Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CULTURE, MEDIA
AND SPORT
AND ENGLISH
HERITAGE
9 NOVEMBER 2009
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome
to the Committee on Public Accounts where today we are considering
the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report on Promoting Participation
with the Historic Environment. We welcome back to the Committee
Jonathan Stephens, who is Permanent Secretary to the Department
for Culture, Media and Sport, and Dr Simon Thurley, who is Chief
Executive of English Heritage. The Department delivers a majority
of its services through 73 public bodies which receive 95% of
the Department's funds. The Report describes how the Department
has worked with English Heritage to increase the diversity of
visitors to historic sites. English Heritage's funding has fallen
in recent years and it has done well to increase its membership
and commercial income. We would like to focus on how they are
widening the audience to heritage. Dr Simon Thurley, perhaps I
could ask you, what do you think is your number one priority as
Chief Executive?
Dr Thurley: To ensure that my
organisation, the organisation in my care, fulfils its objectives.
Q2 Chairman: What are these objectives?
Dr Thurley: Certainly one of the
objectives is increasing participation.
Q3 Chairman: Is that your main objective?
Is your main objective to look after English Heritage, the heritage
of the country?
Dr Thurley: Our main objective
is to pass on to future generations the best of our past so that
it can form a positive part of the future.
Q4 Chairman: All right. I am not
disagreeing with that. That has to be your main priority.
Dr Thurley: Absolutely.
Q5 Chairman: Your main priority is
passing on the heritage?
Dr Thurley: Yes.
Q6 Chairman: Was it fair then, given
the cuts in your funding in recent years, or was it realistic
for the Department to ask you to focus on the difficult issue
of widening participation?
Dr Thurley: We believe that increasing
participation is one of the important things that we can do to
ensure that heritage carries on playing a role in the future of
this country because you have to build up support with young people,
you have to build up support with people whose families may have
recently come to this country from other parts of the world and
who might not feel that the heritage of England is their heritage.
We do believe that the activities we undertake in this area are
an important part of our primary mission as I have just described
it.
Q7 Chairman: If it was such a priority
for you, why did you not set clearer objectives for your organisation
to deliver them because you are clearly not succeeding in this,
are you?
Dr Thurley: We had a series of
agreements with the Department and we were given a series of targets,
every single one of which we either achieved or exceeded, and
I think that given the complexity of what we are trying to do,
we felt that was a reasonable result.
Q8 Chairman: If you look at Figure
5. You say you are succeeding in these targets but you are not
doing terribly well, are you? This is the funding, where was the
figure about the actual participation? Figure 9, sorry, diversity
of English Heritage workforce. I am trying to look at the figure.
Mr Prideaux: Figure 4.
Q9 Chairman: Figure 4, is it, sorry.
I am sorry to confuse you; I do not normally do this. If you look
at the black and minority ethnic proportion of the population,
you are not doing very well, for instance, are you?
Dr Thurley: I am still struggling
to find it. Yes, I have it here.
Mr Stephens: It is page 11. Could
I perhaps pick up because the figures in Figure 4 are for participation
in the heritage environment across the whole of the sector of
which English Heritage are part but only account for a small number
of visits. They show we did achieve significant increases in two
out of the three areas and met the target of three percentage
points in one of the areas. In the second area where there was
a significant increase it was just over 2%.
Q10 Chairman: How about the diversity
of English Heritage's workforce, for instance, Figure 9?
Dr Thurley: I can answer to that,
Chairman. We do not have, as it were, a representative workforce
and there are some reasons for that, and reasons we are trying
to combat. The first point is that many of our staff are operating
in extremely specialist areas. They are architectural historians,
they are archaeologists, members of various parts of the planning
process, and actually in the population as a whole non-white people
are under-represented there. We have quite a big task to do to
encourage non-white people to join these types of professions.
We need to start really working with people when they are at school
because it is not possible just overnight suddenly to increase
the proportion of our archaeologists, for instance, who are non-white,
we just cannot do that overnight because the people out there
do not exist. It is going to be a long process, something that
we are very committed to but it cannot be fixed on day one.
Q11 Chairman: Look at paragraph 1.11,
please. What does being the Department's lead for the heritage
sector actually mean in that paragraph?
