Heritage Assets

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Hollobone, to respond for the Opposition under your chairmanship.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) on securing this important debate, and I commend the work that she is doing on both fronts for her constituents in relation to heritage. My hon. Friend spoke passionately, and it is clear how important the matter is for her constituents. It is obvious that I am not Brad Pitt, Winston Churchill or Norman Roach, but I once had an extremely good night at Walthamstow dog track, and I can see how important it is to the community that my hon. Friend represents.

The Labour party has a proud tradition of standing up for heritage, a tradition that I am determined to continue in my role as shadow Culture Minister. Since the end of world war two, Labour has recognised not only the historical importance of heritage sites, but the economic benefits that such sites can yield. Heritage is central for so many reasons. It goes beyond class boundaries. From Giant’s Causeway to Canterbury cathedral, it is central to our local and national identity. It is crucial in regeneration projects in towns and cities across the United Kingdom.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was the first step on the road to establishing the system of listing buildings. Now, 64 years on, we are continuing the debate to reform and refine it, and my hon. Friends the Members for Walthamstow and for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) have important contributions to make to that debate. Labour then passed the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, which helped to bring about the first 10 national parks. Our commitment to heritage continued in the late 1960s with the Civic Amenities Act 1967, which introduced conservation areas and allowed local authorities to administer loans and grants for the restoration of historic buildings and sites. Soon afterwards, Labour introduced legislation stipulating that anyone who is found to have destroyed a historic building can be imprisoned.

I am proud of Labour’s history in standing up for heritage, and I want a new and reinvigorated debate on the subject. We have clearly made a good start today, and the contributions to this debate focused on the ability of heritage to galvanise and organise local communities. Its importance in defining our cultural, moral, political, theological and social values cannot be underestimated. It incorporates the most special and valued remains and structures. These landscapes physically mark moments in history. Most importantly, people can relive them on a day-to-day basis, and they help to shape our beliefs and our passions. They have lived through the ages, and all elected to this place have an obligation to ensure that they are preserved for the next generation to be enjoyed and to be used as a tool for learning.

For each of us, there are treasured personal objects—a pair of spectacles or a particular chair—that instantly bring back the memory of a loved one. The physical remains from generations past—homes, schools, factories, and churches—are the equivalent for society, for entire communities and for the nation. Historic places are the repositories of our communal memory and identity, and as a result they are deserving of special respect and care. A society that ignores its past cannot embrace the future. We owe it to the next generation to preserve the best achievements of past generations.

A poll conducted last year revealed that 70% of Britons attend one or more UK heritage sites every year, many more than those who visit football games or art galleries. The sector provides work for just less than 500,000 paid staff and 500,000 volunteers. That is as many staff as are employed in the NHS.

In a recent speech to English Heritage, the Minister highlighted the fact that the industry has captured the nation’s imagination. Membership of the National Trust has risen by 33%, and membership of English Heritage has risen by a staggering 62%. The Minister has said in recent speeches that tourism is one of the nation’s fastest growing industries. The sector is set to increase by 3.5% between 2009 and 2018.

A central reason for tourists being attracted to the British isles is our heritage sites. In Yorkshire, for example, local councils were told a few years ago that they were taking a massive risk in pumping money into the tourism industry. However, they believed in the power of their local history and their heritage sites—sites such as Ripley castle and Harewood house, Roche abbey and the York cold war bunker. The “Welcome to Yorkshire” television campaign has heritage at its very core, and the county attracts more than 200 million visitors a year. In fact, a large percentage of heritage tourism in the UK is domestic, especially in recent years given the rise of the staycation.

Heritage is an industry, and Brits spend money on it as much as people from overseas, especially outside London. That is an important and positive aspect, because Government investment in our heritage can support other key agendas, such as quality of life, healthy living, lifelong learning and families spending time together. I am minded to ask the Minister what impact the heritage industry had on the Prime Minister’s inquiry into what makes the nation happy. I shall wait eagerly to see whether it features in his closing remarks. Of course, there are more advantages to the staycation. If Brits are spending their money on domestic tourism and in shops and restaurants near heritage sites, rather than abroad, that is of benefit to the Treasury.

