Arts and Cultural Organisations

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for introducing this debate, and I am sure that we all wish him well with his plans for this conservatoire. I would just say to him, and indeed to my noble friend the Minister, that if they take the trouble to go to the Library and to dust down the unanimous report of the Select Committee on Education, Science and the Arts, published in another place in 1983, they will find many recommendations which the Government could still profitably benefit from. I was much involved with that report and had the honour of chairing most of the committee sittings that led up to it. I suggest both to the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and to my noble friend that it is worth looking at.

In a brief debate like this I just want to concentrate my remarks on one particular thing. People whose lives are enriched by the arts, as they are, and people who come to this country and enrich it because of our arts and our heritage are all, I think, very moved by some of our greatest buildings. One thinks of the great public buildings in London but I think particularly of the cathedrals and parish churches of this country. I say to my noble friend that I am one of those who is very concerned by recent proposed changes in English Heritage. I completely understand why the Government have decided that they want to divide English Heritage and give it an endowment to look after the buildings under its own control—there are some very fine and marvellous buildings—and why they wish to have another branch, probably to be called Historic England, which will give all the technical advice and support and be in charge of listing and all the rest of it. But there is a potential catastrophe in this change because English Heritage’s powers to give grants to buildings which it does not itself possess will have gone.

I have the great good fortune of living in the wonderful city of Lincoln, which has—I do not want to be provocative or divisive—what I consider to be the finest of all our cathedrals, but what everybody, I think, would agree is one of our greatest cathedrals. It costs £50,000 a week to keep Lincoln Cathedral open, without a penny being spent on restoration or maintenance. Over recent years Lincoln Cathedral has been able to look to English Heritage, which is extremely generous and helpful and has given £250,000 most years. That has now gone. There is a real problem, and that problem can be repeated up and down the country. Some people might ask, “What about the Heritage Lottery Fund?”. That is a wonderful organisation and we in Lincoln are benefiting from it at the moment in that we have had a grant of £12 million towards a project called Lincoln Castle Revealed.

However, the Heritage Lottery Fund has its criteria, which include inclusiveness and how many people come and what sort of people. I do not quarrel with that at all. But what I do say is that there has to be a source of funds directed to buildings for their intrinsic beauty, worth and historic interest. That source used to be English Heritage; it will be no more. I believe that, in the case of our great historic cathedrals—we have 27 truly important medieval cathedrals in this country, and there are 42 in all—we ought to have a separate endowment fund, similar to the endowment fund that the Government are giving to English Heritage for its own purposes, to sustain our cathedrals. Any country that allowed the west front of Wells or Lincoln, the spire of Salisbury, the tower of Durham or any of our great edifices to be in danger of collapse could not begin to call itself civilised, or claim that it had a proper Government of a civilised country.

I know that the present Government would never wish to be in that position, but what I would say to my noble friend who is to reply to the debate is this. We have to recognise that these buildings are of incomparable worth, where one comes perhaps closer to the soul of our nation than anywhere else. They demand and cry out for the sort of support that is not currently being given but that will need to be given in the future.