Dr Thurley: It means that we are
the Government's chief adviser on England's heritage and we advise
the Department and ministers on all aspects of heritage and that
involves advising the Government on its strategy towards heritage
as well.
Q12 Chairman: Mr Stephens, if you
give English Heritage £125 million a year to be your strategic
lead, why did you expect your own staff to take the lead in broadening
participation?
Mr Stephens: We give that money
to English Heritage to fulfil the full range of its statutory
and other responsibilities, of which increasing participation
is one but preservation and presentation of its properties is
another. Its important role in the planning system is another.
That money is going to a wide range of activities and our aim
here was to increase participation in the historic environment
of all sorts across the sector as a whole. English Heritage has
an important role but its properties are something like just 5%
of heritage properties across the UK as a whole. We sought to
bring together a core group of lead organisations, of which English
Heritage was an important part, to lead on that target across
the sector as a whole. That was back in 2005. Now English Heritage,
under the current arrangements, are leading the broadening access
group across the sector as a whole.
Q13 Chairman: Dr Thurley, is there
a conflict between the need to widen the participation and your
commercial imperative to make money from your properties?
Dr Thurley: Not at all, in fact
the success we have had with our sites—and thank you very
much for pointing that out at the beginning—has actually
resulted in an increase in participation. About 30% of our visitors
fall into the category of priority groups as defined by DCMS,
so the day job of opening our sites to the public is attracting
a lot of people from these groups anyway.
Q14 Chairman: Why do you then only
open half of your properties for free on heritage open days, which
is an initiative that you sponsored yourself?
Dr Thurley: We never used to open
any of our sites on heritage open days until two years ago when
we had a big campaign jointly with the National Trust called History
Matters or something like that. That year as a special event we
decided to open some of our sites free, and so did the National
Trust. It goes against the spirit of heritage open days though,
actually, because the whole point about heritage open days is
opening sites that are not normally open to the public. If you
suddenly drop an entrance charge from a site that is open to the
public anyway the risk is that you will take visitors away from
volunteer run sites that are not normally open and actually reduce
the number of people attending. I am not convinced that opening
our sites free on heritage open days is what we want to do.
Q15 Chairman: Mr Stephens, do you
think the real problem is you have got all these baronies that
you fund but they are really independent of you and you set these
targets, very worthy targets, such as widening participation but
people like Dr Thurley just get on and do their own thing? His
priorities are not your priorities. His priorities are to preserve
England's heritage so these targets you set these kinds of organisations
are pretty well meaningless because you have very little power
or control over them. Why this hearing is important is that this
happens not just with English Heritage but many of the other bodies
that you work with.
Mr Stephens: I disagree. Preserving
heritage is a key part of our role and responsibility. If you
think about our four key strategic objectives that we have for
now, one is about excellence and the second is about widening
opportunity across all our sectors. Those two things seem to me
to sum up an awful lot of what English Heritage is doing: preserving
what is excellent about the past and making it available to as
many people as possible, and not just doing so through their own
properties but through their other interventions and role in the
sector as a whole. Moreover, on these two sets of PSAs, the one
set in 2005 and the one set in 2008, we have clear delivery plans
in place that have been agreed not just with English Heritage
but with a range of organisations. As Dr Thurley has said, English
Heritage has delivered on what we asked of English Heritage in
respect of those PSAs. We also have comprehensive funding agreements
in place trying to capture the key indicators across the range
of English Heritage's activities to enable us to monitor and,
if necessary, intervene on performance. English Heritage is our
specialist and expert body but we take a very close interest in
its performance.
Q16 Chairman: You are independent,
are you not, Dr Thurley, you can do pretty well what you want.
They can set these objectives but you get on with running your
own show, do you not?
Dr Thurley: That is not true.
We have a funding agreement which is discussed and mutually agreed
and if we do not meet the targets in it—
Q17 Chairman: Did you not reach a
funding agreement this Friday?
Dr Thurley: We presented a funding
agreement to our Commission some months ago.
Q18 Chairman: It was agreed this
Friday, was it not?
Dr Thurley: I am not sure about
that. Was it agreed this Friday?
Q19 Chairman: Finally, because of
this hearing, you finally sat down together and worked things
out.
Mr Stephens: I am sorry, I understand
how you get to that but that is a misrepresentation.
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