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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 912-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
PROTECTING AND PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE
Tuesday 14 February 2006 MR PHILIP VENNING, OBE, MA, FSA, FRSA, MR MATTHEW SAUNDERS, MBE, DR IAN DUNGAVELL, MS BRIDGET CHERRY and MR ADAM WILKINSON, MA, MSC
MR CRISPIN TRUMAN, MR FRANK FIELD, MP, MR DAVID BAKER, OBE, FSA, MIFA, IHBC and DR JENNIFER M FREEMAN Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 50
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 14 February 2006 Members present Mr John Whittingdale, in the Chair Janet Anderson Mr Nigel Evans Mr Mike Hall Alan Keen Mr Adrian Sanders Helen Southworth ________________ Memoranda submitted by The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, The Victorian Society and SAVE Britain's Heritage
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Philip Venning, OBE, MA, FSA, FRSA, Secretary, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Mr Matthew Saunders, MBE, Secretary, Ancient Monuments Society, Dr Ian Dungavell, Director, The Victorian Society, Ms Bridget Cherry, Vice Chair, Twentieth Century Society and Mr Adam Wilkinson, MA, MSC, Secretary, SAVE Britain's Heritage, gave evidence.
Chairman: Good morning everybody. Welcome to this the first session of our inquiry into protecting and preserving our heritage. Before I introduce the witnesses I think Helen Southworth would just like to make a short declaration. Helen Southworth: Thank you, Chairman. I have a relevant declarable interest for this inquiry, in that my husband will become a member of the Heritage Lottery Board North-West from April this year. Chairman: Can I therefore welcome you all. We have representatives of a number of voluntary organisations, I think four of which are part of the Joint Committee of the National Amenity Societies, but you will all have specific interests in the preservation of ancient buildings. In particular, can I welcome: Philip Venning, the Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; Matthew Saunders, the Secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society; Dr Ian Dungavell, the Director of The Victorian Society; Adam Wilkinson of SAVE Britain's Heritage; and Bridget Cherry of the Twentieth Century Society. May I invite Adrian Sanders to begin? Q1 Mr Sanders: What really, really needs to be in the White Paper, and what can wait? Dr Dungavell: I can start while the rest of them are gathering their thoughts on that, but that is a very good question. One of the things that most worries us, I guess, is listing. There is something that needs to be done before the White Paper and that is an interim protection for buildings which are being considered for listing, which is that DCMS tell English Heritage to tell the owner of the building that it is under consideration for listing. Already I know of two buildings which have either been demolished or have been substantially altered as a result of their owners being notified. Quite rightly, the owner makes their own decision what to do, but I think that is a terrible way to prejudge whether the building is listable or not. I think that needs to be changed right away. In the White Paper there also needs to be a consideration that owners will not like having consideration for listing hanging over their heads for a long period of time. I do not think that is fair. There needs to be a defined period in which a decision about listing has to be made, and I have not seen that mentioned so far. It would be quite wrong for listing decisions to take as long as they do now while there is that protection. In the evidence of The Victorian Society you will see that we are aware of some outstanding listing decisions going back to 2002; and we have also got some very important listing decisions which are still unresolved while major development is planned in the area. I would like to give you two examples of that because I think they are quite important. One is the Walter Bodmer Library at Oxford University which is an unlisted building and a member of the public submitted it for listing in April 2005. The Council apparently are beginning their consideration of this planning application today not knowing the result of that listing application, and that seems to me the sort of thing which will bring the whole system into disrepute. We were told by DCMS that English Heritage had recommended it for listing, but DCMS had turned it down. I wonder why it is disregarding the advice of its advisors on the historic environment. The person who submitted it for listing has asked for a review, and we were told when we phoned last week the decision would be made yesterday; but when we phoned yesterday DCMS told us it would be made "in due course". Another university, the Arkwright Building at Nottingham Trent University, we have asked to be upgraded; and we submitted that request on 20 July 2005. It is still undecided even though the local planning authority is trying to decide on a listed building consent application now and it is up for consultation. Those sorts of things I think need really to be sorted out. Mr Wilkinson: Just to raise a flag at this point if I may to do with conservation areas and the need to have serious action over conservation areas. At present buildings in conservation areas are woefully inadequately protected. This is largely to do with the Shimizu decision, which has not been corrected even though many years ago this really removed much control over demolition in conservation areas. There is a real opportunity here to sort this out and make sure that buildings in a conservation area that are of historic and architectural interest all generally adding to the ambiance of a conservation area can be properly protected, which at present they are not. Mr Venning: Could I add something to that. I think the Government has made it clear, particularly in the recent Public Value Conference that was held a couple of weeks ago, that what the Government would like to see is greater involvement with ordinary members of the public in decisions about what buildings should or should not be protected and, in a sense, given some degree of public funding in the process. In a way, it is actually these very buildings, the ones in conservation areas, which are the ones that people are most likely to fight over. If it is local building that they love - has family associations, maybe it is a school which they went to, perhaps not architecturally terribly important but one that adds to that village or town something that they feel strongly about - certainly at the moment the fact that it is in a conservation area means precious little; it is surprising really what you can get away with in a conservation area. I am desperately sad because in a village in Norfolk there was a very nice village hall converted from an early 19th Century foundry and the windows were windows which had been made in that foundry, very nice early ironwork in good condition and when I went back yesterday there were all horrible plastic ones, all done absolutely with permission and so on, perfectly acceptable, but had utterly transformed that building. That same story can be told absolutely anywhere you go. Q2 Mr Evans: What do you want to see in conservation areas with buildings then? Mr Venning: I think certainly a good bit more control than there is at the moment and clarity of control. I think that is the other problem. People are not clear precisely what you can or cannot do. What we are not saying is the controls should be as onerous as they are with listing. At the moment there are categories of control in conservations areas, but I think the situation desperately needs clarifying. For those of you who are not familiar with this Shimizu judgment that we referred to, this was a House of Lords' decision on an entirely different matter, nothing to do with conservation areas but it produced a definition of the word "demolition", which previously had not been terribly clear. The problem with that is the idea of part demolition is one of the items that appears in the conservation area legislation. By making this decision on a totally different matter it suddenly changed the legal framework for conservation areas. The Government when it first came into power in 1997 had said this was one of the things they were going to try to do early on, but there is still no sign of action on that front at all. Conservation areas are definitely something which ought to be dealt with. Q3 Chairman: When you said the windows were changed "with permission"? Mr Venning: I should correct myself - there was no need for permission. I beg your pardon. Q4 Chairman: The local authority could not have prevented it? Mr Venning: No. Mr Saunders: If it was listed they could have done. Q5 Chairman: The Shimizu decision, is that something which you detect that DCMS accepts needs to be addressed? Mr Saunders: Yes. Q6 Chairman: It is just a question of legislative time? Mr Saunders: Yes. Several ministers have said, "We want to change it", but the time to actually do that is not actually done. The White Paper is going to include a radical reform, and we know this is what the substance of it is going to be of the listing process - the process of protecting buildings. There is a fear that, rather than rearranging the chess pieces there ought to be an addition to the chess pieces onto the playing board - because some of the movement of effort towards reform has been away from the resurvey itself - to actually make sure that the lists are as up-to-date as possible both in the description of the building and also in the number of buildings included. For instance, Colchester 1971; Oxford 1972; Exeter 1974; Winchester 1974; these are really old lists. There have been additions over the years - Exeter has 65 additions clipped into it and it is a very, very cumbersome bible to use - and because there has not been a systematic street-by-street, building-by-building reassessment (the last one to be done was in Bath) the other towns are now to be put onto the quasi backburner because of the effort it is going to need on re-doing the whole system, rather than expanding the degree of controls. I think that is the concern - that the effort has been on rearranging the pieces rather than adding to the number of pieces. Ms Cherry: Could I pick up on that as well from the point of view of the more recent past. The listing, as Matthew has said, in the past was dealt with by area, or for the 20th Century it was dealt with by thematic study, which means when buildings were put forward they were seen within the context of comparable buildings, so one could then assess which were the better ones. That process was adopted for the post-war buildings of the Second World War with research being carried out by English Heritage; and that went on in a very satisfactory way until two or three years ago now when that element of the research was abandoned. As a result we have had a spate of spot-listing requests, which is fine from the point of view of the public being able to put in their inquiries and suggestions, but it does mean that such requests have to be assessed on their own without the relevant context. I think it would be very desirable if more attention could be given, as it used to be, to the kind of either thematic research or area research so that buildings could be understood within their context, within either their local topographical context or their historical context; so when one is assessing, say, a library or a town hall of a particular date you would know whether it was outstanding among other examples of that period. This is particularly important for the recent past because it is so much an unknown subject. It is not an area where people have done a lot of research, and one really needs to investigate the background before one makes snap judgments. I would hope that any future approach to listing would involve adequate resources for the background assessments to be done properly. Mr Wilkinson: This question of resources is one which arises out of the White Paper in a very large way. The demands to be placed upon English Heritage as a result of the changes to the listing system will be enormous, and yet its funding will not be changed and going at current rates will probably