Views from the coalface

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Joan Dixon of the Coalfields Communities Campaign sums up the findings of a major new lottery report

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A single point of application, more staff to assist with project applications, a more flexible funding regime and local decision-making were the main recommendations to come out of a year-long grass-roots consultation on heritage in the coalfields.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the project was a collaboration between the Coalfield Communities Campaign, the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation and the Coalfields Regeneration Trust. The project was instigated in the wake of research findings that show that coalfield areas were not receiving their fair share of lottery grants, and that HLF had performed particularly poorly in making grants in these areas. Therefore this unique and innovative project set out to undertake a public consultation; firstly to find out what people in coalfield areas thought was their heritage and secondly to make recommendations to HLF on how they can increase their spend in the coalfields.

The consultation involved sending out more than 1,000 questionnaires to coalfield community groups and organisations throughout England, Scotland and Wales. This was complemented by 21 local events where people were invited to discuss what they considered to be their heritage and how the HLF could make improvements to ease their access to lottery funding. These were followed up by four conferences in England and one each in Scotland and Wales to consolidate the findings, which are published in the research report Something to be Proud of: Coalfield Heritage and the Scope for Lottery Funding. The principal recommendations were: 

1. A simplified lottery application process should be introduced involving a single point of contact for all applications to all lottery distributors and a single form upon which a project’s viability could be assessed. The onus should be on the lottery distributors themselves to work together to decide which is the appropriate funding body or bodies for any given project. Applications worthy of funding should receive support whatever and should not have to be distorted to fit in with individual distributors’ funding priorities.

2. More flexible funding regimes should be introduced, including renewable core funding without the need to create new projects. This would prevent funding-led approaches. There should be greater flexibility in regard to revenue funding of small projects. Above all, there should be an end to rigid match-funding requirements, especially for first-time applicants.

3. More staff should be employed to assist groups in the application process. Additional staff should also facilitate networking between community groups. Funding and more staffing resources should be provided for museums, archives and official institutions to collect, record, archive and make accessible records in their care and to enable them to work with community groups.

4. A dedicated fund for coalfields should be created, possibly administered by an existing coalfields body or by a series of organisations running community chests. This would facilitate the widespread desire for greater local input on decision-making. This would also generate a shared responsibility between applicants and funders for project sustainability.

5. Taking account of the local nature of coalfield heritage. What may be considered to be duplication by neighbouring communities, for example memorials, should in fact be seen as a valid expression of the highly local basis of heritage.

The recommendations of the report, though primarily directed at HLF, could equally apply to all the lottery distributors, and hopefully will contribute to the ongoing consultation on the future shape of the lottery. HLF Chair, Liz Forgan, who received the report at a House of Commons launch in July, promised to make a response to the report within three months. Certainly expectations are high and the many hundreds of people who participated will be looking to HLF to deliver increased funding with a focus on local communities.