the Institute of Conservation identified
many of the problems facing those responsible for the care of
collections. Which do you consider to be the most serious, and
how do you think they should be addressed?
Mr McCapra: You will not be surprised
if I begin by mentioning money. Money is a problem largely because
of the performance drivers to which most museums, galleries, libraries
and archives find themselves answering. It is difficult to make
the case for the necessary funding for conservation, although
I think there are some examples which show that a significant
difference can be made with relatively small sums of money. In
the appendix to our evidence we mention the experience of Birmingham
museums and galleries which have taken a lead in training some
small local museums to make sure they better understand their
conservation and preservation needs and are better trained to
cope with them. That programme is costing about £40,000 a
year across the whole of the West Midlands. You can see that for
about half a million pounds a year that can be extended nationally
across England. If one did that perhaps for four or five years
one would have a whole generation of people across small museums
who would be capable of understanding their needs and responding
to them. One might then need to pick that up every five to seven
years in future as staff turned over. Certainly money is a problem.
A second problem is to do with political attention. The Department
for Culture, Media and Sport has just produced a document called
Understanding the Future Priorities for England's Museums.
I have read it twice relatively quickly. I do not believe that
it mentions the care of collections; and I do not believe that
the word "stewardship" appears in it. Once again, from
the top we have a statement of priorities in which conservation
and preservation figure very small, so it just makes it hard for
people from the bottom up to articulate a case. A third point
would be to do with training and staff development. That matter
is addressed in one of the later chapters. There are problems
to do with specialist skills, particularly in the move towards
outsourcing conservation work largely to sole practitioners who
do not have the capacity to train people up. That is fine for
the moment because most people who are now sole practitioners
were trained through museums. They might have worked for the British
Museum, British Library or a guild somewhere for 10, 15 or 20
years and they have those skills, but they are not then able to
pass those skills on to the next generation. Therefore, money,
political priority and the skills base are the three matters to
which we would draw particular attention.
Mr Pepler: If I may just pick
up the question of outsourcing of conservation, certainly in the
archival sector conservation is much more than mending what is
damaged. In-house conservation resources can do so much more in
the way of monitoring storage conditions, ensuring good packaging
and so on and preventing future damage from taking place or being
aggravated.
Q98 Alan Keen: We have had lots of
submissions to the effect that your sector really is not being
looked after sufficiently well by DCMS. Have you had a chance
to put thoughts together as to what changes you would like to
be made? Why does not DCMS understand the needs of your sector?
Mr Pepler: I am not sure I can
answer the "why" question. Certainly, the archive sector
is conscious that archives do not feature very highly on DCMS's
agenda. Certainly, the home page on its website lists the things
for which it is responsible and it does not mention archives anywhere.
I do not think that from the point of view of the national council
it has a strong view on responsibilities. The archive sector is
of its nature a rather hybrid beast. At one end it is dealing
with current information management and at the other end its role
is very much to do with cultural heritage and it does not necessarily
fit well within any particular departmental brief. What we would
like to see is much greater co-ordination between the numerous
departments with a finger in the archival pie: the DCA, DCLG,
DfES and even the DTI in part in relation to business archives.
What we would like to see is better co-ordination of what is being
done. Just going back to DCMS, the archival sector was delighted
when NCA was established. It was the first time the archive sector
had any general recognition as a whole at departmental government
agency level. We would wholly applaud DCMS for that.
Mr McCapra: I believe that DCMS
has quite rightly focused on making big changes in the way the
cultural heritage sector generally thinks about and engages with
the public, and that is good. We are not against that at all.
Having referred to this DCMS document, there is almost nothing
in it with which we would disagree, but the emphasis on making
changes in access and public engagement over the past seven or
eight years has taken the focus away from longer term sustainability.
It simply is not possible to keep, as the Treasury requires DCMS
to do, driving more and more people through cultural heritage
institutions and driving usage up year on year without also doing
some of the work that underpins that for the future.
Q99 Alan Keen: To be fair to the
department, if we look at other areas of policy we find that in
sport, for instance, there is more money for healthy living. DCMS
has little money itself. It happens right across the areas that
DCMS tries to cover. I hope that we can do the job for you by
reporting the criticism that you have made. It is not so much
a matter of what it has done wrong; it just does not recognise
it sufficiently.
Ms Savage: I certainly agree with
that. The National Council on Archives is jointly funded by The
National Archives and Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.
Therefore, my contact with DCMS is necessarily limited. It has
been more than welcoming but misinformed. I believe that that
is indicative of the division of labour between DCMS and MLA regarding
who is responsible for what. My feeling is that they do not want
to tread on each other's toes and, therefore, nobody takes a particularly
strong lead specifically on archives. For instance, the Archives
Task Force was a very well researched and consulted upon piece
of work and it came out with some concrete proposals, but the
work has not been funded. Although various players within the
sector have taken on some of those pieces of work of their own
accord, obviously central co-ordination has been lacking and its
impact has not been what we desired.
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