carry on decreasing, which is absolutely wrong. Any change which happens to the listing system must be accompanied by proper funding for the heritage organisations that deal with it, particularly English Heritage. Q7 Mr Sanders: I think you have just answered my second question about the effects of the proposals on heritage protection reform on resourcing. Could I go back to Mr Wilkinson's answer to the first question: you referred to "buildings", as did Philip Venning - when you talk about buildings, do you actually mean the site as a whole within a conservation area? Because "conservation area" does not just apply to buildings, it is also to the land, fencing, boundaries and even the landscaping. Could you clarifying that when you are talking about that you are talking about the whole area? Mr Wilkinson: We are talking about the wider area. The effects of destroying one building are not just on that immediate site but on the setting of surrounding buildings, on the way that the street moves and works, and also how you perceive the street. Yes, it is much wider than just a building - it can mean the land. You get many lovely, beautiful Victorian conservation areas with fine detached and semi-detached villas within them which have gardens around them which are in proportion to the house. The current theme there is to go in, plough down the house and bung up blocks of flats which alters the rhythm and scale of those areas and makes them less pleasant places in which to live. Mr Saunders: Through conservation areas you actually can protect trees; whereas you cannot with listing ironically. A tree in the grounds of a listed building can be felled, whereas the one in the grounds of an unlisted building or has a tree preservation order or is within the conservation area and is more than three inches in girth you need permission to fell. It is one of the curiosities. Ms Cherry: One of the important aspects of studying the 20th Century is large sites - for example, university campuses - where the landscaping and the buildings are really integrated in such a way if you destroy one you destroy the quality of the other. Take for example the University of East Anglia at Norwich which has very striking buildings and a very striking landscape. I think it is not just what one thinks of as conventional conservation areas of historic towns, but it is the way buildings and landscapes integrate on larger sites which need to be looked at very carefully. Dr Dungavell: I was going to say the local planning authorities find conservation area work very resource-intensive, and so when they are trying to cope with the pressure of deciding planning applications within the shorter deadlines conservation areas are going to get sidelined. One thing I would like to point is 75% of councils do not have a conservation area advisory committee where local people and experts can feed in their ideas about the conservation area. The ones that do have conservation area advisory committees are cutting back on the number of cases which are referred to them and the amount of time that they take to discuss. I think something needs to be done about that. Mr Saunders: Only one-third of local authorities actually have a conservation officer, as it were an expert, as well as the public who can say "We feel strongly about this particular building". The expert can articulate why it is important in the context of the architecture of the area, as well as the work of a particular architect where it may be a good example of various work or whatever. Q8 Chairman: Your concern about resource implications for English Heritage would presumably apply equally to local authorities who also are going to have additional responsibilities? Mr Venning: Even more so probably, because they are actually at the cutting edge, and that is very often where you get local conflicts appearing, precisely because the local authority do not have the specialised staff; the ordinary members of the public are mystified by these strange decisions which seem to be coming out of the local authority. Whereas if you have a knowledgeable and experienced conservation officer they are able, we hope, to talk to the owner, the developer or whoever, explain the situation, negotiate and take sensible decisions. So often things go wrong not because of ill-will on anyone's side but because of a breakdown in communications. That is why really properly trained and experienced staff are critical to making the whole process work. Mr Wilkinson: As we have said, very often conservation officers within local authorities are not held in particularly high regard by their colleagues in the planning department and also their colleagues in other areas, which is a serious cause of concern for us. Very often there is preference for economic development over conservation, rather than looking at how the two can work hand-in-hand and they do work hand-in-hand. There is a huge body of evidence to show how, if you keep your historic buildings, you can actually regenerate the town as well through them, rather than knocking down and starting again. Q9 Alan Keen: I represent the western half of the borough of Hounslow - the eastern half, unfortunately, is not in my half - Scion House and Osterley House, there is a whole list of them. I am very concerned that the local authority resources have been squeezed very, very seriously and this is another implication where the local authority is going to be loaded with more responsibility without the resources to carry out it. Although there is lots of support locally for looking after conservation areas and, in particular, Osterley House and Gunnersby; although there is a lot of local support for that it will be very difficult for Hounslow borough to look after its responsibilities without something being done about the funding, perhaps ring-fencing it. What do you feel about that? Ms Cherry: One of the ways in which the local authorities have been helped in the past is through English Heritage supporting conservation officers and particularly now offering training schemes which can meet this problem which was mentioned, of local officers who really have not got the right skills. The resource funding comes back to English Heritage funding as well. The third element in the funding resources is of course the Heritage Lottery Fund which has done the most tremendous things to take up really complicated sites which were quite beyond the scope of local authority action or individual owners. We do have some serious concerns that future money in the Heritage Lottery Fund may not be directed towards conservation as much as it has been in the past, because that would be a great disaster. Mr Saunders: I am a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and I have to be very careful. Wearing my hat as the Amenity Society, one of the great charms of working for HLF now is how HLF is able to solve problems that have been on our collective desks for years. If you think of Chiswick House which has just got £8 million no other body could possibly have given that degree of support to a problem which has been around for years and which only HLF could actually solve because it has the collective disciplines within it and a considerable tranche of money. Although I am a paid trustee and therefore have no personal interest, taking my HLF hat off, I do feel absolutely passionately that HLF should carry on because of the good that it has done in its first ten years. Dr Dungavell: I think that is universally shared by all of us. The transformation the HLF has effected on parts of the historic environment is really astonishing. It is tremendously popular with the public and it also has an emphasis on access and participation. It is not jewels just being saved for the precious few. It is things like the arboretum in Derby, which was probably the first public park in the country, which has been restored amazingly; it is things like the Pavilion Gardens in Buxton, and you pinch yourself walking around there thinking that this is the most amazing public space full of people enjoying it. The transformative power of HLF grants is really astonishing. Mr Venning: Could I also declare an interest because I serve on the HLF Expert Panel. However, taking that hat off, what I would say is (endorsing entirely what Matthew said) it is extraordinary how many old cases have been resolved which would not have been otherwise. There is a danger of thinking, "Oh well, we tick those boxes those problems have been solved and there isn't the need for HLF in future"; that is simply not the case. There is a huge number of issues, not merely in the built heritage - remember HLF covers the natural heritage and covers a very wide range of subjects. There are still major problems out there and we would be very worried indeed if those ones missed out because HLF suddenly found its money was being cut back. Q10 Alan Keen: I am obviously extremely happy that the Heritage Lottery Fund can look after the real jewels in the crown, of which we have got quite a few in Hounslow. I am really asking the question about the local authority's part in the linking together of other stuff. Brentford is being developed; the riverfront is being developed; we have got the Brooks(?) just behind there and if we are not careful that is going to be surrounded by not very attractive buildings but those which are in tremendous demand along the River Thames. How do we fund the local authority to make sure the conservation areas in between the real jewels can be looked after and linked together? Mr Saunders: It has to be a truism that if you give any authority extra powers, whether it is EH for listing and local authorities to be the first port of call for applications for protecting historic buildings (which is what is being proposed under the White Paper), you have to pay for it. I cannot see how it is anything other than blindingly obvious and, therefore, Government has to resource the decision-maker appropriately so the decisions are good quality decisions. Q11 Alan Keen: And ring-fence it? Mr Saunders: Or however it is done, there has to be an identifiable audit trail which says, "These are your responsibilities and this is the money to make sure you do it properly and well", either from the local ratepayer or from central government; but probably from central government because it is a central government direction to do this. The White Paper will bring to local authorities considerable extra powers, one of which is scheduled monument consent, which is done entirely now by central government. The idea is that you have a single port of entry; every local authority will be the receiver of the applications to alter whatever it is, a barrow through to a 20th Century swimming pool that is very important by Basil Spence for instance; and the scheduled monument aspect is entirely new. Hounslow does not have many scheduled sites although it does have some; but parts of Devon would have hundreds of them in the rural parts in particular, so the extra tasks on local authorities' shoulders will be considerable. After the resurvey of the scheduled monument lists they were talking about 60,000 entries; I think the total has now gone down a bit, but it is quite a sizeable addition where local authorities previously had no say on the scheduled monument areas at all. I do not see, on grounds of fairness, how you can give extra tasks without resources. Q12 Mr Evans: If we were talking about rainforests now we would know roughly how much is being lost each year as it currently stands. How worried should we be, as the law currently stands, about how much is being lost of our heritage each year? You have given one sort of example, but is there a huge amount of buildings and landscape being lost each year because there just simply is not the protection? Can you give us some sort of ideas as to what we are losing each year? Mr Wilkinson: I think you can get a clear idea of what is being lost in terms of listed building, but it is unlisted; and also it is incremental changes as well. It is the alterations to buildings, such as ripping out the windows, changing the doors, putting different roofs on, whatever, which alters the character and takes away the interest of the buildings which is very hard to map. Let us say we were considering doing a report looking at legal alterations to listed buildings