This Institute is the main professional body for all those who care for the country’s cultural objects and heritage collections. Our charitable objects embrace preservation of the heritage, which is the primary focus of our response. Our comments refer primarily to the workings of the Heritage Lottery Fund

We believe it is important that a keen eye is being kept on the spending of lottery funds. We are aware however that the Heritage Lottery Fund has recently undertaken a thorough-going review of its activities which has laid the basis for its current five year strategy. Many of the points dealt with in this Review cover similar ground, and some of the suggestions could undermine its work.

We comment on certain of the issues raised:

2.5 Consultation

The present decision-making process works well, and priorities are determined correctly by a combination of local initiative and regional review under a national umbrella.

It is historically appropriate that local initiative and energy by those who identify a need for action should shape the conservation and the exploitation of the heritage. This works well, as we have seen in recent years. Any move to methods such as local referenda or polling mechanisms will put the heritage at serious risk, because people can always find what they believe to be higher priorities for more urgent spending. But the heritage does not wait. It degrades inexorably. This country has already lost enough of its heritage of buildings, and its heritage collections of objects are already at too high a level of risk due to lack of care and investment. The country cannot afford to lose more.

2.7 Local decision making

The balance in decision making is about right. Delegating decision making any more locally will generate disproportionate administration costs, taking money from good causes, but without achieving any better decisions than those currently made.

Heritage assets are unevenly spread across the country. Rational response to locally identified needs requires an informed perspective, an overview of priorities across broad geographical areas which are no smaller than the current regions. More local decision making would risk a postcode lottery for the health of the heritage.

3.3 Targeting areas and groups

As far as heritage goes, targeting will risk distorting the pattern of heritage which has grown up over historical time. Materials cultural heritage exists as an un-targeted palimpsest. Its distribution reflects the vagaries of history: social, industrial, religious, geographical economic and many other stimuli and constraints which have created a multifaceted, varied and humanly enriching historic environment. To impose artificial targets would be to impose a straightjacket, a rigid, bureaucratic template which could destroy that very variability in heritage which is so character-full and so valuable.

This and related suggestions would erode the core Lottery concept that funds should be awarded on the basis of the merits of the project, and not because they fulfil pre-determined social, geographical or political agenda.

3.5 A single application form

The application process for HLF grants has been greatly improved and simplified in recent years. The HLF has listened extremely carefully to its audience. We seen no need for further merging of application forms, indeed we believe this could make the process more difficult both for applicants and for Lottery distributors.

3.7 Lottery distributors as investors

We believe that the current level of feedback from the HLF at early stages of application is about right. Potential applicants already have excellent guidance from case officers who help nurture their applications, from an early stage in the process. HLF’s pre-application forms and procedures are most helpful in this respect. Any greater degree of support - while theoretically helpful - would place too great a burden and cost on the distributors, reducing the funds available to distribute, and creating too high a level of interference.

3.8 One-stop shops

Of the suggestions made, the only ones which are affordable, desirable and justifiable are to enhance one-stop virtual shops, and to increase information about alternative or additional sources of funding so as the maximise applicants’ chances of success in achieving their overall funding needs, not just in Lottery funding. It is the nature of the web that such advice will be available nationally, though searching can of course be done as regionally or locally as the searcher requires. Setting up (or enhancing) such a service should not be expensive.

4.4 Extended revenue funding

We should wait to see how the HLF’s five year revenue funding succeeds before making any further changes.

4.5 Core funding

Decisions to alter the balance of core funding should be based on evidence collected from existing projects. Would greater core funding have made a difference?

4.8 Reducing red tape for low-risk projects

Yes, but only to the extent that HLF itself sees further scope for this.

5.2 Increased joint working

What evidence is there that Lottery funding is falling through the cracks?
What evidence is there that there is scope to do more?

We are not aware of this as a problem.

We see no net advantage in creating top-sliced funding for joint schemes.

5.3 Reducing the number of distributors

The Heritage Lottery Fund works extremely well. We are wholly opposed to the creation of a single umbrella Lottery distributor. Any possible efficiency gained would be far outweighed by the creation of a bureaucratic monster, far less responsive to need, and create unnecessary tensions between the core good causes.

Small is beautiful. In the case of the HLF it gets the right results.

This suggestion runs counter to other arguments in the consultation document for greater responsiveness.

In Conclusion

Many of the suggestions in this consultation document appear to arise from a wish for change for change’s sake, and not to be based on well-researched evidence on the success or otherwise of existing Lottery funding regimes.

The current level of consultation by the HLF - recently for instance for its five year strategy -shows sensitivity to many of the issues raised. The HLF has responded well and is already answering many of the concerns raised in this document.

We believe the Heritage Lottery Fund has made an enormous contribution to the heritage sector, where the needs are far greater than the funding sources available. A huge amount of work remains to be done and we look to the HLF - which has developed a great deal of know-how and experience in this area - continuing its excellent work in its current form for many years to come.

30th October 2002