Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 120-139)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CULTURE, MEDIA
AND SPORT,
SPORT ENGLAND,
ENGLISH HERITAGE,
ARTS COUNCIL
AND BIG
LOTTERY FUND
MONDAY 2 JUNE
2008
Q120 Mr Dunne: I am going to pursue
this a little further if I may because I have had a little bit
of involvement in this industry myself, having set up a bookshop
business. Just to correct the Chairman, which I hesitate to do,
it is not 50,000 new titles published every year; it is 190,000
new titles published every year. I happened yesterday to be at
the Hay Book Festival where 140,000 people visited over the 10
days of the festival and I would think virtually every single
one of them, if they were aware that there was a potential government
handout to start their literary endeavour, would be coming to
your door, Mr Davey, and I think the publicity given to this hearing
will undoubtedly mean that the number of applications from potential
novelists will soar, but I find it peculiar to think that your
regional experts can substitute for the role played by the literary
agents up and down the country who make a commercial living out
of doing what your experts are able to do to a minor degree. I
am absolutely perplexed that there is public money being given
in this way.
Mr Davey: What we do is give the
would-be writer the possibility of undertaking the writing. They
may be from backgrounds where they cannot afford to take the time
off to be able to undertake the work required. What we do not
do is second-guess the commercial publishing sector who make the
final decision on whether anything is published or not.
Q121 Mr Dunne: I should not really
delve too deeply into literary endeavour and what makes a good
author and what does not make a good author, but a very large
proportion of the most successful authors sold at the moment in
this country come from relatively deprived backgrounds. It happens
to be a genre which has been very successful and I think it is
hard to argue that you are providing a social service that is
not being provided by the commercial sector in terms of allowing
people to come forward and start writing. People write books because
they are determined and dedicated to do it and that is the best
discipline and generally speaking around the history of novel
writing that is what has created the best books. I have got that
off my chest, Chairman, and now I would like to return to the
slightly bigger picture and, Mr Holgate, ask you if I may, in
your role at the DCMS what oversight do you have of these multiple
grant distributors here in terms of setting priorities or monitoring
what they are doing or trying to encourage them to share best
practice, which is perhaps the thing that comes out most strongly
in the NAO report, that there has not been enough of that going
on?
Mr Holgate: Could I distinguish
between Exchequer funded bodies and lottery funded bodies? You
have a perfect portfolio here. You have two that are both, one
that is pure lottery and one that is pure exchequer, and we do
treat them slightly differently. In the case of Exchequer funded
bodies we set objectives, conditioned by the three-year spending
review. We set efficiency targets. Indeed, the department was
engaged in this business even before Sir Peter Gershon took an
interest and, we believe that we have met the gains for the 2005-08
period and we believe we will make the gains expected of us over
the 2008-11 period. Where Exchequer bodies are concerned we are
about the downward pressure and the greater value for money looking
across any one NDPB. Very rarely do we, within the business of
the non-departmental public bodies, pick something out and say,
"That is particularly in need of reform", or whatever.
There are examples but we try to make them as rare as possible
because the whole benefit of an NDPB is that you are employing
experts like Simon Thurley to run the organisation which delivers
church repairs and no civil servant is able to second-guess him.
On lottery funded bodies we place more weight on the chairs and
trustees of those bodies who are appointed by ministers, I think,
in most or all cases (with some exceptions perhaps) and who are
in a sense the representatives of the would-be applicant and are
very keen, not least because they will be lobbied the whole time
by people with very good ideas, to see that the highest proportion
of the money of the lottery body will go on the grant and the
least amount will go on the administration of the grant. There
are other conditions that apply to both, but on the lottery you
also have financial directions which the department issues which
the bodies are obliged to meet. For both sets there are accounts
directions and a statement of internal control.
Q122 Mr Dunne: Do you have directions
on any particular criteria applying to grant-making bodies, such
as, for example, geographic distribution or distribution to particular
social groups?[5]
Mr Holgate: I believe that there
will be directions for the lottery bodies that impinge on both
those points. A good example might be that the Big Lottery Fund
now has committees for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Q123 Mr Dunne: I think individual
grant-making bodies have it. My question is whether the department
is issuing directives to the boards of these grant-making bodies
to do something in a particular way.
