Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
HERITAGE LOTTERY
FUND
Chairman: Can I welcome back to the Committee
Liz Forgan and Carole Souter on behalf of the Heritage Lottery
Fund. I will invite Nigel Evans to begin.
Q240 Mr Evans: Good morning. How
much money have you got to award in acquisitions this year?
Ms Souter: We do not have a specific
allocated sum for acquisitions, we have general open programmes,
so we will respond to particular requests for acquisitions and
deal with them as we would any other application to us.
Q241 Mr Evans: How much would you
estimate then that you would give this year?
Ms Souter: It will depend entirely
on what we are asked for.
Q242 Mr Evans: How does that work?
I do not fully understand. Normally you would have a budget that
you would be able to operate within. It almost seems if you had
30 great requests then you would be able to meet all of them!
Ms Souter: We are always in the
position that we have more requests for funding than we have the
funds to support, so any project in any year is going to be in
competition with other projects in that year. We have found that
with a few exceptions, for example for churches, that it suits
best the overall needs of heritage to have open programmes so
that we do not cut up our money into penny packets but we allow
people to apply. For example, you might have one year where you
have some very big applications for acquisitions and in other
years the majority might be much smaller and come with other applications.
Q243 Mr Evans: I can understand the
smaller bits. There is no problem with the smaller applications,
but if you had 10 applications which you thought were good but
were all costing £3 or £4 million each, you would not
have the ability to say, "Yes, we will accept them all,"
would you?
Ms Souter: No.
Q244 Mr Evans: You have got to be
cash-strapped sometimes; everybody is cash-strapped.
Ms Souter: Exactly, and that is
the same for acquisitions as for every other sort of project,
be it a natural environment project or wider museum project. We
look at the projects that come towards us. We obviously provide
as much advice and guidance to potential applicants as we can
as to priorities of budget availability and so on.
Q245 Mr Evans: You just said budget
availability. I am just trying to find out what your budget availability
is.
Ms Souter: Overall we have £290
million for the whole of the UK for this year. That is split between
applications up to £2 million, which are considered by our
nine English regional committees and Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland committees, and applications above £2 million which
come to the National Trustees which Liz chairs.
Q246 Mr Evans: Right. Do you see
there being a funding crisis?
Ms Souter: I think there are clearly
not sufficient funds available to meet all of the desires of museums
and galleries to acquire items for their collections and I think
that that has had an impact on the resources that they are prepared
to commit to attempting to make acquisitions. As you have heard
already, it is very dispiriting when there is not a successful
outcome if you have been trying to acquire something. We have
recently announced a £3 million ring-fenced fund to encourage
collections development at the smaller end of the scale with grants
of £50,000 to £200,000. We are consulting on the detail
of that at the moment and that is partly specifically to address
that lack of confidence amongst the smaller applicants that they
will be successful if they attempt to acquire.
Q247 Mr Evans: What about at the
top end; do you think there is a crisis there? Could you give
us a typical example of an application at the top end?
Dame Liz Forgan: We would absolutely
never use the word "crisis". The effect of using that
word would be to do something that we would very much not wish
to do and that would be to put off potential applicants from coming
to us because they would give up before they began, so we would
never ever use that word. It is probably my job on behalf of the
trustees to answer for the overall policy which makes it so difficult
to answer the question that you started out with. The overall
policy which the Heritage Lottery Fund operates is that the heritage
of Britain needs to be seen in the broadest possible context.
The heritage is what the people in Britain value enough to wish
to transmit to the next generation, subject essentially to two
conditions, one is that it can be sustainable and the other is
that it can be shared very broadly with other people. I think
that is a rich and productive and very successful strategic framework
which we have applied over the years and I think has been a good
one. It always makes for friction in any particular slice of that
very big cake when the pressure comes on one area or another,
whether it is archives, whether it is the natural heritage or
whether it is acquisitions. I would not say crisis. You could
never have a policy that prepared for the sale in any year of
a huge Old Master or two or three. That would be ridiculous. Those
things have to be treated as special events.
Q248 Mr Evans: So what would happen
if you had an application this year for something costing £20
million?
Dame Liz Forgan: It did happen
to us not very long ago—the case of the Madonna of the
Pinks that you will perhaps remember. It caused an enormous
amount of discussion which frankly delighted me because it made
everybody think about exactly what we mean by the public benefit
and the value that we attach to these pictures. A fierce argument
took place involving newspapers and trustees up and down the land—it
was wonderful—and in the end after long discussions with
the National Gallery, subject to their creation of a very special
programme of public education and special access built round that
picture to justify a very, very sizeable investment by the Lottery
Fund, we enabled them to buy it. We could not do that every year
and I think you would not expect us to with the funds available
to us.
Q249 Mr Evans: No, so if you get
two or three in a year for £20 million, then you just have
to say that although you thought they were all valid and you would
love to do what you have done with the National Gallery you would
just have to say no to two of them?