[Mr Mike Hancock in the Chair]

We learned over the weekend that leading economists believe that we are on the road to ruin with the Government’s programme of cuts. Surely the Minister realises that schemes such as “Welcome to Yorkshire” are vital for local economies across Britain. These initiatives are having a positive impact on the region, but they are at risk because of the 32% cut to English Heritage and the overall 25% cut to the Minister’s Department. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central explained the consequences of such cuts in his wonderfully entertaining speech. He pointed out that without professional staff to care for, to open and to interpret historic places, the huge rises in visitor numbers we have seen over recent years would fall.

I know all too well the dangers that these heritage sites face. Eastwood in my constituency is the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence, something of which we are very proud. However, the D.H. Lawrence heritage centre, which contains exhibits of the life and times of Lawrence and the original court copies of Lawrence’s most controversial novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, was under threat of closure earlier in the year as the local council was seeking to make cuts. Looking through the visitor book, it is clear that the centre is a resource not only for the people of Eastwood but for people across the country and from all over the world—people who otherwise might never come to our area.

It was vital to save the centre so that we could preserve an essential source of tourist income for the area. The campaign to save Durban house was backed, at my suggestion, by a host of famous faces, including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, the Nottinghamshire writer Billy Ivory, Michael Parkinson, Lord Puttnam, Glenda Jackson and Ken Russell, as well as countless ordinary people. I am sure that the Minister will agree that celebrating local culture and heritage is a vital part of the regeneration of the ex-coalfields of north Nottinghamshire. I was thrilled that the centre was saved thanks to an eleventh-hour agreement with Nottingham university. I suspect that that may be news to the Minister who, of course, rejected my invitation to visit it.

The cut to English Heritage funding equates to roughly £51 million over the next four years, but the true consequence of the loss is not yet calculable. Rolling the dice with the UK’s most special treasures is not the action of a responsible Government. Thirteen years of Labour Governments saw an increase in the number of visitors to historic sites, a broadening of knowledge about our heritage culture and an increase in profits. The last Labour Government did some fantastic work, and although I accept that we may have done more, our heritage sites were safe in our hands.

The Minister has said that we tend to underestimate just how great the UK is. I disagree. Britons from across the country and around the world are rightly proud of our heritage sites, and they show their support with their feet and with their purses. It is the Government who have underestimated the true value of such sites, and it seems that they are content to put the future of such sites at risk.

What we know today is radically different from what we knew a century ago. Britain’s fascination with what went before will long outlive this Government’s reckless cuts. There is a real risk that our historic public buildings—built with taxpayer’s money with the sort of craftsmanship and materials that we cannot afford today—will simply be sold to the highest bidder. That will have two results. In prosperous areas, public buildings such as Victorian schools will become unaffordable, exclusive private apartments, yet in less well-off places such buildings will sit derelict and empty, blighting the town centre or the high street.

Some aspects of the historic environment are already worse off. The extent of Labour’s grant scheme to return to congregations the VAT paid on the repair of historic places of worship has been reduced under the coalition Government. What could be a better example of the big society than congregations coming together to raise funds to restore their buildings and open them to wider community use? Yet donations to these funds to pay for all church fittings and architects’ fees will now go straight to the Treasury.

Does the Minister truly appreciate his responsibility to protect the heritage industry? Does he appreciate the strain that local authority cuts are putting on the authorities’ ability to protect heritage sites, to offer grants to historic buildings at risk and to ensure that changes to listed buildings take place with the advice of expert conservation staff? Given his recognition of how far the tourism industry is set to go in the next few years, why was there no mention of the heritage industry in the tourism strategy?

Will the Government’s emphasis on localism undermine our tried and tested ways of protecting our heritage at a national level through organisations such as English Heritage? As local authorities begin to sell off their historic buildings, libraries, schools, swimming baths and town halls to make ends meet, how will the Government support community groups that want to preserve their public services in the beautiful and historic buildings that have served them well for centuries?