National Lottery

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, because I did indeed enjoy a visit to Lincoln, which he organised. I am one of the vice-presidents of the All-Party Group on Arts and Heritage. The cathedral is of course wonderful; he mentioned the castle and I recall the Wren Library as well.

I enjoyed both maiden speeches. I make just one remark on each, and say to the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington: I hope that when he boards his plane at Heathrow or wherever, he does not have to sit down and mutter, “That was a damn close-run thing”.

The noble Lord, Lord Beith, is very welcome. I can only conclude that he has finally realised that in the House of Lords the Lib Dems do not need to be too committed to the precepts of proportional representation. However, he made a very good point about proportionality with regard to regional expenditure through the lottery fund. Can the Minister confirm what I think is a good pattern of regional spend? I do not know whether she will have the figures available. That leads to a point that is in the back of my mind about Manchester, which I shall come to.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, reminded us that the most wonderful transformation of the Great Court of the British Museum is a National Lottery Fund project—I think that that is what he alluded to. It is an uplifting experience to go into what had been a murky space, which now crowns the achievement of the British Museum under Neil MacGregor. We can now say that it is second to none—not second to the Hermitage, the Louvre or the Prado. It is absolutely wonderful. I can admire the new roof from my London flat; it is a great feather in the cap of the capital.

It is worth pausing on the dilemma in this country of the Great Wen. The noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, referred to the William Cobbett reference to the Great Wen. He was not a great admirer of it—the stockjobbers going down to Farnham, not knowing the difference between a stoat and a ferret, dressed up by the tailors of London in country gear. A lot of that still goes on. But outside of the Great Wen, we have a phenomenon of growing inequality between north and south, as everybody knows, which some people think insoluble. I shall make just a couple of remarks about that. The Minister comes from BIS, not DCMS, so perhaps she can echo the particular dimension of how the lottery fits into that picture.

There is another way in which big money is spent in this field—philanthropy. It is true of the British Museum and many other great institutions that there is private philanthropy, but it is right to suppose that it is very much London-orientated. I would be surprised if the Minister had any numbers on that, but I would be surprised if that was not the case.

One project that I need to mention is the People’s History Museum in Manchester. A few years ago it got a grant of £7.5 million from the HLF, and it was reopened in 2010. Its throughput of visitors is now four times what it had been before. I take that as an illustration of the fact that capital and revenue are really complementary to each other; there is no point in saying that capital is very important and sniffing about revenue grants. Could the Minister comment on that? There are many bits of lateral thinking going on about transitional expenditures, and so on, but the fact is that one cannot live from hand to mouth for ever. Some of us helped to raise £300,000 in the past couple of years for a gallery in the museum of heroes of people’s history. It is not just about the Labour movement, it is about people’s history. No fewer than 25 Members of this House each put in £3,000 among the £300,000.

Will the Minister ask her colleague, the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, whether there is a heritage dimension of the northern powerhouse idea because I shall finish on an economics note? There is no doubt that in the great cities of the world there is now huge connection between the buzz of arts and culture and the buzz of the economy. I hope that in due course the Minister or her colleague will write to me on that point if she cannot respond to it today.