and buildings in conservation areas; we decide it is too hard to try and trace these changes over the years and see what had been legally done and illegally done, perhaps over one small authority; the challenge would be enormous. From SAVE's own point of view, we can see a very clear threat ahead in the form of the housing market renewal initiative which at current rates would see 168,000 nearly all unlisted and nearly all not in conservation areas but pre-1919 terraced houses destroyed over the next ten or 15 years. I know one or two members of the Committee have constituencies in Pathfinder areas. This is perhaps one tangible area where we will and can see what is being lost; but otherwise it is an incremental problem which is just carrying on. This again comes back to the question of conservation officers having proper control over their areas. Dr Dungavell: There is also a great repairs backlog as well. The Council for the Care of Churches I think estimates that £1.2 billion is needed to repair Anglican places of worship. HLF has a figure of £5.6 billion on repairs needed to historic buildings. While they are not being done there is a slow decline of the heritage value of those assets. Mr Saunders: The actual applications to demolish listed buildings are running at about two a week. The total of listed buildings which people want to destroy was 127 last year in England and Wales. There is a vastly increased number, and EH estimates about 20,000, which are in varying degrees of risk, either because the owner hates it or because the owner does not live in it, or multiple reasons for planning blight, and that is the great threat; because an empty building sadly very often becomes an ex-building because children get into them with a box of matches and it is no more. There are examples of really outstanding buildings, Grade 1s as well as the ordinary Grade 2s, which are empty and under threat and a total waste in that position as well. That is, I think, the insidious threat and one which is much more difficult to arrest. It is much easier to say to someone who owns a building, "No, you can't demolish". It is much more cumbersome to go beyond that and use repair powers if necessary; but local authorities do not like using those - they have served 300 or whatever but do not like serving a large number of them because of the ramifications of that. That is a much more intractable problem to solve and it is a huge problem. Mr Venning: Matthew talks about the problems of buildings which are empty - one of the keys to it, we feel, is to try to encourage better maintenance of buildings, because it is because a lot of the gutters get blocked that water falls in and the roof rots and very quickly starts falling in and so on. How one actually encourages maintenance is very difficult. My own organisation has run something called "National Maintenance Week" since 2002, which is simply designed to encourage owners of any kind of building, new, old, factories, houses or whatever, once a year to do those simple tasks, like cleaning out the gutters and so on. It is difficult and I know HLF has been struggling with trying to think of ways to encourage maintenance, and a number of others have. There is scope here for DCMS to take a lead, because it relates to many other government departments which have an interest in the care of buildings and so on. I would hope DCMS might take a lead perhaps convening some kind of interdepartmental working party - in fact I have written to the Minister suggesting this - to see if we can do more to encourage maintenance because it meets sustainability and all these other arguments and, at the same time, is a very practical way of ensuring that buildings do not get lost needlessly. Mr Wilkinson: The important point is that it saves money in the future. If you clean your gutters out right now to prevent water getting in you are saving grant aid in the future. There is a need for a paradigm shift in the whole system to be looking at maintenance first and grant aid only where absolutely necessary. Perhaps there should be some form of funding for maintenance schemes. The main obstacle at the moment obviously is VAT, that perennial question that comes back and haunts us the entire time, and I am sure you are all with us on this one as well - there is a need to sort that out very urgently. Chairman: It has featured in quite a lot of the evidence! Q13 Janet Anderson: Could I ask Adam Wilkinson - you referred to the housing market renewal Pathfinder Project, and there is one in my constituency. Do you not accept that in fact some of these houses had reached the end of their natural lifespan and there was no alternative but for them to come down? If I could just add to that - if you take the three areas of Darwen in my constituency, one is in a conservation area and there is no question of the houses there being demolished but they are going to be refurbished. I can say that the vast majority of the people who lived in the houses that are going to be demolished are now very happy. I was talking to someone the other day who had been able, through the compensation he had received and the shared equity he had received, to buy a much better house and he said to me, "When I finish work today, Janet, I'm going to go and sit in my garden. That's the first time I've ever been able to do that". Could I just briefly say to you, do you accept that some of this was essential? For example, in Burnley next door terraced houses were changing hands for £25 in local pubs. Mr Wilkinson: I am aware that Burnley Wood must be the worst area and the worst case we have come across; but even there houses prices have changed enormously. Of course you could look at some buildings and say there is no hope but other cases, where you compare one or two buildings on a street, are the ones we picked up. The housing market renewal initiative is a sweeping initiative and what seems to be going wrong is failing to look at the small scale and how you can knit areas back together with perhaps some select demolition and not taking out 200 or 300 houses, or in east Manchester 700 houses, in one go but looking at how you can carefully knit areas back together, how you can regenerate them through perhaps taking out one or two houses and creating some green space and getting alternative uses into the areas as well and creating employment, rather than just looking at demolition as the cure-all. If you demolish you move the problems onto somewhere else. A lot of problems in these housing areas are social problems and not housing problems, as you well know and are aware of. You do not cure a social problem with a bulldozer; you cure it by other means. There will be times, yes, when perhaps a handful of houses might possibly be taken out but I do not see that mass demolition is a cure for these. They can be refurbished to modern standards. We have seen this and it can be done economically as well. There is this key question of doing it economically. If you can do it economically, individuals and small businesses will do it rather than the government having to spend the taxpayers' billions on demolishing and rebuilding. Q14 Mr Hall: Would you have said the same thing in the 19th Century? Mr Wilkinson: Then we would be dealing with buildings in Philip's era. The housing conditions are entirely different nowadays. Q15 Mr Hall: Would you want to live in an end of terrace two-up and two-down with no back garden and your front door straight onto the street? Mr Wilkinson: I pretty well do actually! Q16 Mr Hall: You are very much on your own there! Mr Wilkinson: In central London possibly not. That is not the reality though. The houses being demolished now are not flat back-to-backs; most of those were taken out in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier in the 1930s. It is not four families living in a two bed-roomed house. It is usually one family in a one or two bed-roomed house. You can do other things: you can knock two together to create alternatives. You can do other things with these buildings. Look at what Urban Splash are doing at Chimney Pot Park in Manchester where they are completely adapting the houses. Q17 Helen Southworth: We are getting into a discussion about demolition or non-demolition rather than heritage or non-heritage. Is there an issue here about wanting to maintain things because of the contribution to the local community and their viability and the length of life they have got in usable terms, or are you saying that nothing should ever be knocked down? Mr Wilkinson: No, not saying that. This is where communities are fighting for their buildings. The communities are very strongly linked to their buildings; they love their areas; and they are historic areas as well. Q18 Helen Southworth: There is a judgment to be made; it is not an automatic thing? Mr Wilkinson: There can be, yes. There can be a judgment to be made for us as a small organisation of where we fight. There is the link between people and buildings. We are often told by government (all of us) that we should be more socially inclusive, and yet when we are fighting for buildings alongside little communities we are as socially inclusive as you could possibly be. Q19 Chairman: May I come back to a theme which you referred to earlier which I think has some resonance in the discussion we have been having, and that is how effective DCMS is in arguing the case for heritage against particularly other government departments? Here we have the case of the ODPM pursuing a policy which you clearly have considerable objection to; and there have been other examples which have come in, in the evidence, where it has been put that DCMS simply does not have the clout needed in Whitehall. Is that something you believe is true, and what can be done about it? Mr Saunders: I think there is certainly a feeling that DCMS should be taking more of a high profile lead on heritage matters, particularly as heritage (that dreadful word) actually embraces so much of our lives in all sorts of ways. Just walking down the streets to shops very often you pass areas which have been there for years with a sense of an area of importance surrounding us. I think it is very depressing to look at the mission statement of DCMS to find heritage not mentioned at all. It is almost as if it is an embarrassment: it may be Salisbury Cathedral but it is an embarrassment and, therefore, we do not mention it. I think there is a culture within DCMS which does not seem to be as proud of the greatness that this country has produced in terms of architecture as well as art and countryside, everything that heritage is about; and it is on what goes on today, whatever it is, it is other responsibilities - media, sport whatever. There is a feeling which we seem to get that it is not praised and championed as much as it ought to be, particularly as parts of it are under threat; which is not to say that the other courses of the Ministry are not just as important; but not to mention heritage - if you go onto the website it is hardly visible, and yet this country has more listed buildings than any other country in the world except Italy. We have a heritage which is absolutely mesmerising. We have 57 cathedrals and towns like Bath and Chichester. It is just extraordinary. Why is the Government not celebrating that, other than to tourism (which is easily done) but saying, "This matters to the identity and sense of pride and pleasure of this country"? We do not get that sense that that clarion call is coming from the DCMS. Q20 Chairman: Yet the Secretary of State has written on her pamphlet about how much she values the heritage. They have recently had a seminar called Preservation of Heritage and we have a heritage White Paper coming out shortly, so the Government can point to quite a lot of both rhetoric but also, we hope, action in due course? Mr Saunders: It is not in money. The DCMS budget - if the reflection is of value, it is not coming through in the money. English Heritage is being starved virtually. The budget for grant that English Heritage has for the whole country to give to outside bodies is £30 million which is the cost of running half of a London hospital or buying half a jet. £30 million is pathetic as a sign of how Government values the heritage in the broad sense. Q21 Janet Anderson: You see this problem of DCMS not giving