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.