Written evidence submitted by Historic England [FFL 034]

1. Historic England is the Government’s statutory adviser on all matters relating to the historic environment in England. We are a non-departmental public body established under the National Heritage Act 1983 and sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). We champion and protect England’s historic places, providing expert advice to local planning authorities, developers, owners and communities to help ensure our historic environment is properly understood, enjoyed and cared for.

2. We welcome the opportunity to submit evidence to the Committee.

Summary of key points:

• The historic environment has a central role to play in delivering levelling up objectives, helping to create and sustain pride in place as an important bridge between people and place. The conservation and regeneration of heritage are effective routes to restoring pride where it has been lost. The historic environment also has benefits for living standards, community connection, health, well-being, jobs, education, skills and housing, where it is integrated thoughtfully within proposals with vision and leadership.
• Communities who will most benefit from levelling up support, need time and expertise for lead organisations to engage and plan for delivery.
• It is recommended that a portion of grants funding is allocated to revenue funding for project masterplanning, community engagement and capacity building for the places most in need, where increased capacity in local authorities and communities can deliver stronger bids and long-lasting skills.
• The competitive bidding process has advantages but could be made more accessible by having more regular but smaller bidding windows with a low investment expression of interest stage to reduce the upfront cost for authorities in making speculative bids.
• Historic England and the other DCMS Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) provide a valuable resource of support and expertise in engagement and capital project delivery. This could be used more effectively to support grant recipients. The ALBs have developed partnership working and regional networks to provide this support.
• The DCMS ALBs also have the ability to develop knowledge sharing networks that would help spread the benefits of funding to wider regions.
• Using levelling up funding to extend or widen existing well-performing projects (such as those being delivered with Towns Fund or High Streets Fund) could streamline the process and bring forward benefits by reducing the cost and time needed for planning, as well as making use of engagement already undertaken.
• It is recommended that future funding rounds (if forthcoming) consider means to broaden the impact of funding across regions outside larger towns and cities by working with clusters of smaller towns to share resources. Providing revenue funding to build capacity to address thematic issues across areas is also recommended.
• Consideration should be given to opportunities for smaller grants to support more remote rural communities.
• Recommendation for metrics to measure the success of levelling up funding against the government’s objects include: being focused on the measurable outcomes of funded capital projects on jobs and productivity; recognising the added value for business of investing in heritage; and measuring place attachment, the impact of civic engagement (rather than its frequency) and the development of social capital as a return on investment as indicators of improvement in ‘pride in place’. 

Inquiry questions

How can the Government ensure that all areas that need funding for levelling up receive adequate support with the bidding process and subsequently receive adequate funding?

3. We suggest that the first part of this question has two main answers – the support for the bidding process needs to be in the form of both time and expertise. With regard to time, in our experience, those authorities whose resources are most stretched are least likely to be able to generate a worked-up proposal at short notice. Sufficient time must therefore be allowed for the more stretched councils to mobilise for a quality bid. We recommend that a small part of any investment fund should be devoted to providing masterplanning grants as a first stage of support for authorities struggling to make bids. Our evidence for this is the evaluation of the Towns Fund bidding process carried out on behalf of the national DCMS agencies by Colliers in 2021 which concluded that:

‘Almost all parties agree that the quality and deliverability of place-related proposals is improved where there is a thought-out medium[-term] strategy to which the local authority is committed, typically in the form of a Masterplan, that has clear prioritisation of projects. They are probably the optimal point for local and national organisations involved in place making to input at a local level.’

4. For this type of support to add the greatest value, however, we believe that it should not be used simply to outsource masterplanning because this leaves little or no legacy of skills in the commissioning council. At the very least, council officers should form part of project teams so that they have the opportunity to share their local knowledge with external experts and so that they gain experience that builds councils’ capacity for future bid development.

5. Where bids have benefited from greater consideration and masterplanning, they are more likely to deliver long-lived success. Historic England’s capital funding projects, such as repairs to historic buildings or conservation area enhancement schemes, often follow smaller project development grants to fund preliminary research for building surveys, design work and feasibility studies. These stages also help develop support for proposals in the affected communities and build confidence for investors, which helps to lever-in private capital.

6. Turning to the expertise part of our response to the question, the government can make better use of the skills and expertise of the DCMS Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) to support authorities across the country to develop bids. Culture, in its widest sense, has a key role to play in levelling up the country. In its national cultural ALBs, the government has a rich vein of expertise that could be better mined to support its Levelling Up agenda. These bodies were created by government to act as impartial advisers in cultural and heritage investment. The ALBs have long-term relationships with partners in place-shaping who are likely to go on to apply for levelling up funding or for future funds like the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.  Enabling the ALBs to support authorities in planning for investment and subsequently delivering their projects could bolster those authorities who have the least resources of their own.

