National Lottery Heritage Fund Grants: Conservation Management Plans

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord paid tribute to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for supporting landscape projects. It has given more than £1.1 billion to more than 13,000 landscape projects since it started. Historic England has also looked at maintaining archive records and has set up the heritage information access strategy programme, which is due to be delivered by 2022. It will facilitate the free uploading and storage of information in a publicly accessible database by any organisation. However, the problem remains that the copyright of these conservation management plans rests with the grantee, or sometimes the contractor, not with the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, can it be true that a body created by statute, with no responsibility other than to protect heritage, should have deliberately decided to destroy its own physical archive relating to the conservation and management of historic parks and gardens, which it has itself done so much over more than 20 years to support? Does it not beggar belief that the National Lottery Heritage Fund, aware as it most certainly is of the fragility of digital archives, should have perpetrated such an act of vandalism? Can the Minister reassure us that this story is just a bad dream?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

No, it is not a bad dream. However, it is more complicated than the noble Lord portrays. First, the records that were destroyed were not originals. The originals remain with the grantee of the fund. The conservation management programmes that the National Lottery Heritage Fund possessed were copies from a point in time. They were living documents and were changed; they were not the originals. Secondly, the fund does not retain the copyright, so even if it retained the documents, it would not be able to make them publicly available. It is trying to ensure that in future the grantees of National Lottery funds are able to make the documents publicly available, and they are encouraged to do so, but there are issues about finding an archive prepared to take all those documents.