Mr Holgate: It will be clear to
them that they are incumbent upon spending their grant as equitably
as possible across the country and, at the risk of taking the
novelist example again, if there is someone who is from a background
that would not naturally lead them towards making a successful
application when the intrinsic case may be very strong, we will
always be wanting to try and attract that marginal application.
Q124 Mr Dunne: But, Mr Holgate, you
have not got a written directive to Mr Davey that he must produce
X number of novelists from a Y type of social background and Z
geography?
Mr Holgate: No, but the bodies
do incur costs in trying to spread the possibility of successful
application both geographically and to groups from different backgrounds
or different traditions who may not think to look to the state
or the lottery for help.
Q125 Mr Dunne: One of the reasons
why I am probing on this is that we have not got anybody here
from the UK Film Council but I have had representations from bodies
that are currently funded by the UK Film Council. One such organisation
is called Flicks in the Sticks. It provides rural displays of
films in village halls and on the Welsh Marches, including near
my constituency, and they are very concerned because at the moment
there is a significant amount of investment being made by the
UK Film Council in providing digital installations, which is a
good thing, but 100% of that is going into urban areas and the
question for me, representing a rural area, is, where did that
direction come from? Why are they not giving a proportion of that
funding to provide digital access to rural cinemas?
Mr Holgate: I think it is extremely
unlikely that we would direct the UK Film Council as to where
geographically it should put its investment other than the general
presumption of trying to reach parts of the country which would
not normally be reached.
Q126 Mr Dunne: In this particular
case they are very definitely not reaching the parts of the country
that in my view deserve to be reached. Perhaps you could have
a look at that for me and send a note about it if you do establish
that there is anything the department has said along those lines.[6]
Mr Holgate: Certainly.
Q127 Mr Dunne: Thank you. Mr Wanless,
you have been praised by Mr Holgate and others in your responses
to other members of the Committee about the outreach that the
Big Lottery Fund undertakes and I am aware of that, having participated
in both meetings with MPs. I think I am hosting one for you next
week for West Midlands MPs, but I have also had the benefit of
your West Midlands team coming to my constituency to explain the
various schemes that are available for applicants. I applaud you
for doing that and I think that perhaps goes further than any
other grant-making bodies in doing that. That may be because many
of your grants are for small individuals but it sounds to me as
though if Mr Davey were to start having similar events he would
be absolutely swamped by artists of every description looking
for some kind of grant. The question I have for you is that the
success in certain local authority areas seems to be predicated
on that local authority having an individual who helps the voluntary
sector with grant applications, and in those local authorities
that do not engage someone to do that the uptake is somewhat lower.
Does this reflect a deliberate policy on your part to seek to
outsource this accessibility and information sharing and if you
were to take this on yourselves would you not have greater success
and a more even distribution?
Mr Wanless: There is a limit,
I guess, to how much of this outreach we can take onto ourselves
because of a desire to control the amount of lottery money we
spend on ourselves rather than on the money going directly to
the good causes, and this is why there are these kinds of classic
dilemmas where efficiency comes up against effectiveness. We have
taken a decision to have a very fundamental restructuring and
concentration of our grant-making activities in two income centres
and have small regional outreach offices with eight people in
each, and the West Midlands is one, and that has saved us £3.5
million a year. As to whether we should add a little bit of that
back in for a bit more outreach of our own, I do not know. As
has already been indicated, we are under considerable pressure
to keep our running costs down as low as we can, so at the moment
I would say our first strategy is to try and map out and engage
and involve a pattern of helpers for potential applicants across
the country and to seek those out and encourage local authorities
that have not got them to think about it because of the benefit
it would have for their area, to encourage the sectoral organisations
or whatever. That is where we are at the moment.