7. Providing deprived communities with support through additional sources of impartial expert advice and funding to prepare masterplans could help them to compete more equally with better resourced areas. To support those areas that are resource poor, Historic England provide support for authorities that are priorities for investment not only through the expert staff in regional offices but also through our Historic Places Panel.  This panel brings together volunteer doyens from the development industry with expertise that can support authorities in developing their strategies for investment in place. They are invited by host authorities to assess issues and address focused strategic issues. Details of the panel’s membership and reports to our local authority partners can be found at: https://historicengland.org.uk/about/who-we-are/committees-and-panels/historic-places-panel/. Many of the authorities who have played host to the panel have gone on to achieve considerable success in access to grant aid for levelling up places, including for example:

• Gloucester (received £20m in levelling up fund round 1)
• Nottingham (received £18m in levelling up fund round 1)
• Isle of Wight (received £5.8m in levelling up fund round 1)
• Sunderland (received £20m in levelling up fund round 1)
• Ramsgate (received £19.8m in levelling up fund round 1)

8. As far as ensuring adequate funding is concerned, we suggest that match funding requirements are varied to reflect the local level of need for levelling up. Historic England have provided grants to many authorities around the country and have previously required a high level of match-funding to demonstrate value for money. However, our experience was that this could prevent those authorities with the greatest need to apply for funding. As a result, we now take a more pragmatic approach, reflecting the need of communities in the areas where we provide grants and the potential benefit to them and therefore allowing a lower percentage of match funding where justified. This approach is based on an assessment of optimised funding mix set out in our Public Value Framework; which can be viewed at (https://historicengland.org.uk/about/what-we-do/corporate-plan/public-value-framework/).

9. Noting the extreme variation in the Towns Fund awards when looked at on a per capita basis (from £101 in Wolverhampton to £3,444 in Goldthorpe), Colliers suggested in their report to the joint ALBs that ‘There should, ultimately, be a mechanism for taking the size of the town’s population into account when considering how much funding it can access, even when it is a priority for funding because of local circumstances.’ We concur with this suggestion in the interests of a fairer distribution of the available funding.

What are the challenges of competitive bidding and will this impact areas with limited resources and capabilities for bidding?

10. Historic England has seen benefits from competitive bidding rounds that galvanise action and encourage innovation and we would not discourage their use. For example, in most years we receive only a handful of applications for our Conservation Area Partnership Scheme grants, which offer funding up to £300,000 over three years to support works to buildings and public realm in conservation areas. In contrast, the window of competitive bidding for our High Street Heritage Action Zones (which also support works in a conservation areas) was more than four-times over-subscribed for the initial target of 44 schemes. Nevertheless, we recognise that competitive bids are resource intensive and can disadvantage councils that are most challenged by gaps in their capacity or that haven’t been able to invest in speculative proposals.

11. The greatest challenges for competitive bidding are time and risk. Increasing the number of bidding windows on a pre-advertised calendar, with a low-detail initial ‘Expressions of Interest’ application stage would help authorities have greater confidence in preparing bids. Preparing detailed bids for multi-million-pound project involves considerable expenditure with a high risk of failure.  Having an initial expression of interest stage would help to test ideas before committing to the expense of project development or, alternatively, to have time to reconsider unsuccessful proposals before bidding. Having a published calendar of bidding windows would also help authorities to plan ahead for the work needed to inform a bid, including the engagement needed to develop proposals that are publicly supported. We note this is the process now adopted for the Community Ownership Fund (COF) and commend it. Details of the COF, which will provide £150m by 2024 to support communities to take ownership of assets of community value, are available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/community-ownership-fund-prospectus/community-ownership-fund-prospectus--2.

How can the Government achieve its aim of streamlining funding for Levelling Up?

12. At present, successive governments tend to launch discrete regeneration initiatives with changing emphasis according to the top-down priorities. This results in stop:start regeneration on the ground, with some successful programmes coming to an end before they have yielded their potential benefits in full. Each time a new initiative is launched, the schemes for regeneration of places require long lead-in periods of community engagement, project planning and partnership building. This can be wasteful of resources. In our experience, even the modestly-scaled schemes such as Historic England’s Conservation Area Partnership Schemes, or the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s larger Townscape Heritage Initiatives, only start to achieve significant spending in their third and fourth years following several years of project planning and engagement time. Funding levelling up could, in contrast, be streamlined by extending projects where existing funded programmes are achieving levelling-up objectives but could continue for longer or could be expanded with additional funding. This would follow a ‘what works for local regeneration’ approach.

