It’s a bit rum. The great and good of the cultural world suddenly want to know what you think about the way they spend your money. On Friday the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will start canvassing views on how National Lottery proceeds should be divvied up in future. If you think that the whole lot should be given to orphaned hamsters, now is the time to speak.
But one of the lottery’s “good causes”, the Heritage Lottery Fund — which has given grants to 16,000 projects, ranging from the Great Court of the British Museum to the restoration of local parks — has got its retaliation in first. Today, Liz Forgan, its chairman, launches the HLF’s own public consultation: “Our Heritage, Our Future, Your Say”.
All very democratic. And, to a cynical observer, all very suspicious. What’s behind this sudden urge to know what folk on the Clapham bendy-bus think about heritage? The answer, in three words, is “money, politics and survival”, though Forgan doesn’t put it quite like that. “The Government has said that heritage will continue to be a good cause, next time round,” says the 61-year-old former boss of Channel 4. “But we don’t know what share of the lottery cake we will get. And after giving out more than £3 billion in grants, I think it ’s right that we should account for ourselves: what we’ve done; what we plan to do.”
But what has really concentrated minds at the HLF is a potentially disastrous triple-threat. The new National Lottery Bill going through Parliament is one element. Not only does it open up the disconcerting possibility of punters being able to designate, at the point of sale, which good causes receive their money, it also allows the Government to seize and reallocate the interest on unspent money in the various lottery funds’ bank accounts. That sounds technical, but its implication is brutally simple. Because the HLF deals mostly in big projects, which spend their allocated grants over a number of years, it has substantial unspent funds in its coffers. Losing the interest on them could cost it £15 million a year.
Secondly, the HLF has been over-committing: agreeing to fund worthy projects to the tune of about £100 million more than its income each year. For obvious reasons this allocation of future funds has to end soon. And thirdly, the 2012 Olympics have to be paid for, and a special lottery ticket is being launched to raise some of the necessary billions. Nobody knows for sure how big a bite this will take out of the main lottery’s profits. But the feeling is that the good times are over for the original good causes.
So what will be the total damage? “At the moment we can spend about £350 million a year,” says Forgan. “We estimate that this will go down to around £230 million.”
Which means, as Forgan admits, that “hard choices” will have to be made. But does that matter? Haven’t all the major heritage problems been sorted out?
“Oh, Richard, how can you say that?” Forgan replies, feigning astonishment that I should voice what is a pretty commonplace sentiment.
“Yes, the most horrendous problems have been addressed. The vital stores of our great national collections, for instance, are pretty much OK. When I first came here I went round the back of the Natural History Museum, and what I saw shocked me to my boot straps. I mean, Darwin’s specimens stuffed in flimsy boxes, with water pouring everywhere.
“The worst of all that is fixed. But the notion that the heritage job is done is nonsense.”
So what is left? “For a start, there’s a huge opportunity,not yet seized, to take the extraordinary collections that we have — many of which are displayed in dowdy and old-fashioned ways — and apply to them all the exciting things to have happened in museum display in the past ten years.
“Then there’s landscape. People forget that the Heritage Lottery Fund does not just do the built environment. Really important work still needs to be done if we want to avoid mayhem in the countryside.”
The brochure published to launch “Our Heritage, Our Future, Your Say” lists dozens of potential areas for future HLF intervention, from inland waterways (500 miles of them still derelict) to endangered historic ships, natural habitats, churches and archaeological sites.
What’s really new, however, is the notion that the public should be involved more in heritage work, not only as volunteers in museums or on historic sites, but by helping to formulate heritage policy. At a time when the question of what constitutes our national identity has never been so contentious, Forgan wants the public to help to define the HLF’s own objectives — no doubt partly with an eye to getting public opinion firmly behind heritage when the Government re-carves the lottery cake. The consultation launched today (www.hlf.org.uk/future) is the first result of that.
Does this mean that the HLF will operate in future rather like the TV series Restoration, where viewers voted for the building they most wanted to see saved? “I am very queasy about asking people to vote for this or that project,” Forgan replies. “In fact I won’t do it. Those are decisions that require detailed technical analysis. But I do think it’s vital that we involve the public at a philosophical level. If the only heritage values allowed are the ones decided by professionals, you are ignoring the reasons why people feel so passionately about piers or landscapes or whatever. The question ‘what do we value from the past?’ is something to which anyone can give an interesting answer.”
To this end she is considering recruiting “citizens’ juries” — not just to ponder this somewhat abstract matter, but to fulfil a more practical role. She wants them to be “mystery shoppers”, checking up on projects that the HLF has funded but doesn’t have the resources to police.
Sadly, Forgan won’t be around at the HLF to see how, or if, her strategy works. The rules state that she must quit her chair next year, after six years. She will do so with genuine regret. “It’s a lovely job,” she says. “I spent most of my working life as a journalist. And, most of the time, journalists make people miserable. So to see the happy effect on people and the healing effect on communities when their own past is honoured, put right, restored — that has been a wonderful thing.”
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