Q128 Mr Dunne: I have a final question,
Chairman, if I may, to Dr Thurley. In response to a couple of
Committee members you touched on the Religious Buildings Programme
and I applaud you for doing this because I think you are an absolutely
vital source of repair for many of our communities. I have two
concerns about it. One is, and particularly in light of the much
publicised increase in the value of lead and the number of church
roofs that are stripped of recently renovated lead, what happens
to an applicant who has recently had their roof repaired by you
and they then lose the lead to theft? What is their scope for
getting it repaired again, using your funding?
Dr Thurley: I would very much
hope that the church would be insured with the ecclesiastic insurers.
The insurers would be responsible for paying out for that, but
the thing that we are really interested in is trying in some way
to stop this haemorrhage of lead off church roofs. There is a
clever device that you can paint onto church roofs which we have
been promoting to try and reduce that loss but it is a serious
problem and churches are going to their insurance to cover it.
Q129 Mr Dunne: Can I suggest that
every time you provide funding to such a church you make it a
requirement that they paint it with this equipment and, secondly,
publicise the fact that the roof is protected and make that a
condition of their application because it might help stem the
theft? The other part of my question is, where you are investing
significant public funds into buildings which in many cases may
be on the verge of becoming redundant but for good architectural
reasons you are protecting them, do you have some kind of fallback
mechanism that if public money has gone into a church that subsequently,
within a reasonable period, becomes redundant that money does
not then goes into the coffers of the Church of England or similar
bodies?
Dr Thurley: Redundancy is still
quite rare, it has to be said. The best churches, which are likely
to be the ones that we have funded, are very likely to go the
Churches Conservation Trust, which is a body which is funded by
the state for looking after redundant churches. All our grant
schemes have provision for clawback if for some reason someone
is being seen to make some sort of profit out of it but I should
say that in the Places of Worship scheme that we are talking about
it is very rare. I am not sure that there is even a record of
that happening.
Q130 Chairman: I am very interested
in your work, Dr Thurley, on keeping churches open and I think
what you do is excellent. I do not think you do it enough. When
I was visiting Stow church, which you might be familiar with,
in my constituency, they had a problem with lead being stolen,
but I am interested by your answer about keeping churches open.
It infuriates me that so many churches are still locked. You just
mentioned ecclesiastical insurance. They have made it absolutely
clear in the past that they want these churches to remain open
and I would have thought that if you are giving public money,
given especially that many people do not necessarily go so much
now to formal services on a Sunday but they like to visit these
churches during the week, particularly in rural areas, you should
be much more insistent in the use of your money to keep these
churches open, and if the excuse is that they have valuable objects
such as silver candlesticks, they would be locked away and wooden
ones put there. I just do not buy this argument that these churches
need to be kept locked.
Dr Thurley: Chairman, I absolutely
agree with you and we do use our money for that purpose. We have
very strict criteria of not giving our grant money unless churches
are able to keep them open. The current number of days is 28 and
we are going to increase it this year to 40 days.
Q131 Chairman: It is not good enough
just to say, as I so often see, "If you want a key go down
the lane to Mrs Bloggs". It is not good enough. People want
to have the church open.
Dr Thurley: You are quite right.
We did a survey last year with the Church of England which revealed
that an astonishing 89% of the population last year went into
a church, not necessarily for the purposes of worship but they
just went in because they really enjoyed it, and the majority
of those churches are churches that are left open.
Q132 Chairman: But why did you say
earlier, I think to Mr Bacon, that they are sometimes resistant?
Why should they be resistant?
Dr Thurley: I think there is anxiety
about theft and vandalism, particularly in urban churches. You
find that in rural areas churches are very often left open. In
urban areas it is much harder because the likelihood of ne'er-do-wells
coming in is higher. The insurance situation I think is one of
the keys to this because the insurers are now offering, extraordinarily,
insurance discounts for churches to be left open because a church
that is left open is far less attractive for someone to break
into than a church that is kept locked.
Q133 Chairman: I am also interested
in the work you do for cathedrals. How much do you give to the
cathedrals of England a year?
Dr Thurley: Perhaps I can preface
the answer to that question with a remark which is that in 1991
we did a survey of the English cathedrals to work out how much
work needed to be done to them to get them into good condition.
