National Lottery Heritage Fund Grants: Conservation Management Plans

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord paid tribute to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for supporting landscape projects. It has given more than £1.1 billion to more than 13,000 landscape projects since it started. Historic England has also looked at maintaining archive records and has set up the heritage information access strategy programme, which is due to be delivered by 2022. It will facilitate the free uploading and storage of information in a publicly accessible database by any organisation. However, the problem remains that the copyright of these conservation management plans rests with the grantee, or sometimes the contractor, not with the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, can it be true that a body created by statute, with no responsibility other than to protect heritage, should have deliberately decided to destroy its own physical archive relating to the conservation and management of historic parks and gardens, which it has itself done so much over more than 20 years to support? Does it not beggar belief that the National Lottery Heritage Fund, aware as it most certainly is of the fragility of digital archives, should have perpetrated such an act of vandalism? Can the Minister reassure us that this story is just a bad dream?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

No, it is not a bad dream. However, it is more complicated than the noble Lord portrays. First, the records that were destroyed were not originals. The originals remain with the grantee of the fund. The conservation management programmes that the National Lottery Heritage Fund possessed were copies from a point in time. They were living documents and were changed; they were not the originals. Secondly, the fund does not retain the copyright, so even if it retained the documents, it would not be able to make them publicly available. It is trying to ensure that in future the grantees of National Lottery funds are able to make the documents publicly available, and they are encouraged to do so, but there are issues about finding an archive prepared to take all those documents.

Sackler Trust: Donations

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, with regard to the second question, the Government do support museums. Public funding amounts to about a third of all museum funding, and that is very important. One of the strengths of the museum and gallery sector in this country is that it has a diversified funding stream. The Mendoza review found that the amount of public funding that museums and galleries received over a 10-year period was roughly consonant. I do not think that public vetting of donors is a good idea. I do not think that the Government should be involved in assessing the rightness or wrongness of donors and whether they are suitable. It is very important that public institutions have their own trustees who look at these things, and many of them—the large ones, especially—have ethics committees to do just that.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, although due diligence is indeed necessary, does the Minister agree that deep gratitude is owed to the philanthropists who support our cultural institutions? Does he also agree that, if fastidiousness is pursued to the ultimate, many of our cultural organisations will not be able to do the very valuable work that they do? Does he agree that, if the noble Earl’s severe audit had been applied to the Medici, the Renaissance would not have occurred?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not think that that was the only reason for the Renaissance, but I take the noble Lord’s point. It is worth putting on record that this country has been extremely well served by philanthropists, including with respect to our great museums. I remind noble Lords that a quarter of the most visited museums in the world are in this country—and four of the top 10—at least partially because of the philanthropic gifts that the noble Lord mentioned. I am happy to put that on record.

Anti-corruption: Beneficial Ownership Registration

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Howarth of Newport

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree with my noble friend. It is important to make the point that we would like to help developing countries to facilitate this, and we are spending money and resources doing that. DfID, for example, and the HMRC are capacity-building, and we are spending more money. We agreed to double our expenditure on that under the Addis tax initiative.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, what proportion of the illicit capital flows that my noble friend asks about end up invested in the London property market? If the Government persist in their privatisation of the Land Registry, will they undertake that no bids will be entertained from business interests that have connections with secretive jurisdictions, such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey or Delaware? Will they also undertake that any organisation that is allowed to have charge of the Land Registry will be subject to freedom of information requests, with cast-iron guarantees of full transparency and public access?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, about 100,000 properties in England and Wales out of 24 million titles are owned by foreign companies, and of those about 44,000 are in London. As I say, we will be the first country to insist on a public register of beneficial ownership by foreign companies for property and, as I said, that will apply to existing properties, not just new ones. We are leading the way in the world in opening this up to transparency.

European Union: Single Market

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Howarth of Newport

Thursday 17th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree. The question is whether a genuinely free trade area of 500 million people on our doorstep is a good thing to be part of.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord spoke of lower prices in the single market. However, since this organisation is a protectionist one, is it not clearly the case that consumers within the EU are paying higher prices than they would otherwise be paying?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I shall just give the example of flights, which have come down dramatically in price.

Economic and Social Inequality

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Howarth of Newport

Thursday 18th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they will prioritise to reduce economic and social inequality in a One Nation Britain.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

My Lords, the Government believe that the best way to reduce inequality is by delivering full employment and reducing the number of workless households. By restoring growth to the economy, low-income households will become more likely to enter work, and households will reap the benefits of a growing economy. More people are in work now than ever before, and since 2010 the number of children in workless households has fallen by around 390,000.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, while the Prime Minister sloganises about the Government’s one-nation approach and as the Chancellor forswears any tax increases on the well off and remains bent on hitting the poorest again with a further £12 billion of cuts in social security, is it not inevitable that inequality will worsen, with its associated pathologies of ill health, underperforming education, poor productivity, slow economic growth—as the IMF pointed out this week—and, whatever tokenistic legislation they pass, a budget surplus continuing to recede beyond the horizon?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I do not agree with the noble Lord. Income inequality in the UK has actually come down, and this is reflected in household incomes since 2007-08. The annual average disposable income of the poorest fifth of households has risen by £100 in real terms, while over the same period the largest fall has been in income for the richest fifth of households, which has reduced by £3,000 per year. The way to address inequalities, both social and economic, is to get people into work so that they can reap the benefits of full employment.