Hadrian’s Wall

Debate between John Penrose and John Stevenson

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (John Penrose)]

It is always a pleasure to have you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone. I was debating opposite you yesterday with someone else in the Chair, but it is good to see you back in your accustomed place, looking after us today.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) on securing the debate and putting the case so strongly. It is always good to see a constituency MP batting hard for an important local asset and industry. It is absolutely clear, as he rightly pointed out, that tourism is one of the most important industries, if not the most important, in the Lake district as a whole, including the area around Carlisle. It is a crucial part of the local economy. The area does not have just beautiful scenery, but one of the country’s—indeed the world’s—pre-eminent heritage assets, in the shape of the wall, running right through the middle of it. There is plenty to be proud of, raise awareness of, and shout about to attract more people to visit both Carlisle and the wall, and my hon. Friend has contributed to that by securing this debate.

My hon. Friend asked me to acknowledge and comment on the importance of the wall to tourism, and I do not think it possible to overstate that importance. The wall is a crucial part of this country’s offer. One of the reasons most frequently given by foreign visitors for coming to the UK is our heritage. Heritage is an incredibly broad term, including everything from Stonehenge, which is plus or minus 4,000 years old depending on the part of the site, right the way up to modern culture such as the Glastonbury and Reading music festivals, and everything in between. There is no doubt that Britain was a very important part of the Roman empire; in fact, the city of York was effectively its administrative capital for decades. The wall is an incredibly visible and solid reminder of that period, and is an iconic example of the kinds of things that people come to Britain to see.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: the wall is a very important site, and is part of a world heritage site. I think it was one of the first transnational world heritage sites, because it takes in not just Hadrian’s wall but the Antonine wall, which runs parallel to the north, and goes across into the northern German elements of the old Roman empire. It is part of a project that is, I think, ultimately intended to include the entire borders of the old Roman empire, right the way around through to the coast of north Africa. It was one of the first elements of that project to be put up, and it is of global significance. We are incredibly lucky in this country to have something that is so well-preserved and, importantly, properly looked after to ensure that it remains preserved for not just our generation but future ones. My hon. Friend is also entirely right to say that it is an essential part of rounding out the local tourism offer, so that the area does not have just beautiful countryside and lakes—which it undoubtedly does—but an incredibly impressive heritage offer.

There is, however, the problem that my hon. Friend was right to raise. Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is struggling, along with a great many other destination management organisations. That is what they are called in the jargon, Mr Hollobone, but you and I would probably call them local tourist boards of one sort or another. They are organisations that are having to make the transition from an era when money was a great deal freer and the Government’s budget was a great deal larger, through to an era when regional development agencies no longer exist and everyone has to cut their cloth to fit. I will not try your patience, Mr Hollobone, by going too far off piste by talking about the economic mismanagement that led to that situation. However, for whatever reason, we are faced with a far tighter economic and fiscal situation. Therefore, everyone is having to cut their cloth to fit. Indeed, I am sure that the various business owners, land owners and attraction owners along the whole length of the wall would all understand that it is important for someone not to spend more than they earn, otherwise pretty soon they will go bust. This country is no different. We must ensure that we are living within our means. Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is faced with precisely the same challenge as many other local tourism bodies around the country: that budgets are smaller. It is therefore trying to find and plug a hole in its budget.

My hon. Friend came up with a creative and intriguing potential solution to that. It is not something I have heard before, and interestingly, it is certainly not a solution that has been suggested to me in other parts of the country. It has the merit of being entirely original and certainly very thought-provoking. His suggestion is that public sector bodies along the wall might want to hand ownership of their assets over to Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd. I suspect that the underlying assumption behind that idea is that enough cash will be thrown off to plug all or at least some of the gap in the organisation’s funding.

I am not sure that that underlying assumption is necessarily correct, although my hon. Friend is entirely within his rights to ask me to check it, which is effectively what he has done. We have gone away and done some numbers, and I am not sure that such an approach would fill the gap as it currently stands. The organisation is going through a great many other changes.

[John Stevenson]

Yes, the Minister is on the right track in terms of what I am thinking. However, I am also thinking that the sole purpose of Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is to maintain, preserve, look after and promote Hadrian’s Wall. Some of the other organisations have other interests and will have calls on their resources from the other attractions that they may have. If the wall’s assets were transferred into the Hadrian’s Wall company, the focus would be solely on Hadrian’s Wall.

[John Penrose]

I appreciate what my hon. Friend is saying; he gave a capable exposition of his idea. However, the stumbling block for me is simply this: if we consider other destination management organisations—local tourism bodies of one kind or another—he is absolutely right to say that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is unusual in that the collection of tourism assets with which it is dealing happen to be stretched out in a long, thin line that cuts through a variety of different villages, towns, steadings and local authorities.