It revealed that there was a significant amount of work to be
done and between 1991 and 2001 we spent very nearly £50 million
on the English cathedrals and we conducted a second survey in
2001 that revealed that the vast majority of the very significant
backlog of repairs to English cathedrals was completed.[7]
Q134 Chairman: So this is a long preamble
to explain why you have cut their grant, is it not?
Dr Thurley: It is one of the two
explanations of why we now give less money.
Q135 Chairman: Is it not about £3
million a year you give?
Dr Thurley: At the moment, yes,
it is in that region.[8]
Q136 Chairman: I find this staggering.
As a nation we spend £650 billion of public money. This is
the greatest architectural resource we have in this country and
we are only prepared to spend the staggeringly small sum of £3
million from the public purse to maintain what is our greatest
historical legacy. Do you not find that extraordinary? Why do
you not take this opportunity to criticise your paymasters, the
Treasury, and ask for more money?
Dr Thurley: English Heritage has
not received an inflationary increase to its grant since 1997.
We have had to be very clear about what we are prioritising in
terms of spending. After the 10 years of expense on cathedrals
we decided that the priority had to be parish churches because
cathedrals are much more able to raise money than a remote parish
church like Stow, although that particular one attracted a great
deal of attention, but the average parish church finds it much
harder than Lincoln Cathedral to raise a lot of money. Therefore,
given the fact that we had significantly less money to give away,
we decided to prioritise parish churches over cathedrals and,
of course, I agree with you that it would be good to continue
our Cathedrals Funding Scheme at the sort of level that we did
during the 1990s but the simple fact is that we had to take a
decision on priorities in relation to how much money we had.
Q137 Chairman: And when you have
got to save money why get involved in the scheme in Salisbury
Cathedral, for example, which caused a lot of upset over lighting?
I am on the Cathedral Council of Lincoln and this went round the
cathedral community in this country that you were getting involved
in a very proactive way which was quite unnecessary?
Dr Thurley: If I may correct you,
Chairman, it was not the lighting that there was a dispute over.
It was a dispute over the replacement of the high level stonework
and the parapets. We are very supportive of Salisbury's current
scheme, which is illuminating the cathedral at night and which
is being paid for by private donor. The reason that the Dean of
Salisbury, June Osborne, was upset and there was a dispute is
that we did not give her a grant and she was extremely angry about
that. We did not give her a grant because we deemed that 42 other
cathedrals that we did give grants to had a higher claim to the
small pot of money that we had than she did.
Q138 Mr Bacon: Mr Davey, Trollope
wrote a lot of novels about the doings of English cathedrals.
Are you having any novelists doing a post-modern take on cathedral
internecine warfare?
Mr Davey: Not to my knowledge.
Q139 Mr Bacon: Thank you. Dr Thurley,
you mentioned lead being stolen from roofs in answer to Mr Dunne,
and I have certainly had experience of this in my own constituency
and throughout Norfolk. I ask this because I used to spend, for
reasons too boring to go into, a lot of time in Germany in a copper
factory. I just wondered whether you had ever used pre-patinated
copper or recommended it to be used because it might be cheaper
and you get your patina right there, 200 years of wear, but it
is new and it lasts?
Dr Thurley: There are two issues
there. There are issues of performance. There is no doubt about
it, lead does perform better than any other metal roofing metal.
The second issue is one of authenticity because it just does not
look the same. Whilst it might be possible to make some types
of substitute material in some parts of a church where performance
and authenticity are not an issue, for many churches the appearance
of a lead roof, which is quite often very visible, is a very important
part of the whole feeling of the church. Yes, we would consider
alternative materials but we would have to take those other two
factors into consideration.
5 Ev 22 Back
6
Ev 22 Back
7
Note by witness: The nearly £50m we have provided to Cathedrals
for repairs has been in the period from 1991-92 to date (2007-08). Back
8
Note by witness: The correct figure for grants to Cathedrals
at the moment is £2m pa (currently committed for one further
application round for funding for projects to take place in 2009-10),
half funded by English Heritage and half by the Wolfson Foundation
with whom we have a partnership on this scheme. Back
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