Embracing Botticelli and Brick Lane

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Liz Forgan, chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, talks to Jane Taylor about the fund’s new five-year strategy, the Lottery funding review and her hopes for the future

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What do you see as the most important shifts in the new strategic plan?
There’s a temptation with five-year plans to tear up everything and start again. We have not done that: the essential values of HLF are the same. Conservation at the heart of everything; access, education are the critical priorities. The shift is a loosening of the parameters of how you define heritage and who does the defining.

The early years of the HLF have done wonderful work on the great heights of heritage. That had to be the priority. There were decades of neglect and the greatest national treasures of Britain were in a state of need. We can now afford to look around and ask whether we can broaden the constituency of people who are interested in and love the heritage. To persuade more people to like Botticelli is one thing, but the really exciting thing is to engender a discussion in which we can figure out for instance, how important is Brick Lane? Is it transient stuff of no enduring interest or really important? 

How are you going to do that?
It’s a risky business. The risk is that you neglect the best and waste money on stuff that turns out to have no enduring value. So how do we guard against that risk? We will require people to make the argument about why they value something outside the designated parameters. And we are expecting the riskier elements to be at the smaller end of the grants spectrum. You can do a great deal at community level with really quite modest sums of money. 

How will you get to the kinds of people and the kinds of areas you are talking about to stimulate these different kinds of applications?
There is a view that because the Lottery is played by everybody, Lottery funds should be calculated on a per capita basis and sent round the country so everyone’s got their fair share. I absolutely reject that approach as inconsistent with our primary responsibility, which is to the heritage. And it’s a mistake as a community development ambition. If you simply post off cheques to people on the grounds that it’s their turn, you risk reinforcing failure. It does not help any community to encourage them to embark on a project that is ill-thought out or beyond their capacity. So we have to move back a step. We have swallowed hard and invested real money putting in place a regionalised, localised structure of capacity-building support. We have development officers going into HLF offices all over the English regions and in the nations for the first time in our history. And their job is to identify those networks that do exist. Many of them will have nothing to do with heritage. I don’t care if it’s the Brownies, the Rotary Club or Natterjack Toad Support Society, if there is an effective network, that is where we start to build a local discussion about this very simple idea of heritage: what is of meaning and value from the past for those people?

Many local authorities do not have the resources to support people in the kind of detailed planning that needs to be done to lever serious sums of money out of us. So we have to put in place a pre-application support system, and that’s what we’re doing.

Is this seven years too late? You are rolling out a programme of devolved decision-making at a point where Lottery income is going down and your projected increase of 30% in admin costs obviously means less money for grantmaking.
Our staff and admin costs will still end up well under 10%. (CHECK FIG). Our overheads as a proportion of our activities are absolutely defensible. There was a crying, urgent need to attend to the top line heritage assets of Britain. The work of those early years has enabled us to look around and see what the next big strategic need is, and I think it’s this. We’ve also had the benefit of learning from other people’s experiences of devolution. 

Is your proposal in the strategic plan to select five priority local authority areas in each region and country your response to the Secretary of State’s call for all the Lottery distributors to make a contribution to Fair Share?
We are not party to Fair Share. We looked at the possibility of being part of Fair Share, and there isn’t a proper fit. This is our contribution to the ambition to see that we are not skewing the spread of our funds inequitably. 

The strategic plan says you want to shift your grantmaking to more smaller grants. There seems to me to be a high level of overlap between Awards for All and your own schemes at the bottom end of the scale, possibly adding to the confusion that people have about Lottery grants schemes.
Although we are making a modest shift towards the lower end of grant-giving, we are protecting the 25% of our funding that goes on big projects. In no way is this a dumbing down or abandonment of big projects. It’s a modest attempt to shift resources to see if we can’t enrich the definition of heritage.

I don’t think there’s great confusion – our other grants start where A4A leaves off. I am conscious that everyone except Lottery distributors thinks the solution to this is one front door and you just put in your scheme and an unseen hand would send it to the right pot. I’m sure there is more we can do to simplify the process. However, the heritage is not the same as sport or the Community Fund – you can’t get past that point. What we can do is see the process through the eyes of the applicant more than we have done in the past. 