enough priority to heritage, how do you see this being overcome? Would you transfer it to a different government department, or is it a case of better liaison between government departments? Dr Dungavell: I was going to say I think there is an illness in the heart of DCMS to start with. Until we get heritage valued by the department that owns it there is going to be a problem wherever you move heritage as a responsibility. To highlight the problem again, as Matthew was saying of heritage being the poor relation within the Department - if you look at the figure of grant for English Heritage over the period 2000-2006, the English Heritage grant increased by 3%, which in fact equates to a reduction of almost 10% in real terms. In the same period you see Sport England, funded by the same Department, having an increase of 98.6%, and sport as a whole by 143%. That is money the DCMS is deciding how to split up itself, and it has really got to prioritise heritage internally before we talk about where it might sit elsewhere in government. Mr Wilkinson: As long as wherever it goes there is a Minister representing it, and one thing I feel grateful for is we do have ministers within the department at the moment who represent heritage. David Lammy, being a champion for heritage, has yet to have a chance to prove it, but we obviously hope that he will. If heritage were to be moved, so long as there is a minister within that department fighting a corner and willing to make sure that heritage gets across the agendas then that is going to be a positive thing. Q22 Mr Hall: In my constituency I have got a listed building, it is an old convalescent home, Crossley Hospital, a magnificent example of a listed building of its kind in total dilapidation because the Crown Agents and the Department of Health failed to repair it, which goes back to the earlier points all of you were making about the need to invest in affairs rather than having restoration as a main option. What do you think the Government needs to do with even its own properties, which are historical buildings of great value but have been left to decline because of a lack of use or no use at all; where we end up in the position we are now where a building will be redeveloped, it is in the green belt, and because it is a former hospital site it is not covered by the constraints of policy planning guidelines with the green belt; and what will happen is that some of the buildings on site will be demolished and we will have new four and five bed-roomed detached houses as well as the restoration of the site for residential development. A classic example of the point you were making. What should the Government do to avoid those problems arising in the future? Mr Wilkinson: It depends on the department really. The NHS is the worst offender when it comes to historic buildings; whereas something like the MoD has been very good in recent years by looking ahead and seeing what is going to be made redundant and then starting to think about what can be done with that. The NHS has not been doing this. What it will do is see a large hospital site, it will then think about making it redundant, and once it is redundant it will call in the consultants who will get paid a very fat fee to draw some lines on a map, get an outline planning permission while the building rots, the kids get in, set fire to it and trash it. We have seen this happen at Severalls near Colchester, and I will provide you with information about this. Q23 Chairman: I live about a mile away from Severalls and I know it very well! Mr Wilkinson: The redevelopment costs shoot up and demolition, therefore, becomes an option to bung more housing on the site. Yet there are many examples of how buildings like these can be converted and reused very effectively creating gorgeous locations in places for housing. Mr Saunders: At last Crown exemption has gone. You could not actually take on the Government. As a local authority you could not serve a repairs notice or refuse them permission to demolish something. There was a procedure parallel to that. Now the planning exemption has gone maybe the culture of local government will change, taking on the big boys in central government and saying, "It's a disgrace that this building is just wasted and empty. We, as local people, are offended by it. Quite apart from the heritage of it, it is just a waste. We want you to do something about it". The culture of local authorities may change rather more belligerently towards transparent examples of useless neglect. Q24 Mr Hall: Would it help if there was a statutory requirement on the owners of listed buildings to keep their buildings in a good state of repair, and if that applied to government buildings like the Department of Health that would solve part of the problem? Mr Wilkinson: I agree with that. That would make sense. Look at housing corporations; housing associations have a statutory duty of care to keep their buildings in good condition and they do and it works and it saves them money as well. In the long-run it will save money and in the short-term it will cost a bit but it is something SAVE would support very strongly indeed. I would obviously have my hat on as a board member of Maintain Our Heritage and have certain interests there but it certainly makes sense. Q25 Mr Hall: Finally, what else can the Government do in terms of assisting people to maintain their buildings if it is not going to be a statutory requirement? You have already been very straightforward about the fact of removing VAT from maintenance and repairs. I assume that is the collective view of all of you? Mr Saunders: Yes. Mr Venning: Could I make one very simple suggestion and that is: we know that a sellers' pack is going to come in shortly where, when you sell a house, it will be a requirement on the person selling to produce a pack. At the moment there is a very good opportunity to provide much more information to the person buying about the building that they are taking on and some of the responsibilities; not a detailed architectural appraisal but just a bit more information than I believe is planned at the moment. This would be a very simple thing. Central government could fund it. We are not talking about large sums of money but again it would provide an enormous amount of help to the owner who often takes on an old building knowing very little and not knowing where to turn. This would again avoid a lot of the expensive mistakes and give them the helping hand that they need. Mr Wilkinson: The Government could also encourage maintenance services - literally a man with a van going around once a year and cleaning out gutters. There are a few initiatives happening at the moment. We set up in Bath Maintain Our Heritage to see how it would work. It does work. It can be expensive; it can be cheap; it depends how you do it. Currently there is one in St Edmonds, the diocese, which is getting underway, going round the churches and helping out there, and overcoming the health and safety obstacles. There is currently one starting up in the Diocese of London as well and, I hope, in the Diocese of Gloucester working with the churches. They are perhaps the most vulnerable and the most governed by, at times, frustrating legislation to do with health and safety, but ones where there is a real need to keep our common heritage on its feet. Q26 Chairman: Can I just come back to this potential tension between conservation and development. You have mentioned the NHS and I do know several sites very well. There are plenty of examples where the NHS wishes to invest in green field new build hospitals, and the way in which they look to finance that is by giving over sites for development. Several are exampled where there is potential for enormous development. The fact that there is an historic building which is listed is an obstacle to that development. You would argue that it should not be but that may well be the perception in too many cases, that in some ways they almost stand by and hope it deteriorates over a long enough so they can get rid of it and build lots of new houses. You have argued in your evidence that development and conservation should not be opponents of each other, they should go hand-in-hand. Perhaps you would like to say a little more about this. Mr Wilkinson: With these larger sites it is the power of the mass house building where they have a standard product which they want to dump on the land they have in their hands. They do not employ architects. They do not want to look at these buildings; they are simply not on their horizon; and yet it is the smaller ones, like P J Livsey or Urban Splash, who can take on these buildings and can make plenty of money from developing them into housing. In the current market housing, however you develop it, it seems, is going to make you money. If you can do it in an historic building you are in fact investing in the future of that site. Those large developments of the 1960s and 1970s people look at now and think the estates are foul but those which are going to be done in these historic buildings will maintain the private occupancy for many years to come. It is about two things - it is not just about blatant profit but it is also about looking to the longer term and creating real places for people. Ms Cherry: It is also an attitude, is it not, where one needs to educate the developer to look constructively at the site, at the potential of the historic building, rather than just assume it is a nuisance. I think that is a learning process. There are good examples, as Adam said, where it has been done and one needs more publicity for such successes. Mr Venning: One of the advantages of representing an organisation which is nearly 130 years old is that we see how rapidly the world changes, and how so often decisions are taken about a building or site dependent entirely on the precise economic circumstance of that moment. Things change all the time; economic cycles change all the time; planning laws change; attitudes change; strange things like HLF come completely out of nowhere. The world is constantly changing. If we look back over our 130 years we can see so often occasions when it is said the only chance to save this building or site is to do X and it is something really horrible; and luckily that has not happened and the world has moved on and something much better has occurred. I think, as always, trying to assess what is worth or is not worth doing with a building or a site one needs to say, "Is there a realistic chance that something might change five years from now or in ten years' time?" As we know, in the early 1990s there was a great slump in the property market and buildings had very little chance of being saved then; we then had a housing boom. Things are always changing and so many of these decisions are based on absolutely most short-term and immediate issues which may damn a building which has been around. We have plenty of Saxon buildings still in this country - not many of them are at risk - but buildings may have lasted hundreds and hundreds of years but they are condemned simply because at that precise moment in time the money is not right or the developer has a particular priority or the planning laws are as they are. Going back to my distinguished predecessor William Morris who founded the SPAB, he said, "We are only trustees for those that come after us". I think this is something we bear in mind all the time. We are thinking not just of the immediate but we are thinking of our children and our grandchildren and what they will enjoy and what we are handing on down to them. Q27 Mr Evans: It is true, is it not? I would just add one thing on that, which is that the economics of the 1960s in Swansea meant that the council did away with the oldest passenger railway in the world, and it is a great shame to everybody that that was allowed to happen and it would not be allowed to happen now. Do you think it has got better - that people are more heritage-aware than they were in the 1960s? Mr Venning: I think so. There are all sorts of good reasons for that. Even so, there are still going to be lots of things that are going to be at risk possibly for different reasons. The tragedy is you can look back at all sorts of things which could have been saved but were thought to be uneconomic but today would be valued, loved and have economic