Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 267)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
HERITAGE LOTTERY
FUND
Q260 Alan Keen: I am sorry, I should
have explained that I was asking the question overall, not just
on the Heritage Lottery Fund. I understand your role is to be
waiting for applications to come forward but I am talking about
the overall position. You were talking about the evidence that
was given before you stepped forward. I was talking about the
same thing. There is no-one with a proactive duty or a proactive
role anywhere it seems to me.
Dame Liz Forgan: You have to be
careful of choking it off. If you go too far in trying to interfere
with the private interests of people they will retreat. The Reviewing
Committee keeps a very, very careful and skilful balance between
the interests of the private seller and the interests of the public
in keeping the best things here. They do a very, very skilful
job like that. I think myself that is the way to go. I would be
concerned about the notion that there was somebody stamping round
the country saying we want that and that and that.
Ms Souter: If I could add there
are different levels of activity as well. I do not think we should
under-estimate the local contacts and the contacts with individual
institutions that are built up over many years. Many of the great
collections include works that have been on loan to them for very
many years and increasingly over the years the curators responsible
for those collections have developed much better relationships
with the owners of those loaned works of art and so they know
where things are and they will be alerted. A great many acquisitions,
and I think we would probably like to see more, are effected through
private treaty sales so they do not come to the market in the
first place, and very often that is because the owner has a good
relationship with the curator, with the local gallery. I think
it is also the case that as museums and galleries have become
much more effective at fundraising more widely for perhaps their
contribution to the capital funds which we have funded so broadly
across the sector, they have also started to build up relationships
with potential donors. They are not always just looking for people
who will help them in supporting acquisitions. Some people will
be interested in doing that, others will be interested in refurbishing
a separate area of a gallery or something like that. I think there
is a level of expertise growing up and well-established in some
of the bigger institutions that is doing the sort of proactive
work that you are talking about.
Q261 Alan Keen: It is comforting
to hear. Would you say that activity is equal across the country
or will it differ depending on the experience or the skill of
the various museum directors?
Ms Souter: Realistically it varies
enormously. The larger and the national museums have a greater
capacity, apart from anything else, to devote resources to that
sort of contact building and to reaching out. If an organisation
is so under pressure that it is not quite sure how it is going
to fund its staff for the next year, then it takes a really strong-willed
director or set of trustees to stand back and say, "No, we
are going to do this long-term relationship building." Some
are very, very good at it, but one of the hopes that we have for
the collections initiative is that by saying to people, "You
can collect, you can acquire things," that we will raise
the aspirations and that some of those smaller institutions will
start to think, "Okay, let us see if we can raise some matching
funds locally and let us see if we can excite some of our potential
donors locally to do that," and that will gradually expand
that base.
Q262 Alan Keen: You have just explained
that nationally there is not the same amount of skill and commitment
or determination right throughout the country. Is there enough
co-ordination to make sure that those gaps are not damaging therefore
the potential collections that we may get nationally?
Ms Souter: I think there is always
going to be more that could be done. The Renaissance in the Regions
programme has helped enormously by creating relationships around
the hub museums in the regions. We have funded a number of partnership
programmes where we have supported a major national institution
to work with two or three other regionally based institutions
to share skills and knowledge, but there is always, always more
that could be done in that field. I think the Department's attempt
to develop a strategy and a set of priorities for the future will
be helpful from that point of view and when the MLA comes up with
its action plan that responds to that report, then I hope that
will help show the way forward as well.
Q263 Alan Keen: Can I ask specifically
now about archiving. It was Oxford University, was it not, that
criticised the fact that you have not got an expert on libraries
and accused you of being out of balance really and said therefore
that sector would suffer? Is that true?
Dame Liz Forgan: Our trustees
are chosen not for their sectoral expertise. Some of them have
sectoral expertise, some of them have completely different areas
of responsibility. We have tried to be very protective of the
archive sector. I do think they are the Cinderellas of this story
but the Heritage Lottery Fund has spent £56 million on archives
and libraries up to now. Some of the solution lies in the hands
of the archives sector itself and we have worked very hard with
them to try to change their vision of an archive from being something
that is closed and quiet and dark and beloved of a very small
number of scholars to something which is also an open place where
all kinds of people can find really important ideas about their
lives and their communities. Here and there around the countryside
you can see that working really marvellously well. I think the
snowball is rolling and we are ready to support and back that
initiative wherever it comes.
