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Heritage

I congratulate the Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford (Mr. Whittingdale), and Committee members on producing the excellent report before us. Having spent much of the past five or six years on the Select Committee on Education and Skills, I know how much work is involved—how many weeks it takes to reads vast amounts of expert evidence and take vast amounts of oral evidence. At the end, it is not that one does not see the wood for the trees, but one takes the final report for granted after spending so much time on it. It is only when an outsider—in this case, me—reads the report with fresh eyes that one realises the excellence of Select Committee reports. The report before us is a tour de force. I congratulate all hon. Members who have spoken. They have ranged widely— from St. Paul’s cathedral through Bethesda chapel, Turton tower, Stonehenge, the Lindisfarne gospels and listing ships to demolished barns. They have highlighted the role of heritage in enhancing community well-being, tourism and the projection of soft diplomatic power abroad, and they have highlighted the sector’s chronic underfunding, which is further threatened by the common spending review and by Olympic overspend robbing it of more lottery funds. There has been eloquent testimony from throughout the UK about the way in which heritage is central to our lives. The Committee’s report is an excellent review of the state of the heritage sector in England. It is a devastating indictment of the Department’s failure to understand heritage, to value its full potential or to make the case for it to other Departments such as the Treasury, the DCLG, and the Department for Transport in respect of Stonehenge. The report is also an indictment of the failure even to maintain the already inadequate funding of the heritage sector. As people have said, this debate is timely given the looming tourist opportunities associated with the run-up to the Olympics in 2012, the ongoing heritage protection review and the soon-to-be published heritage White Paper—or, at least we hope it will soon be published. I hope that the Minister will give us a firm publication date for it. The Government’s response to the report was weak and complacent. It showed little understanding of the heritage sector’s concerns and in many cases failed to reflect the reality experienced by heritage organisations and practitioners. The report found that funding for the heritage sector, and for English Heritage in particular, has fallen dramatically over the past decade, with cuts of nearly £10 million in real terms since 2000-01, further cuts up to 2008 and the threat of even more devastating cuts in the comprehensive spending review, with cuts of between 5 and 7 per cent., or the so-called flat cash cuts that we now hear about. English Heritage funding has already reached a level that threatens its ability to carry out its current functions, let alone the extended responsibilities being discussed in the review. Government plans to demote the chair of English Heritage to a one-day-a-week role further underlines the DCMS’s failure to fight its corner against other Departments. Let us remember that the sums involved are quite small—they really are the small change of Government spending. In the Department for Work and Pensions, which I shadowed for four years in the previous Parliament, or in the Department for Education and Skills, which I have scrutinised for the past five and a half years on the Select Committee on Education and Skills, the amounts that we are discussing would just be rounded up at the end of a page. They are not that significant. The portable antiquities scheme, which was referred to earlier in detail, is one small example of that. The scheme is invaluable in recording archaeological finds. It has brought many previously unknown sites to the public eye and has saved many finds that would have otherwise been lost in overseas antique markets, flea markets and so on. The portable antiquities scheme is a booming scheme. Rachel Atherton, who is the field liaison officer for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, recorded 1,476 finds last year, compared with just 693 the year before. The scheme also plays a massive role in education, yet there is a great fear that it will be hit badly by the forthcoming comprehensive spending review. What does that fantastic scheme cost? For 2008-2011, which is the period for which those involved are most worried about future funding, it would cost between £1.5 million and £1.6 million a year of DCMS funding to maintain it, yet there is a fear that unless such small amounts are ring-fenced and protected by the DCMS, we could lose the scheme. The heritage protection review aims to simplify and streamline the listing and scheduling systems into a single system. Doing so would bring greater transparency and community involvement, which everyone in the heritage sector supports. However, as the Committee’s report makes clear, although that would mean reduced costs in the long term, there would be significant set-up costs in the short term. Will the Minister give us an assurance that English Heritage will be given the additional funding to cover the extra costs and duties that will required under the new regime? A large proportion of the heritage sector’s work takes place in local authority planning offices, which host the historic environment records. Those offices will need the resources to upgrade and digitise hundreds of thousands of paper documents, when the changes to heritage protection that are anticipated in the forthcoming White Paper take place. They are valuable changes, which would help increase transparency, cut bureaucracy and simplify management procedures, but there are heavy up-front costs to pay to achieve them. Many local authorities employ only a single heritage officer and almost half—43 per cent.—do not even have a heritage champion. For the heritage protection review to work, local planning authorities need a local professional heritage service with sufficient clout and funds to deliver what is proposed. Unless a statutory duty to provide costly historic environment services is included in forthcoming legislation, there is a danger that the aim of universal access to high-quality heritage planning and records will be destroyed by local authority cuts, owing to funding shortages. Hon. Members have already commented on the danger to the Heritage Lottery Fund if it has to shoulder a further burden in the next few years in order to meet the costs of Olympic overspend. That would endanger the principle of additionality, which is what the fund was set up for in the first place, and reduce overall resources for an already underfunded heritage sector. The Committee was right to say that the Secretary of State should give an assurance that no further money than that that has already been promised will be diverted from the lottery to the Olympics. The loss of yet more lottery funds to the heritage sector is potentially devastating. The Government’s response to the Committee was not reassuring, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give us a commitment that no further lottery funds will be lost— Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—