value if only they had been kept going. Dr Dungavell: Could I just mention airport expansion in terms of short-term economic need and long-term damage to the historic environment. Q28 Mr Evans: You will be fighting to save Terminal 5 in years to come! Mr Saunders: Too young! Mr Venning: Terminal 6 we do not want. Q29 Helen Southworth: What can be done to foster the kind of entrepreneurial ideas and partnerships? You talked about the housing opportunities in buildings which are no longer fit for their original purpose but that is quite dependent on sets of local circumstances fitting. What other things can be done that can actually be sustainable? Can we actually foster a kind of creative attitude that is sustainable? Dr Dungavell: I think that is interesting. You start from probably not the heritage perspective but the environmental perspective and you start to see buildings as embodied energy, for example. You then question the wisdom of demolition to start with and you say, "What are we trying to achieve?" Q30 Helen Southworth: How do we get the people to do that? Mr Wilkinson: There are so many good examples. Q31 Helen Southworth: How do we build up this group of people who can do that? Ms Cherry: One important thing is to have buildings that are accessible. Very often if you have a site which is walled off, nobody can see what there is and it then falls into dereliction. There is an openness and an opportunity for people understanding what exists, that is one of the key things, and to educate people about their surroundings in ways so they understand what is on their doorstep. So often people only wake up when the bulldozers come in and realise they are losing things. I think very often it is a question of local education and making things known to people, opening things up, and I suppose one comes back to local authorities providing opportunities. Dr Dungavell: I think publicity is a really valuable thing as well. There is a fantastic leisure centre in Nottingham which has - I think it has got a swimming pool - work out centres in the old train station, so the platforms have become exercise facilities. There is a former hospital chapel somewhere in East London - I have only seen photographs of it in an English Heritage publication - where there is a swimming pool in the nave. Mr Saunders: Woodford. Dr Dungavell: That is tremendously imaginative. I am not sure what my committee at The Victorian Society would think about that but I think that is quite an exciting re-use of an historic building. Mr Wilkinson: It is this question of perception and changing perception at all levels. It does not matter whether a building is listed or just locally valued, if it is re-used it can revitalise an entire area. If you look at something like the Hothouse scheme in Stoke-on-Trent, an unlisted and attractive primary school was going derelict, was going to be knocked down, but the local authority sponsored one person to take it on and use it as an incubator for small business. It ended up with a life of its own and became a central part of the community through getting people on their feet as small businesses, then sending them off into the wider world and they take on other buildings and give those a life and use as well. It is a question of economic use, of building if the imagination is there and the will is there, but so often it is the perception that these buildings are tired, at the end of their lives, when, in fact, they are far from it, they are just beginning their lives. Mr Venning: It is essential that we have more professionals - architects, surveyors, engineers and others - who understand old buildings and can work creatively with them. That is not about preserving them in aspic but finding new uses for them which at the same time do not destroy the very things that make them interesting. That is the problem. There are plenty of architects who work on old buildings but who do not have that sensitivity or knowledge. Q32 Helen Southworth: The DCMS has set targets for visits by new users from minority and socially deprived groups. How effective do you think the heritage sector is in meeting those targets in terms of tying these things together? Dr Dungavell: It is a slightly barmy way of approaching things anyway because one of the problems at the DCMS is it seems fixated by the idea of heritage as a visitor attraction. You can go and consume heritage in a museum and anywhere there is a turnstile they like it, but if you are walking through an historic neighbourhood, how can you be counted? How can we count those in Westminster? Q33 Helen Southworth: What happens if you are living in an area which is not an historic neighbourhood, how do you find out about them? Dr Dungavell: It is amazing how many areas do have historic elements. I live in an area of 1960s comprehensive redevelopment in Kentish Town and the local swimming pool there is 1901, a tremendous building, but the council is thinking about closing that down. For many people that is their only experience of the power of the historic environment and that is not appreciated. Q34 Helen Southworth: Does nobody have ---- Mr Wilkinson: You can lead a horse to water. People are interested in their areas, it is very hard to quantify that, and yet local history societies flourish. No matter where you go in this country there is a bit of heritage somewhere, whether you are tripping over an old gravestone somewhere or there will be a local church or just people's houses. Back to these areas in the North that we have been dealing with in the Pathfinder areas, it is their heritage they are dealing with. Most town centres, even those that have undergone some kind of comprehensive redevelopment in the 1960s, still have heritage left in them. Look at Coventry, it has got some fine mediaeval bits left in it. You can show people that they are there, you can change how people use towns, to walk through towns to try and help them perceive this, but you cannot count it. You cannot count how people react to their surroundings unless you are going to be on the street corners counting it, and that is not our job as societies fighting for historic buildings. Ms Cherry: I have to come in here and say that heritage is not just things in the distant past, heritage is the 20th Century as well. The 1960s is interesting in its own right. Certainly local history societies flourish and tend to attract an older generation, but what about the schools, what about education? Here you have the opportunity to encourage children to be interested in their surroundings at primary level, at secondary level, they can think about design problems, they can debate what sort of buildings they like and so on. That is where one should be focusing to try and get an appreciation, an understanding and an enjoyment of the world around one which is not just heritage spots here and there but it is everything, it is your local street, which may be 1960s, it may be 19th Century, it is more likely to be a mixture of them. If you can encourage children to understand that, appreciate it, enjoy it and debate it, then they can become intelligent adults who will take an interest in what is going on around them. It is not good enough just to send schools out on school visits to heritage spots. That is pernicious in a sense. They may have a good time but they have got this idea that it is something out there and it is different from their daily life. What you have got to do is encourage their interest in local history, local design, local environment and develop from there. Q35 Helen Southworth: Should the sector be doing more to see those things happen? Ms Cherry: Yes, absolutely. The difficulty is here we are going beyond DCMS perhaps, but that is what I would like to see happening. Q36 Janet Anderson: Do you think it would be helpful if HLF grants were more widely available to private owners? Ms Cherry: It depends how they are framed. Mr Wilkinson: It is very hard for the voluntary sector to deal with the grants sometimes because of the mass of paperwork that goes with them. If you are a professional body dealing with it, it is much easier. It is not necessarily a bad thing that you have certain hurdles to jump but how do you then account for how a private owner is going to be dealing with that money. It is very hard indeed. Dr Dungavell: I think also the HLF resources are shrinking for various reasons, partly to do with the Olympics and partly to do with how they are able to spend their money. In the public sector for the HLF there is not enough money for the need and if you spread it more thinly then some of the projects that we think should be supported ---- Q37 Janet Anderson: Do you not think it would persuade private owners to be more responsible about protecting our heritage? Mr Saunders: I must be careful because this is an issue HLF is looking at very closely. It has always been an assumption that Lottery money is for the public good and if you start keeping the roof on a private house where the public does not have access you have difficulties of potentially private gain, but what HLF would say is English Heritage is the body ---- Q38 Janet Anderson: You have still got the environment even if you have not got access to it. This was the point that Bridget was making. Mr Saunders: It is. English Heritage is there not to provide exclusively for private owners but it has never had a prejudice against private owners, in fact almost the opposite. If you can prove poverty and your building is very important to the street, even though interior access might not be possible, English Heritage will help you, but the Lottery is a much more difficult creature to use in areas where there might be an element of private gain. This is way beyond what conservation is about, this is almost what the Lottery is about. Ms Cherry: The way in which English Heritage has been able to help through things like town schemes which have given seed money, balanced by local authority funding plus private owners, to improve the condition of small buildings in a high street can be extremely effective. To apply an HLF approach to that would be immensely complicated. Even the town schemes are difficult because they have to get so many agreements with so many different sorts of people. The way HLF grants work - I know through being on the receiving end - is a very complicated business and I think it would collapse for local owners, I do not think they could cope. Chairman: I think we are going to have to stop there. Can I thank all five of you for giving evidence. You have given us a lot to think about and we will be returning to a lot of these issues in the course of the next few weeks. Thank you. Memoranda submitted by The Churches Conservation Trust, Advisory Board for Redundant Churches and Historic Chapels Trust
