Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, if she will develop a national register of (a) the condition and (b) maintenance requirements of heritage assets.

The heritage assets most at risk of loss or irreparable damage are already captured through Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. This tool is used to map the assets at risk, and to improve the likelihood of solutions being found.

Significant funding is currently distributed to heritage assets across the country, both through Government and our key partners, such as Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Historic England works to remove buildings from the Register, working with local decision-makers to alleviate risk by facilitating repairs, finding new uses for assets which are unoccupied but capable of reuse, and pursuing creative solutions to sustain those which are not. Historic England also targets the investment of its grants where reducing risk will bring the greatest benefits, an approach which has proved highly successful in its £95 million High Street Heritage Action Zones programme.