Apart from that geographical oddity, it is entirely normal that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd has to interact with a breadth and variety of different types of organisation. There are different owners—public, private and in some cases third sector—and people from the National Trust as well. Any destination management organisation must deal with a variety of local tourism companies. We could be talking about destination management organisations in York, in my constituency of Weston-super-Mare or in Bristol—it does not matter where someone is in the country; they could be in the Cotswolds or anywhere else. Such organisations have to deal with everything from local hotels to local restaurants, attraction owners and everything else in between, plus local councillors and so on. They are all faced with that precise mixture of stakeholders and interests to match up.

The interesting thing is that there is no instance of such organisations expecting to own the assets that they are helping to promote and manage. In fact, their role is subtly different. They are not quite a trade association, but they are an organisation that helps to promote a particular area. The attraction owners, whether they are private, public or third sector, are key members of that organisation. They come in a variety of different legal wrappers—partnerships, companies limited by guarantee or whatever—but in each case, the various different stakeholders are key members of that organisation and if it is well run, they are the people who dictate terms and set the agenda for what the organisation is trying to do.

It is therefore crucial that although the organisation does not have to own the assets that it is working with, it must have an extremely close and effective relationship with the people whom it is seeking to represent. I am talking about a different kind of relationship, which is a bit more flexible. I would suggest anyway—my hon. Friend was right to point this out—that going down the route of trying to transfer ownership is not necessary, because many other examples of a membership model are being pursued successfully throughout the rest of the country. He was also right to say that it would be an extremely long and slow process.

In the case of private sector owners—from what I can see, some 90% of the wall is in private ownership of one kind or another—I suspect that, persuasive, effective and passionate as my hon. Friend is, he would have to go some in order to persuade most of them to give over voluntarily property that may have been in their family for generations. They may have purchased it recently, but either way, it is private property. I am a huge fan of the Government’s philanthropy agenda, but I suspect that that would be philanthropy on a different scale and that, if my hon. Friend managed to do it, he would go down in history as one of the greatest philanthropic persuaders this country has ever seen.

I understand where my hon. Friend is coming from and why he is making that suggestion. What I would suggest in return is that I think there is an alternative way, which may be a little quicker and simpler, of achieving the goals that he and I both share, and that is to make sure that we have some kind of membership-related approach, whatever kind of legal wrapper it may come in. If we can get to that position—I understand that that is where Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is trying to move—the company will be able to do precisely the kinds of things that my hon. Friend is talking about and attempt to market and promote the entire wall from one coast to the other, and put across and sell the huge benefits that he has rightly and passionately outlined in his speech. That is precisely what needs to be done and, I think, what everybody wants to see happen.

The huge advantage that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd has is that, after many years of trying, it is managing to stitch together an incredibly disparate range of people, simply because of this geographical oddity. The asset, associated companies, attractions and issues that it is trying to deal with stretch from one coast of the country to another. I do not know how many different local authority areas it goes through, but it is a very large number, and it has proven extremely difficult to co-ordinate it in the past. It has started to do it, but as my hon. Friend rightly points out, it has to make this transition.

My hon. Friend has asked about other kinds of funding sources. It will be partly up to local tourism companies and local attraction owners, be they public, private or third sector, to say whether it is in their commercial interest to be part of a collective marketing scheme. I am not suggesting that this should be a piece of corporate philanthropy, but that it should be a natural part of everybody’s corporate marketing plan to say, “If we contribute to a collective marketing plan for Hadrian’s Wall as a whole, it will help my business and my neighbour’s business as well.” This is, therefore, a piece of self-interest as well as collective action, and I think it will be tremendously positive.

It is also worth saying that local authorities may conclude, as is happening in many other parts of the country, that tourism is such an important part of the local economy—my hon. Friend rightly pointed out that it is very important in Carlisle and Cumbria as a whole—that they want to contribute in some way to some of these collective marketing operations through council tax payers’ money. That is happening, as I have said, in many other parts of the country. It depends on the importance of tourism in the local economy, but as my hon. Friend has pointed out, that is a very easy point to make in his part of the world, because it is such a vital part of local job creation. I encourage him to speak to his local council and fellow MPs in the area, to see whether or not they feel that the local authority’s contribution reflects the importance of this crucial part of the economy to local jobs and employment.

I think that we are speaking a similar language in terms of what we want to achieve and that everybody agrees about the importance of Hadrian’s Wall to the nation’s heritage, the world’s heritage and the local tourism industry. I think that we have slightly different recipes for how the issue might be addressed, but a great deal more can be done and I suspect that my hon. Friend and I will look to work with the local authority and local businesses to ensure that that happens.