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Rt Hon Frank Field, a Member of the House, Chairman, Mr Crispin Truman, Chief Executive, The Churches Conservation Trust; Mr David Baker, Chairman, Advisory Board for Redundant Churches; and Dr Jennifer Freeman, Director, Historic Chapels Trust, gave evidence. Q39 Chairman: For the second part of our session this morning we are now turning our attention to what might be termed the ecclesiastical estate. I would like to welcome particularly our colleague, Frank Field, who is Chairman of the Churches Conservation Trust, and the Chief Executive, Crispin Truman; David Baker, the Chairman of the Advisory Board for Redundant Churches; and Dr Jennifer Freeman, Director of the Historic Chapels Trust, which I believe is also chaired by one of our colleagues, Alan Beith, who said to me that he was sorry he could not be here but obviously would be following our discussions with some interest. The churches comprise a significant proportion of our heritage and in particular the Grade I listed buildings and you are struggling to save as many as you can that pass into redundancy. Can you tell us something about the scale of the problem? How are you managing to cope with those that you already have? How do you see the future in terms of the number of churches that are likely to need help in the future and will be applying to you for assistance? Mr Truman: I think the question of redundancies, which is often the question that is asked, how many redundancies are we going to see in the future, is possibly a bit of a red herring. There has been a fairly stable number of churches becoming formally redundant, certainly parish churches in the last few years, 30 a year. Trevor Cooper, who did submit evidence to you, has predicted in a study by the Ecclesiological Society that it might reach 60 a year. It is a difficult game to predict because when the church is faced with crisis, perhaps more than any other heritage building, the local community really comes together to save it. What we do know is there is a lot of churches at risk and they are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Something else that Cooper pointed out in his book is the decline of participation in churches reflects the wider decline in public life. What you often see is an historic church now is the last public building in a community where it has lost its post office, its pub, its railway station many years ago. That reflects more a downward drift in commitment to public buildings. He identified 500 churches that have less than ten adults looking after them. Local people are completely in charge of these buildings, they fund them, maintain them and repair them. Sixteen hundred have only between 11 and 20 people regularly committed to the building. That is a symbol of the crisis we are facing. There is a lot of buildings out there really hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Mr Baker: There is one interesting angle on that. The Advisory Board for Redundant Churches deals only with Anglican churches and we are a reactive body; the Church Commissioners ask our advice as cases come through to them. As Crispin says, there is a steady flow. It is quite difficult to predict reliably whether things are going to get very much better or very much worse. One tendency we have noticed is for the Church of England to start doing area reviews of their church facilities, so instead of dealing with churches incrementally ad hoc, one here and one there coming up for redundancy in places like Brighton and Hove, for example, where a deanery-wide study was undertaken, that creates a lot more business, as it were, and possibly creates more scope for redundancy. A lot depends on how it is taken through and what balance is taken locally between heritage considerations, pastoral considerations and financial considerations. Dr Freeman: Could I just say something about the picture with the non-Anglican churches. It is reckoned that there are as many non-Anglican places of worship in England as there are Anglican. It is also thought that a large number of them are under-listed or under-graded and that is very much the experience of my organisation. There will be a lot of work for the new listing surveys in that area. Again, the picture is of a steady number of redundancies across the board, although statistics are hard to come by. Certainly the Methodists reckon that about ten listed buildings a year are becoming redundant. The Roman Catholics plan to make a lot of redundancies in the North-West of large build churches which are not in centres of population, residential population, any more. On the other hand, the Baptists do not get many redundant churches and the three we own are the three highly graded buildings which they have made redundant. Q40 Chairman: To what extent can you anticipate that because presumably you are in conversation with the Church of England about which churches are likely to be unable to continue in the long-term? Do you try and work with them to identify those and plan ahead so you do not suddenly have large numbers that come to you simultaneously out of the blue? Mr Truman: The Churches Conservation Trust takes its buildings from the Church of England so, yes, indeed we work very closely with the Church Commissioners because in the end they decide what comes to us. They have predictions. They do a three yearly survey of dioceses asking them to predict what might become redundant. I have to say they always give us a very strong health warning with these predictions. The predictions for the next three year cycle are of a fairly steady trend. I think perhaps one alarm bell that they are ringing, which fits with what David was saying about Brighton, is there are increasingly large numbers of Victorian, often urban churches that are the real problem churches that seem to be coming to the end of their potential for surviving on their own that might start coming to us and that would be a real problem certainly for us and the other organisations because they require much larger amounts of money to turn them round. Dr Freeman: The Historic Chapels Trust by its very nature acquires a lot of problem, difficult, large churches and buildings in difficult inner-city situations or remote urban situations because if a building can find an alternative future there is absolutely no requirement for our Trust to acquire it, and so we take on the difficult buildings and we start our regeneration programme there and then, and we also roll-up the functions of the Advisory Board and the Churches Conservation into one body, but we are an independent charity. We are not owned by the other non Anglican denominations. We act independently and we have discretion. Mr Baker: One of the difficult things about predicting redundancy (and this is slightly beyond the remit of my board, but we observe it) is that it depends so much on local circumstances, local people. You can have a very good priest who is very much in tune with his congregation and that will keep a building going longer than might happen if you had a priest and his congregation who were on different ends, as it were, of the theological spectrum. You could have strong leaders, you could have difficulties in congregations, and, moreover, those circumstances change. Certainly in my years on a diocesan advisory committee I have seen parishes which looked doomed - people moved away, others came in, a change of priest and then things moved up. There is a lot of change bumping along the bottom there. Mr Field: Chairman, I think there are two issues. If you look at the Conservation Trust, we have this huge collection of outstanding buildings and a miniscule budget, which is actually being cut in real terms, and, as Crispin said, we do not know what the future trend of redundancies will be. What we have been trying to do is not only change our role as a trust, which originally was a William Morris type conception where you received a building and you set it in aspic - you did not change anything, you preserved it as it was. We felt that there is no future for us as a trust which only did that, although some wonderful buildings are so isolated that is the only thing you could suggest to do with it. We are trying to think of alternative ways that buildings might be used, and we are not being very modern about this. It is really a medieval conception that a community would actually use the knave of a building, so we are trying to get back to what these buildings were in their local communities, but we are also trying to extend our activities and, therefore, our legal basis so that we do not wait for buildings to come to us. Are there services that we can jointly provide with what is called the non-redundant part of the ecclesiastical scene so that buildings do not end up redundant? There is the idea of an ambulance service where buildings which are vulnerable can get basic repairs done, because you cannot expect a congregation with an average age of 70 to get up ladders and make sure that gutters are cleared. Is it possible for some kind of service to be provided to local communities where they might seek quite small grants which prevent that congregation imploding in on itself? There is an outwork to be done as well as having to face the real issue, which came up in your questioning in the earlier session, and that is that here is this country with this incredible collection of buildings, if you want to call them "heritage", and yet all of us somehow think this can be maintained with a miniscule budget, and it cannot be. Q41 Chairman: Is it your ambition to essentially get churches off your books, as it were? You have got a constant trickle of new buildings coming to you. Are you trying to get them into a position where they can be self-sustaining and you no longer have to take responsibility so that you can direct your attention to new ones? Mr Field: We are trying to do two things. We have classified our buildings - Crispin can tell you more of that - and there are clearly some that, on reflection, ought not to have come to us and therefore we are rather keen about whether we can actually find other uses for them which will be different from the sort of uses that we try to find for our churches, and there are others, probably at the top end of the market, which maybe parishes will want to claim back again. There ought to be a movement here rather than just a growing stock of buildings, but there are difficulties involved in that. Mr Truman: I think that is right. Actually that widens out back to your question about looking at what might come to us as we explore, with other organisations and, indeed, the Church Commissioners, the potential churches at risk and look at the problem churches. The problem is not only about lack of money to do repairs; it is about lack of community capacity. Often the will is there to save the church building but there is a lack of skills to project-manage, to fund raise, to look at imaginative alternative uses. That is the situation now, and I think that has been the situation historically, and so churches, as Frank says, have come to us that perhaps, if we had been able as a sector to inject more support, help with repairs, advice, perhaps hands-on help with fund-raising and practical interventions at the point in time where things were going wrong, they could have been kept out of the Trust anyway - they need never have come to us. I think we are all agreed there is a real need for capacity building by the sector and you need resources to do that. As Frank says, we have looked at our estate. It is a mixed bag of buildings. We think there is a lot of potential. What is special about churches is that they are essentially beautiful public buildings, iconic buildings, at the heart of communities that people love. In many cases we have got local people who are very keen to do more with a building but are at their wits end because it is cold, there is no toilet and the seats are hard. There is a need for some money, there is a need for capacity building, there is a need for fund-raising and there is a need for imaginative partnerships, perhaps with regeneration agencies, beyond the normal usual suspects of a church to think about what uses could go in there and how we can help perhaps a sub-region address issues of community development or regeneration. Having said that, what Frank has also alluded to is that there is a core of church buildings, some of which are in our care and some of which may well end up with us, where you will not be able to do that ever. They are Grade I listed, they are stunning, they are national monuments, but they are in the middle of a field. You might improve tourism, you might get more people to visit them but, in the end, they need central support, they need help from a body like us or another body, and you will not ever be able to sustain them on their own. It is about horses for courses, but there is certainly huge potential to do more. Mr Field: We are trying to develop local management agreements where local groups increasingly take over the running of the church, which we then hope might also be a model for future vestings that one would think locally about whether a community would take over its church in a different legal form rather than it automatically come to us. Dr Freeman: The Historic Chapels Trust has been very active ever since it was inaugurated in introducing community activities into its buildings even before the lottery was formed. We always felt that it was somehow a depleting experience to offer somebody a guide book, tell them to walk round and then come out again after 20 minutes and that we must offer them something more. Right from the outset we have always put in new heating, lighting, kitchens, modern loos and facilities so that these buildings can be used by the local community, and, in order to do that, we have set up local committees following