13. To illustrate this point, current programmes such as Historic England’s High Street Heritage Action Zones are now embedded in authorities’ ways of working and are making progress but could deliver more for levelling up with additional investment, whilst avoiding the ‘lag’ of project development and establishment. Having a route for authorities to bid for additional funding once a programme is running and proving its capacity to deliver levelling up could speed up spend and bring forward impact. Where these schemes have undergone a bidding and assessment process this should ensure appropriate management processes are in place and should reduce the time taken to determine whether they offer value for money.

14. For example, following invitation from DCMS to present proposals for how the original High Street Heritage Action Zones Scheme could be extended, we identified schemes in six Tier 1 levelling up authorities that could deliver more:

• Longton (part of Stoke on Trent) and Grimsby: More properties could be transformed supporting new uses in local centres of greatest need, driving a circle of local investment.
• In Gloucester, three properties that have already benefitted from HSHAZ investment could absorb an additional £0.4m to take the Folk of Gloucester Museum off the Heritage at Risk list and convert upper floors above shops into residential units.
• In Lincoln the City Council are asking for more funding to transform more properties along the high street in Sincil Bank, one of the top 10% most deprived wards in the country, where local owners are keen to invest but there is not enough funding available.
• Public realm improvements in Kettering have transformed the high street visually and made it more accessible. These works and improvements to buildings could be extended to more of the High Street.

15. We have suggested in our response to DCMS that a minimum £0.5m across at least six schemes (£3-6m total) in Levelling Up Tier 1 Priority Places would ensure balanced distribution of funds and effective and timely delivery in the last year of the planned HSHAZ scheme or by extending it into financial year 2024/25. Using levelling up funding to extend such existing projects would streamline spend to achieve levelling up benefits faster and at better value for money.

16. We recognise that extending existing successful schemes, which are measured in the terms of their original goals and not necessarily in the terms of a new government’s priorities, will present new challenges for evaluation and the demonstration of value for money. In practice, however, the measures of success in local regeneration vary little over time – jobs, economically productive floorspace, GVA per capita etc. If what matters is the creation of benefits for local communities, we are confident that evaluation techniques can be devised to cope with a rolling programme of investment.

How can funding focus on both wider regions, as well as individual towns?

17. Achieving a wider impact from levelling up may require looking at different scales of delivery to support communities outside major towns and cities. The Levelling Up Fund in Rounds and 1 and 2 favours expenditure on large capital projects which are likely to be located in major (regional centre) towns and cities.  Investment in small towns through relatively small grants can have a positive impact for surrounding rural areas. To extend the benefits of funding to smaller towns it may be helpful to support towns that work together as clusters.

18. On the Isle of Wight, for example, Historic England have funded High Street Heritage Action Zones (HSHAZ) for both Newport and Ryde (both led by community organisations in partnership with the Island Council). By working together, the towns have been encouraged to develop their individual strengths rather than competing, creating a stronger total offer for the island’s communities. Whilst the two schemes are distinct, they can share staff and knowledge, as well as co-commission work to achieve greater benefits. They are also able to share knowledge and activities with Gosport Borough Council’s HSHAZ team across the Solent, and more widely through a regional network of HSHAZ officers and through the national knowledge hub website for the scheme. Beyond towns, however, addressing needs of levelling up in rural areas may require special consideration. For dispersed rural communities, for example, it might also be necessary to provide small-scale, localised interventions so that they don’t get left behind.

19. Funding schemes could also address thematic regeneration issues found across regions. Whilst working directly with those communities most in need of support to address common issues, a corollary of levelling up investment should be also to disseminate more widely the skills and capacity generated. Developing and promoting thematic knowledge-sharing networks, such as the High Streets Taskforce may be one means of developing this sharing of know-how. Using the Cultural ALBs to support this knowledge sharing to spread the benefits of levelling up funding across regions would make good use of the existing infrastructure of knowledge and engagement that they provide. Investing in ‘know-how’ and knowledge will help keep resources within a region even if individual officers move between local authorities. Historic England have used this principle, for example, by training teachers in using heritage resources to enhance teaching local history.  We have found that teachers move between schools but are likely to remain within a LEA area, maintaining the value of our investment in the area (for details of our DoE funded Heritage Schools Programme see: https://historicengland.org.uk/services-skills/education/heritage-schools/).