Ms Souter: I think perhaps I would
just add that one of the largest HLF awards of recent years was
£17.7 million for the acquisition of the John Murray Archive
for Scotland. The excitement that that has generated in Scotland,
and will generate much more widely when people find out really
what is in that archive, really will be a beacon project in terms
of showing how important an archive can be in casting all sorts
of lights on heritage across the board.
Q264 Chairman: You stated earlier
that even if there had been no guidelines from the DCMS that you
probably would not have changed any decisions that the HLF has
made. Can I raise with you one specific application which we will
be hearing from shortly, the Public Catalogue Foundation. Many
people would think that the work of the PCF is extraordinarily
valuable but you rejected it, I understand, on the grounds that
it did not encourage new audiences to get involved, it did not
improve physical access, and it did not provide support in interpretive
materials. Those sound very much like the sort of guidelines you
are operating on but are you saying even if those were not your
guidelines you still do not think the PCF is deserving of HLF
support?
Dame Liz Forgan: It is a brilliant
scheme but we think it could be more brilliant, and that is the
subject of the dialogue that has been going on between us and
them over a number of years. I had better leave it to Carole to
speak about the detail.
Ms Souter: There is no doubt that
it is a fantastically exhilarating project being carried out with
tremendous commitment and enthusiasm, but we do ask that people
think about not just providing a baseline of information but how
people are going to use it and get involved and so on. The particular
application that was turned down was for the Suffolk project and
I myself had a meeting last year with the Public Catalogue Foundation
and we had a very productive meeting about how, for example, you
could use volunteers to do some of the work and how you could
spread out some of the information and rather than simply producing
the catalogue how you could actually get it out amongst a wider
group of people. Some of my team had a pre-application meeting
in the middle of last year and we were hopeful that we would have
a request for a project planning grant which would be a small
grant to enable the Foundation to think about how they might apply
for more substantial funding from us. I think it should be clear
though that the Foundation has a project of its own which it wants
to take forward and it is a wonderful project. But we have criteria
for funding projects. There are things that can be done that can
bring those two together but it is for the Foundation to decide
whether they want to do those things, whether they want to add
on working with volunteers in a broader group and so on which
would make it possible for us to fund them. I think we have had
some very productive discussions and, as is the case with a number
of projects, the fact that it is not something that necessarily
meets our criteria does not mean we do not think it is a great
project for other reasons but we do have to have criteria that
apply across the board and are understandable by everybody.
Q265 Chairman: The core purpose of
the PCF, the revealing of all these works of art which up to now
nobody has known exist because they are all in dusty store cupboards,
that itself you regard apparently as a wonderful project but you
were not prepared to finance it?
Dame Liz Forgan: It is wonderful
but we believe that the spending of Lottery players' money ought
to be rewarded with the maximum possible benefit and we think
there are greater benefits that that money could deliver if we
work together with the Foundation on a more ambitious way of doing
this. This has happened to us many times before. I hope I can
make you believe that our access and education criteria, although
they may be expressed in somewhat lumbering terminology, are ambitious
and wonderful values, and they are there to encourage curators,
say, in museums to make a leap of imagination further than they
would normally go. It is wonderful to have an Old Master you can
hang on the wall, thank you very much, fine, value for money is
delivered but if you just give it another push from an organisation
and say, "If you really want that money you are going to
have to think a little bit harder about how you are going to make
that picture come to life for more people and how you are going
to get more value for more people out of this huge investment
by Lottery players," and that is what we do. Most of the
time you get complaints from people at the beginning as to why
are they being subjected to this awful PC stuff but when the reality
comes to fruition the overwhelming majority of people are delighted.
They see their institutions blossoming in a way they did not before
and they see their staff using their wits and their imaginations
in a way that they had not before and that is the aim.
Q266 Chairman: So you are optimistic
that you will be able to support the PCF?
Dame Liz Forgan: Do not say that!
Q267 Chairman: You are hopeful?
Dame Liz Forgan: It would be quite
improper!
Chairman: I do not think we have any
more questions, thank you.
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