public meetings, which normally consist of people who have never have had anything to do with the church or the denomination or that chapel before, just people who are concerned, and we have managed to graft on lots of new activities even into the most unpromising buildings. We have never really found a chapel that we could not regenerate. There are always half a dozen people out there who desperately care and will be on the local committee and will ensure there are open-days, that weddings still continue, that we have a concert, et cetera, et cetera, throughout the year, without promoting heavy over-use. We also have a lot of tenancy agreements, such as the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery at our chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery who use that particular chapel on a weekly basis and also hire it out. This was a building that was derelict until 1997 - it was a very early lottery scheme - and it is in a cemetery, not the most promising venue for lively activities, but it has gone like a bomb. It has been wonderful. I feel that our message is one of optimism and hope, but I do have some concerns about the future, which I will come to in a minute. Mr Baker: Could I strike a slight cautionary note on what is being said in the Churches Conservation Trust, which is admirable stuff, but the reality is that outstanding churches of outstanding merit will continue to become redundant and will continue to move to the Churches Conservation Trust. The scope of many of the churches that they have for accepting alternative uses without damaging that interest is limited and there are going to be a lot of difficult cases. It is all going to take a lot of time. In the meantime, in the natural course of events, the portfolio of the Churches Conservation Trust is going to steadily increase - that is natural - but what they are faced with is a declining budget in real terms, and so what has been said about the need for more resources for the Churches Conservation Trust from the detached overview position of the Advisory Board, we support that need for resources very strongly indeed. Mr Field: Can I make a comparison between Jenny's portfolio and ours. If we take the Unitarian Chapel in Wallasea, which Jenny's Trust has taken over, huge numbers of activities are now going on there but it is a building with a number of rooms and - and this is in no way detracting from what the Trust has done - it is easier to put kitchens and lavatories in than if you have got a great medieval building. It is somewhat more difficult, which is what David was saying, to adapt those buildings. It is not necessarily impossible, but it is more difficult to do. Dr Freeman: I would entirely agree with your point, Frank, but also I would emphasise that HCT has created new-build, as at Walpole Old Chapel in Suffolk where there was no scope for a loo and a kitchen within the envelope of the historic chapel - it would have been a travesty to do that - so we built a little block outside which fulfils that purpose. We have also done that kind of thing at the Dissenters' Chapel, where we built new facilities behind one of the colonnades, which cannot be seen but which has enabled that cemetery chapel to be regenerated. Q42 Helen Southworth: One of the things that I wanted to ask was similar to the question I asked before about bringing new people into an understanding and an enjoyment of the historic environment, people from socially disadvantaged groups or people who were not normally accessing heritage. I was wondering whether you thought there was a role within that for churches and listed buildings. Mr Baker: If I could put my DAC hat on temporarily (and I am not here in that capacity), I think one of the ways in which the wider community can get linked into their churches, whether they use them or not, is by the creation of "friends" organisations. This tends to happen rather better in prosperous rural areas than in urban situations, but if you have got the whole community in some form or other behind the church, not just the parochial church council, this can be a focus for social activities, for engagement, for understanding about the building and, crucially, for fund-raising for maintenance. Mr Truman: I think that is right. You can hit a number of targets all at once with this. The Trust now has an education programme which I think probably, to be fair, came from trustees and from the DCMS wanting to see school projects going into churches and learning about our heritage. What we are seeing also as a result is that school children, having learnt about a trust church in their midst - Vange in Essex, for example, a church that was heavily vandalised - then take ownership of it and start to care for it and be concerned for it. In Vange the local school children have designed replacement stained-glass windows that were smashed by perhaps their elder brothers in former years. They are now actually keeping watch on the church and there is a regular series of community events, secular and worship events, going on there and the church has come back to life as the result of an education visit aimed at broadening the types of people involved. I think, yes, that is the case. Our favourite church that we always like to point to that we have grown from our colleagues is St Paul's in Bristol, our circus church, which is a stunning Georgian church in a Grade I listed square. I do not know if any of you know St Paul's in Bristol where the 1980's riots were, but it was an area which saw terrible decline and disadvantage. With the help of £2.5 million from HLF we have restored that church and there is now a circus school in there as tenant, and they are bringing a completely new cross-section of society into that building from across Bristol and it is working wonders and it means that our church is being looked at after. Dr Freeman: Could I just speak for the virtues of disabled access which we have introduced to professional standards, which has meant that nearly all our chapels will take it, and we do find that that is used. We have one or two people at Todmorden Unitarian Church, who are active members of our local group there, who are quite seriously disabled and it has provided access for them and they take part fully in the facilities and events that the chapel offers. Mr Field: On that, we are pleased that the Department says us targets for visitors, and we have a million visitors a year plus and we actually fulfil that. There is a danger, though, that the Department is so breaking down its target and asking us to count who is going in and who is coming out, that if you have got slender resources you are diverting resources to that exercise rather than perhaps doing your mainstream, and I do question whether the people coming in quite see themselves in the categories that the Department thinks they should fit into. I was at a project in the East End the other week, and it was a Bangladeshi group, and I wanted politically to talk to them about identity. I said to them, "Look, I have two identities. I am English and I am an Anglican. What is your identity?" They all surprised me. They said that they were British and, secondly, Bangladeshi. If they were coming through our churches, presumably we would do this as an ethnic minority. It was quite interesting that none of that group thought of themselves primarily in those terms, but the Department has a structure that we should be meeting those sorts of sub-totals of our total, and I am not so sure how valuable that is. Q43 Helen Southworth: I hear what you say about that, but, leaving aside the specifics of the categorisation, do you think, in your experience, non traditional access to heritage happens by itself or do you need to work at it? Mr Field: Both, I think. Q44 Helen Southworth: To give you an example, did the community ask for them? Dr Freeman: I would say that the publicity at HCT plays a very big role. We generate an enormous amount of publicity, press releases, booklets, guidebooks and all the rest from Head Office but also locally as well, where local committees will advertise events very widely in a local area and pull in audiences. We reckon our audiences come from up to 20 miles - that is the limit on it - but most will come from closer. Mr Baker: As far as the Advisory Board is concerned, this is not strictly part of our remit, but, in addition to advising on the heritage merits of potentially redundant churches, we also advise on the extent to which they are capable of accepting change, and we do this in a fair up-front way, providing papers that indicate that a certain amount of change is possible and make sure this gets to the locals and gets into the local system, and so when a church that is going for alternative use is offered on the market there is the sort of paper work there that gives an indication of what the opportunities might be. The sorts of thing you are talking about could be one of those, but obviously the users have got to come to the opportunity. Mr Field: On that, Helen, I think that there is a huge group out there who are deeply sympathetic to church buildings, and we see that with the numbers of people who visit. Whilst in no way do we want to detract from your inquiry about what the sum of public support should be, I think there is an onus on us to try and see how we might tap better the huge resource of goodwill out there from people who do actually love visiting churches and feel that churches are part, not just of their own local communities but a crucial part of understanding what England is about. Q45 Mr Evans: Can I press you on that one, Frank, because I go to a church in Ribchester, which you may know as an old Roman town, and it seems that we are forever raising funds to keep that church in good nick. We have just done an appeal on arts and heritage where the congregation all subscribe money over a four-year period for that church in Stibb, which is another church which is not too far away and which is a very historic church. Yet, we are limited in numbers and because of the sort of money that we are talking about to keep these churches in good nick it is very difficult and, if we were not doing it over four years, I am not too sure how we would do it, and we do a number of fund-raising activities as well as getting money from the congregation. Do people really appreciate the scale of the problem? We are looking here at £1.2 billion worth of repairs that are now outstanding on churches. I do not know if my church is in that figure, but how can you access cash outside of congregations to make sure that these fantastic churches and buildings that are there are going to exist in 100 years time? Mr Field: There is a case for greater public support (i.e. greater taxpayer support), but I believe that we should try and do that in a way which enhances local support rather than people feel that somebody else is taking over the responsibility. A form of matching funding would actually achieve that. I think there have been too many areas of British life where people sign off and think, "Oh, that is the taxpayer's responsibility. We do not have to do anything more." The size of the bill is so huge, as you say, that volunteers by themselves are not actually going to be able to achieve that, though they achieve miracles. What we want is a form of increased taxpayer support which encourages people to try even harder to raise funds. Mr Baker: This can be done quite usefully with a mix of national and local government support. When I worked for a county council as their conservation and archaeology officer and we had a grants budget, before it was cut altogether, for historic buildings, we quite deliberately offered grants to those historic churches that did not fall within the grants that English Heritage were then giving. So we were trying to do that sort of partnership as well, of course, as encouraging the locals at the same time, but I think very few local authorities now have historic buildings grants budgets left. Mr Truman: If you look at the Church of England report Building Faith in our Future, which is their strategy for church buildings, one of the things they call for is an equal place at the table with other sources of government funding at regional and national level - ODPM monies and RDA money and regeneration monies. I think there is a perception