Dame Liz Forgan: Hard choices
I am afraid. We have always taken the view that it is a serious
issue for the nation but it cannot be done by one agency alone.
The Heritage Lottery Fund cannot do it; the Government cannot
do it; the private sector cannot do it. We need all three to be
meshed together in a way that maximises all our potential contributions
and enables each bit to do what it most wants to do, and together
I think we could probably do a bit better than we are doing at
the moment.
Q250 Mr Evans: So do you think there
should be a creation of an Acquisitions Fund particularly at the
top end?
Dame Liz Forgan: I am nervous
about that notion because it seems like a very simple solution
to everything. Actually what do we mean by that? What I would
like to see is the Government looking very carefully at Nicholas
Goodison's proposals, not only for increasing the Government's
own contribution, for instance with the National Heritage Memorial
Fund, which I do think is very important and it ought to be up
to at least £20 million if we are to do this job properly,
but also to encourage the private sector to share more of this
burden because, as anyone can see by reading the papers, private
wealth in Britain is increasing very satisfactorily and we are
not seeing a corresponding chunk of that money coming into this
area. It is plainly an area where it potentially could. Both NHMF
and the Lottery have always had a view that part of their duty
was to contribute towards the acquisition of special objects.
We tend to look very, very favourably on applications that come
from the regional and smaller museums ones because a small acquisition
in a regional museum can make the most enormous difference, for
example the Wenlock Jug in Luton—an NHMF grant—or
the Joseph Wright of Derby `Portrait of Richard Arkwright' that
we bought for Derby Museums and Art Gallery—an HLF award.
The people of Derby really care about that, it makes a big difference.
The Lottery itself tends to be seen as a huge pot of money but
it cannot do it by itself and nor should it. It has to live by
its own lights and by its own lights it can make a big contribution
but it cannot do it all.
Q251 Philip Davies: Do you spend
up every year your budget, in which case, following on from Nigel's
point, is it pure luck as to what comes up each year as to whether
or not you can buy it? Or do you say, "These things come
up periodically and so we will put money aside each year so when
a really big thing comes up we have actually got money in our
pockets to do something with it"?
Ms Souter: Can I answer that in
terms of how we operate within the Heritage Lottery Fund. We allocate
a sum which we are prepared to commit each year. For many years
that has been more than our income levels because we know that
the big capital projects we fund take a long time to spend the
cash so we can manage the cash flow by committing more funds in
any given year than we are expecting to go out of the door. We
are coming to the end of that and so our commitment levels will
be declining over a period but we aim to commit as much money
as we started the year wanting to commit. We do not hold money
back. We do not operate in that way. The National Heritage Memorial
Fund, which was set up as a living war memorial in 1980, operates
on a slightly different principle. It has a grant-in-aid figure
which as Liz says, we hope very much will be increased over the
years, and it also has an endowment which sits behind it. That
means that there is at least the potential—to go back to
Mr Evans' question—if there was a very large acquisition
that was suitable for the National Heritage Memorial Fund, because
the endowment sits there as well as the grant-in-aid, to deal
with a quite extraordinary situation as we had with the acquisition
of Tyntesfield for the National Trust, a house in its entirety
rather than a work of art, but it gives us the opportunity to
use that money in very, very special and unusual circumstances.
Q252 Chairman: It was put to us in
evidence that the HLF appeared to be giving a lower priority to
museum acquisitions than they had done in the past. Would you
accept that is the case?
Dame Liz Forgan: Absolutely not.
As Carole explained, the flow is driven by what comes to us not
by our own arbitrary decisions. What is the best illustration
to give you?
Ms Souter: Perhaps I could mention
success rates. The success rate for acquisitions for museums,
galleries, archives and libraries has never fallen below 76% and
in the year in which we contributed least money, which was only
£1.3 million, a very small percentage of the total HLF money,
the success rate was still 80.86%, so it really does depend on
what people ask of us. Realistically people will make their judgment
about whether they are likely to be successful or not so one must
not be naive about that, but we have a very, very high success
rate for acquisition applications to HLF.
Q253 Mr Evans: So what percentage
do you turn down?
Ms Souter: Just under 20%.
Dame Liz Forgan: Chairman, I think
it was you in an earlier session who made the point that there
was some sense that people did not apply because they were afraid
that it might be a waste of time, and we are concerned about that.
Carole mentioned that we have taken a proactive step in a way
that we do not often do to try to address this in the shape of
a special fund of about £3 million which is precisely aimed
at encouraging the regional museums to not only acquire things
but also to put in place the curatorial training and confidence
to look after them and to want them. This is an experiment and
we will see how this goes. We have not promised anything more
than a year. In fact, it will take five years to work through,
but we have tried to make it as simple as it could possibly be.