You came into the Lottery world a year ago. What was your initial impression of the way it works?
I took one look at the application form and nearly fainted. I couldn’t imagine how anyone possibly ever filled in such a thing.

I absolutely understand why it was as complicated as that. Everyone was feeling their way, handing out huge amounts of public money. However, it’s time to simplify. Awards for All is now a simple matter. Your Heritage is really clear and easy. We’ve just done the same process on the main grants pack and taken 37 pages out of it. If you want £20m out of us you are going to have to go through the mill. If you want £50,000 we’re not going to put you through such a gruelling process – we’ve tailored the burden on people to the size of the grant. We have also put in place people on the end of the phone who you can ring up and talk to. And now we have regional offices, all the distributors’ regional managers will know each other – some of them are in the same buildings. If an applicant comes to HLF with a scheme and we see it’s not for us but it could stand a chance with the Sports Council, instead of saying, ‘not this window, squire,’ we will phone the sports council and help the applicant that way. 

Out of all the distributors, your participation in Awards for All up to now has been at the lowest proportion of your own income and the lowest proportion of A4A’s budget.
The fact that the take-up of heritage projects under A4A is lower than other people’s is nothing to do with our willingness to make money available. It’s up to the applicants to decide what they want to apply for. 

But as you have said, the type of projects at that end of the scale aren’t those that you would necessarily have recognised or gone out of your way to stimulate demand from in the past. I wonder whether you shouldn’t have been more proactive especially in A4A, because there is a circle involved?
I agree. The turning back of the circle starts with devolution, building development capacity rather than forcing demand that isn’t there. One consequence of the devolved structure of the HLF will, I hope, be a much greater take up of A4A.

But you don’t do it by pretending that we’re all doing the same thing. The five good causes were very carefully thought out. The heritage is not the same as music in schools or kids having football pitches. 

What was your reaction to the headline issues outlined by the Culture Secretary for her forthcoming review of Lottery funding?
Tessa has very clear priorities. It takes more energy to understand clearly how the heritage delivers on those criteria than it does to think out, say, how the Community Fund delivers. One of the things that worries me is the number of politicians who think of the heritage as an obstacle to regeneration instead of an invaluable asset to it. It’s not our job to argue with the Government’s priorities. But it is our job to help everybody understand how the heritage can be a contributor to its ambitions, by making the argument that heritage contributes to the regeneration of communities in a way that nothing else can do. It gets to people at a deep level to do with their sense of their own identities, hope, despair, recovery and symbolic investment in precious things from the past.

Heritage can deliver on those government objectives.

Does the HLF have a problem with a prominent branding association between the Lottery and heritage projects?
No. There is a legitimate interest in tracking the connection between buying a Lottery ticket and the good causes. I would not be happy at all if we were going around slapping Lotto graphics all over beautiful parks or historic houses – I don’t think anyone would dream of suggesting that we should. We have joined in willingly and happily in the Camelot publicity campaign. I think it’s excellent. I’ve got no problems whatever about an association between Lottery ticket buying and the heritage. It’s part of bringing more people in on the argument. If there is a problem about the literal graphic rendering of the Lottery and the graphic rendering of the heritage, we need to face it. 

What are the main lessons HLF has learnt from its first seven years?
One lesson is how important it is to be absolutely clear about what the approved principles are of any particular scheme – what we are giving you the money to achieve. The second lesson is that pre-application effort on our part is worth its weight in gold. The time and effort we spend talking to people before they fill in the form pays itself back a thousandfold in terms of the quality of the schemes. 

In five years’ time what do you hope to have changed about the country’s heritage landscape?
There are two objectives in terms of the political argument. One is that heritage is not an obstacle to regeneration, it is an asset. The other is that the historic built environment and the historic natural environment ought to be thought of together. Government departments deal with different bits of the modern environment and the historic environment in ways that sometimes makes it very difficult to get value out of them together. We can help with that: uniquely, we are in a position to take a completely holistic view of the heritage.