that churches are seen as faith groups which are outside the mainstream of funding. We have a church in Cambridgeshire which is right next to one of the growth area developments, literally in the next field. We tried to get some money from the Community Facilities Fund that goes alongside both areas to use that medieval building - it was an empty medieval building - as part of the plan for community facilities, and it was just missing off the radar of all of bodies - the local authority in the region and the Cambridge Future Horizons body that had been set up. They were just perplexed at the idea that this building could have something to contribute. I think overcoming some of those barriers would be of greater help on this issue. Mr Field: May I add one point to what Crispin said about the launching of that Church of England report which was done in Lambeth Palace. Gathered together were civic society - the people and organisations who have through the decades and centuries supported these great buildings - and the Government minister who was kindly responding to the launch of this building, at the end, invited the assembled company to join civil society. She had not realised that civil society was there and was operating without her coming or going or anything else. I think it is immensely important when you are doing your report that you seek ways in which you strengthen civil society rather than civil society thinking it is another reason for the state either elbowing us out or the state does not see us having any role at all in maintaining our historical heritage. Q46 Chairman: You are optimistic that there is still a willingness on the part of the community at large to join together to try and save historic buildings? I went to the launch of an appeal for my local church and there were half a dozen people and they were the same people see at every voluntary organisational event, no matter what it is - WRVS, Red Cross - and predominantly elderly people, and not particularly affluent either. You are optimistic that somehow there is this untapped resource there. Mr Field: No, I wish to salute the efforts which are made. In Nigel's example it was interesting what he did not to say. He was saying how huge it was, how continuous this activity was, but they do it. What we are looking for is some form of partnership with tax-payers through the state which encourages that rather than makes people feel that their role is now irrelevant to the raising of funds. I think we are at the stage where the bills are mounting, and, unless there is a response centrally, people will just feel that they are drowning in this situation. It is getting that combination right which I think is crucial. Dr Freeman: I think I can add to that by saying that any relief on charitable giving to church buildings and charities in general will, of course, be very welcome. Historic Chapels Trust funding works slightly differently. We have found historically over 13 years that we have got roughly a third of our funding from English Heritage, roughly a third from the Heritage Lottery Fund since it started and we have raised about a third ourselves, and we have raised it all over the place from a variety of donors, nobody giving us money of any great magnitude and most people giving money on a one-off basis. We do have a subscribers system, but these are people who have come in for £10 a year and sometimes give us more. Somehow or other we have scrambled all this money together to over £4.5 million which has all been pushed into our chapels, but I think that at HCT we do have concerns about the future funding of English Heritage and the future funding available from HLF. If that declines, we will be worrying and in trouble. I think a lot of private people give us money because we are getting grants from EH and HLF and have their backing - that is important - a sort of imprimatur that what we are doing is the right thing. Q47 Alan Keen: Recently particularly we have all looked at the rivalry between Islam and Christianity, but I can tell you, it is nothing compared to when I was a boy and the rivalry between even different branches of the Methodist Chapel and the other denominations. We used to throw bricks at them, and this was part of life. Thank goodness that has all finished. Not the last people who approached me in my constituency but the one before that was an American Evangelist church, who has partly rebuilt a series of factory units to make a church, but the people who approach me more often than any other type are Muslims, and there seem to be as many branches of Islam, or certainly groups of Muslims, as there were when I was a boy and was astonished by the rivalry between local churches. Is there a bar in the Church of England against churches being used by other religions? It is the same God when we are looking at Islam, for instance. Is there a bar? Mr Field: Whilst our churches have been made redundant they are still consecrated buildings. There is no bar on community groups using them for community activities, but there are still occasional services which are carried out in our churches, and we actually encourage that, but we have never had an application from a Muslim group specifically to use one of our buildings for religious purpose, though - it comes back to this accounting business - we would not know whether Muslim groups as community groups, as part of community groups, would naturally participate. Mr Baker: All Souls Bolton is a huge Victorian church in our care in the middle of an area which is now 95% Asian, and the Asian community are at the forefront of saving that building, but they want it as a community centre for the whole community. They have said to us that they do not want it for worship and they do not want to be exclusive about it, but they are fascinated by it because it is in the centre of their community but also because it is a religious building, albeit it is a different religion, and we see a great future for that building being run by the local Asian community. We have a building in Toxteth which is going to be a multi-faith centre. That will stop short of worship because of the sensibilities of the Church of England, but it will in every other respect celebrate different faiths and, being on the front line of the Toxteth riots, it is very appropriate. Mr Baker: I think I can give a slightly wider picture to that. Only about 10% of redundancies end up in the Trust whereas nearly 75% end up in alternative uses of some sort or other. Amongst those alternative uses are, indeed, religious uses. Yes, as Frank says, there are sensibilities about how an ex-Anglican building is going to be used, but you do get quite strong community-based uses of churches. There is quite a lot that goes on in the 75% that end up in alternative uses. Mr Field: In the Bolton example, it was the Muslims who were beating off the white yobbos who were trying to burn down the building in the sense that they felt that this was a great building for the community. As you would expect, there are war memorials in the church, and as I was going round I was discussing with the Asian leadership that one of the things we would obviously want to do is to move those into the sanctuary, which would remain a religious area of the community building; but many of the people who had come to live round that area themselves had fought in those two wars or had relatives who had, and one of the suggestions was that they might like to give the equivalent memorial stones for people who now live around that area whose own family members died in the first and second World Wars so that there would in fact be two plaques, one remembering those who died in the wars who actually lived in that area and a second plaque of people who now live in the area who have families who died in the same war on the same side over the last century. So there is another side to this Muslim debate which is not always picked up in the media. Q48 Alan Keen: Coming back to theology rather than buildings, there has been movement but there appears to be no movement on the bar against other religions using Church of England buildings for worship. Is that the case? There are so many Muslim groups in my constituency who would love to have anywhere. They are not looking for churches, they are looking for any building of any sort of where they can worship. Is there a chance of that bar ever coming off? We are not now talking about buildings, and maybe we should not get much into this, but we are trying to preserve buildings and there are people who would love to use them. Mr Field: We have not had any applications. In the Bolton example people have already got places to worship in but actually want some significant community resources, and it is the Asian community who are the spearhead in putting forward proposals for that that we are trying to join up with. Q49 Helen Southworth: Could I ask very briefly about the craft skills involved in the work? Some of the examples of the churches show an incredibly high level of original craftsmanship. What is your experience of getting access to the right kinds of craftsmen? Is this something that the Government needs to support? Dr Freeman: Yes. I feel very strongly on this point. I am qualified in building conservation myself and I often take a direct role in employing craftsmen at our chapels. There are not enough of them and it all adds to the time frame during which a project can be carried out, because the craftsman cannot come when you would most like him on the spot. When one is repairing buildings of Grade I or II quality, one has to have a top-most person doing the work, and so I was pleased to see that the HLF is now offering £7 million worth of bursaries, but still it is not easy to make your way as a craftsman, particularly when you are young. I think rates of pay are not very high necessarily until you get well-known. Mr Field: We put in our contract asking people whether they offered New Deal and also Modern Apprentices. You obviously cannot do that with tiny contracts but with the larger ones. On the Bristol one that Crispin mentioned the builders and the conservation company offered two modern apprenticeships, and one of the guys turned out to be a star, and not the one you might have thought originally would have been, and is now an incredibly valuable member of their staff. Q50 Chairman: Can I return to the central question of funding. Frank, you said that we need to look beyond central government and encourage perhaps a match funding. Nevertheless, on your grant, which, as you pointed out, has essentially been frozen for the last few years, HCT gets money from English Heritage, whose grant has also been declining in real terms, and HLF which is under pressure. How serious is the funding position facing your two organisations? Mr Field: Supposing the responsibilities of the Trust grew in the next 30 years as it has in the past 30 years and our budget remained stable in money terms, therefore a cut in real terms, we would go under. Crispin has some examples of churches where we already, with our cuts in budget, cannot do the conservation work that we would like to be able to do. Therefore they are falling into greater disrepair than we would want them to be. Whilst we can happily say we can swim along in the next few years, unless there is a major change in how the Department views heritage within its budget and what it allocates and therefore how we can continue to encourage volunteers to give, in the way that Jenny describes, I think the longer term future for the greatest collection of historic buildings in this country is grim. Dr Freeman: I would concur with those remarks. I would also point out that at HCT we do tackle chapels in the grossest of gross disrepair - some of them are nearly derelict - because there has not been the kind of quinquennial inspection system for those buildings which has applied to Anglican churches for years and years. We face enormous repair bills at some of our chapels and I think that if the EH and HLF budget's are going to be cut back that is going to add enormously to the scope of work that HCT can complete within a reasonable period of time. It is the unreasonable period of time that creates yet more disrepair and the need for yet more money. Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along this morning. |