Science and Heritage: S&T Committee Report

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Selborne]

My Lords, the Committee will be grateful to my noble friend Lady Sharp for introducing this debate, and for the way in which she chaired the original report, which was described at the time as something of a wake-up call. I am not convinced that it was a wake-up call for the DCMS but it was certainly a wake-up call for the heritage science community.

The results of that report have been impressive. If we look at the joint science and heritage programme of the AHRC and the EPSRC, we can see very positive results. There is now a national heritage science strategy, developed by a steering group, and, as we have heard, a National Heritage Science Forum is being set up. These are attributes arising directly from the first report. The follow-up report, as we have heard from my noble friend, was to review implementation, not just by the Government but by the research councils and the heritage science community—museums, galleries, libraries and those who look after historic buildings and archives.

The AHRC deserves many congratulations for the way in which it has carried the baton for research in this area. Like my noble friend, I have to say that I am less convinced that the performance of the EPSRC and the NERC has been quite so impressive. It is a concern that the EPSRC seems unwilling to provide opportunities for heritage science to compete for resources for doctoral training and capital equipment. That makes one wonder if research councils will not be working together in the way in which they did originally when they were facing the danger of fragmentation of this interdisciplinary research area, which after all was the problem identified in the original report of 2005-06. I agree with my noble friend that the AHRC as a small research council—indeed, the smallest—will find it hard to sustain sole responsibility.

The scope of science heritage suggested to us in the original report, and contended to be the case, is that DCMS must clearly be the appropriate department to provide what we described as moral leadership, and that continues to be the case. After all, the department leads on cultural heritage and it interacts with English Heritage and many national museums and galleries. There are of course some parts of our national cultural heritage for which DCMS is not the lead department. In the Chamber on Friday we debated the Antarctic Bill, one provision of which is to allow the Government to help with the conservation of the Antarctic huts—Scott’s, Shackleton’s and others. Admittedly, that is a very small part of our conservation heritage but it is the responsibility of the Foreign Office. Defra has responsibility for Kew, which has an enormous responsibility for cultural heritage. The herbarium, the library and the seed banks are very much part of our culture and that of other countries. You cannot enforce the Convention on Biological Diversity without going back to the specimens collected over many hundreds of years and held in our archives. Defra is, of course, fulfilling the responsibilities there.

When DCMS says that it is not for it to tell arm’s-length bodies how specific funds allocated to them should be spent, I agree. However, I have to say in parenthesis that that is precisely what Defra is doing at Kew now, where it seems to be requiring every item of capital expenditure, even of quite small sums, to be passed across it first. That is very frustrating for the trustees at Kew, of which I am no longer one. Going back to DCMS’s role as the promoter within the Government and champion of heritage science, while I recognise that it is not there to tell arm’s-length organisations what to do, it has a particular responsibility in helping to co-ordinate the approach to attracting EU funding and ensuring that future framework programmes meet our needs appropriately, as well as those of our partners in Europe. I believe objectives could be set for DCMS in this area without in any way getting in the way of the arm’s-length bodies.

The present framework programme, programme 7, has as one of its themes the adaptation of heritage to future challenges such as climate change, digitisation, resource efficiency, the use of raw materials, the development of new technologies and the dissemination of best practice. If we think about it, many of these areas require an input from the engineering discipline, as well as from many others. That brings us back to the requirement to make sure that there is a wide spread of input from the research base, including from the EPSRC. I understand that the existing joint programme initiative under framework programme 7, which is headed,

“Cultural Heritage and Global Change: a new challenge for Europe”,

is likely to have a follow-up strategic programme, Eranet Plus, to build on this joint programming initiative. I have asked the Minister to tell us whether the Arts and Humanities Research Council will be participating in this programme. Indeed, will the EPSRC and NERC also be participating?

In summary, I congratulate those members of the National Heritage Science Forum who have set up a transitional body to draw up a vision defining its strategic aims and potential impact. Looking at the organisations which we know will be joining this forum, such as English Heritage—of which I am sure we will hear more in a moment—the National Trust, the British Museum and the British Library, it gives a lot of encouragement that what the original report started is now being carried forward by the heritage science community with strength, and robustly too.