We have removed all the requirements to come back to us every
time an institution wants to purchase an individual object, so
we are going to make it as simple and as streamlined as it possibly
can be for those who qualify for it and we will see whether that
will achieve its aim, which is really to raise the water table
at regional level of curators in those museums having the training
and confidence and encouragement to acquire. It is not necessary
to spend £3 million every time you want to acquire an object
that will really enhance your collection. We hope that will have
a good effect at that level.
Q254 Chairman: You do not feel that
the guidelines you operate under from the DCMS, which focus specifically
on issues like promotion of access, make you less inclined to
give grants for acquisitions than for other projects within the
museums sector?
Dame Liz Forgan: I must tell you
Chairman, that although we have broad general directions from
Government to that effect, if you took them all away tomorrow
I do not think there is a trustee round the table that would change
the way we operate. That is not out of some piece of political
correctness; it is out of the belief that not only is the heritage
story enriched and enhanced by having more and more people contributing
to it but that in the long term our ability to sustain our national
heritage depends on there being a really broad constituency of
people who know it and love it and think it is theirs and will
look after it and campaign for it.
Q255 Helen Southworth: Could I can
ask about timeliness. Are there issues about the speed with which
people need to respond if they get a catalogue and find there
is something important to their collection which is on sale next
week?
Ms Souter: Yes.
Q256 Helen Southworth: What are the
issues and what is the resolution of them?
Ms Souter: Again if I can address
the two funds. It is easier for the National Heritage Memorial
Fund to turn round an application very quickly because it does
not have the requirements for access and involvement and inclusion,
so we have (and on the part of the staff this is truly heroic)
turned round applications in two or three weeks when exactly that
has happened, when someone has found something in a sale catalogue.
It is obviously not ideal because it means you take a decision
on one object rather than looking at whatever might be coming
up at the next committee and looking at them all as a piece. It
is more difficult for the Heritage Lottery Fund particularly at
levels over £50,000 where that level of application would
go either to a quarterly committee meeting or to the trustees
meetings, and as our resources are increasingly stretched I think
both committee members and trustees are increasingly concerned
not to take decisions between meetings (which would be what would
be required) because of the risk that you disadvantage some other
project which is going through the process and comes up at a meeting
which has less money available to it because you have taken a
decision on an acquisition. There is no doubt that it is more
difficult for the Heritage Lottery Fund to deal with a sudden
request for an acquisition than it is for the Memorial Fund.
Q257 Helen Southworth: Would you
like to see incentives to get owners who are thinking of selling
discussing it with the public sector rather than going to auction?
Dame Liz Forgan: It is terribly
important and that sort of intelligence is so helpful and useful.
On the whole curators and people know what is going on. It is
just every now and again something comes out of the blue and it
would be extremely helpful if we could find a way of encouraging
people thinking of selling to start having a discussion with their
local museum or gallery before making a decision. That would be
wonderful and anything you could do to make that happen would
be simply miraculous.
Q258 Alan Keen: Helen has led on
to what I was going to ask. Your role is very passive, is it not?
You talk all the time that you do not want people put off from
applying to you because they think they will not get the award.
The whole situation to me seems to lack co-ordination. It is a
fragmented business altogether, is it not? You have got museums
who obviously would like to acquire whatever item happens to come
along, but it seems to me it is the private collections that are
important, and they might not even be collections, they might
be just objects that exist and owners have not even thought of
them as part of a collection. Do we not need someone who is proactive
and looking out for and trying get the same culture that exists
in the US into people's psyche, to people who at the moment have
objects which they do not even understand the desire of other
people to see them? There seems to be no-one who is proactive.
We go from the Treasury which is struggling to understand the
word "giving". It is not very comforting for taxpayers
to have a Treasury that does not understand philanthropy. What
would you like to see exist? Would you love to be in a position
yourself where you were the person who had the duty of looking
at everything and planning ahead as to what could be done in trying
to persuade people with money to give? There must be people who
do not even understand the system at all concerning valuable objects.
I am sorry to be talking around the subject but I am trying to
draw out what could be done. Can you comment?
Dame Liz Forgan: I have just been
relishing the wonderful vision of myself as the "Empress
of the Arts", but I think in seriousness the market is a
very, very powerful motivator of people. The issue is not how
you motivate people to sell things, it is how you encourage them
to have the public interest at heart when they do.
Q259 Alan Keen: To give rather than
to sell.
Dame Liz Forgan: I think the evidence
you heard in the session before us is the best advice there is
on that subject. I do not think we can add to it. One element
where we do contribute, and you are right when you say we are
pretty reactive and that is quite deliberate, but one thing we
have done in recent years is to set up a small development function
in our regional operation so that there are people who will go
out at the very bottom end of the market if you like and encourage
people to apply to us for funding for all sorts of things, to
talk to people who would not naturally think of perhaps applying
to us, who would not naturally think that the things they possess
or love or want to save qualify for heritage, and to that extent
we are proactive. We do go and we say, "Just a minute, have
you thought about this?"
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