20. Providing revenue funding to develop capacity may be particularly cost-effective to extend levelling up benefits across wider regions.  As an example, Historic England’s Places of Worship Support Officer scheme has provided support to numerous communities across rural and metropolitan areas.  These officers have worked work with faith groups, community groups, local authorities and charitable trusts to use places of worship as resources for the whole community. They have helped people to use their treasured buildings to meet local needs. They work across areas to help communities make best use of buildings and understand the importance of volunteer help across a wide range of skill sets. By making links with external organisations, they have helped identify available grants for essential maintenance and repairs so the buildings can continue to serve local people. Historic England provides 50% of the costs of the post for three years and the scheme is open to communities of all faiths. So far 34 posts have been created. By proactively engaging people and helping create new working relationships these officers help communities to find the right solution for them and their building. To date, they have helped:

• 1,574 congregations with ongoing support and advice
• 6,542 individuals to learn confidence-building skills through study days
• To secure £13m in grants to deal with urgent repairs

How should the success of Levelling Up funding be measured against the Government’s desired outcomes for Levelling Up?

21. The levelling up missions are:

• Boost productivity, pay, jobs and living standards by growing the private sector, especially in those places where they are lagging
• Spread opportunities and improve public services, especially in those places where they are weakest
• Restore a sense of community, local pride and belonging, especially in those places where they have been lost
• Empower local leaders and communities, especially in those places lacking local agency

The document Levelling Up the United Kingdom: missions and metrics Technical Annex, published by Department for Levelling Up Communities and Housing in February 2022 sets out proposed metrics for assessing the success of achieving these missions and the focus areas within them.  Heritage has an important role in achieving objectives in each of these missions, with opportunities to contribute to the defined focus areas for activity in each set out in the white paper.

Metrics for Mission 1 Pay and Productivity

22. Heritage contributes to economic growth and jobs either directly (within the heritage and cultural sector) or by creating the spaces for new business.  Our research on the value of heritage to business conducted for our annual Heritage Counts survey in 2018 demonstrated:

“Businesses increasingly attach a premium to premises and areas that provide a sense of distinctiveness, uniqueness and authenticity.”

And

“… growing demand for characterful spaces has resulted in a growing number of businesses occupying listed buildings.” (the report for Heritage Counts 2018: “The Past is the Foundation of Our Future Heritage in commercial use” is available online at: https://historicengland.org.uk/content/heritage-counts/pub/2018/hc2018-heritage-in-commercial-use/).

21. The metrics proposed to assess impact against the first mission are focused on individual or household incomes but do not reflect the economic contribution made by improving, for example, building stock through capital investment. Where levelling up funding is likely to be invested in capital programmes it may be difficult to directly attribute the impact this makes at the level suggested by the proposed metrics.  However, it may be more possible to identify the GVA provided by use of the spaces improved through investment, or the value of facilities provided and then identify the contribution this makes to the local economy. We were able to use such metrics in the assessment of impact of our long term programme to invest in Derby’s Cathedral Quarter, including recording the reduction in vacancy rates, uplift in rental value of property improved, number of jobs created and square feet of employment space created (for details please see our published evaluation report at: https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/in-your-area/midlands/retail-in-derby/). This may be a more achievable level of measurement, although perhaps not as insightful in terms of the impact on individual quality of life.

Metrics for Mission 6 Skills

23. Having regard to skills and training; skills gaps and shortages in our construction workforce have created significant challenges for the heritage sector and levelling up.  This has made the repair and regeneration of historic places that have become run down slower and more expensive. Working with sector partners, including Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) we have sought to address these long-standing challenges by integrating the knowledge and skills required to work on traditional buildings into mainstream construction training. Our objective is for all new entrants to the construction industry as well as the existing workforce to have the right knowledge and skills to work on traditional buildings. Notably we have supported the inclusion of the ‘principles of heritage and conservation, e.g. listed buildings, traditional buildings and maintenance of existing stock’ in the core content of the new Construction T level for Design, Surveying and Planning. Whilst delivery of the T-levels is the responsibility of the Department for Education, their uptake and entry to the workforce of course finishers will have an influence on the success of levelling up and we feel should be included in metrics. On this basis the metric proposed for Mission 6 – Skills is appropriate to assess part of this mission in our view, although we would like to see this is broken down to provide detail of how the skills needed locally are identified and how additional continuing professional development to deliver high level skills (particularly in the building trades) are measured (for further information on the Strategic Skills Strategic Partnership see the interim report at: https://historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/education/strategic-skills-partnership-progress-report-2018/).

Metrics for Mission 9 ‘Pride in Place’

24. With regard to restoring sense of community and ‘pride in place’, the historic buildings and places at the hearts of our communities have a particularly high value and potential to deliver more through levelling up. They form an essential part of the social fabric of our communities and investment in them predictably generates a positive sense of direction so long as they are maintained. Research by Public First, undertaken on our behalf, identified that local heritage was a strong factor in determining civic pride (their report is published at https://www.publicfirst.co.uk/heritage-and-civic-pride-public-first-report-for-historic-england.html). This pride in place went beyond individual landmark buildings to awareness of the general historic character of towns, including the industrial heritage that in many communities has been the past engine of growth and is a source of communal and family identity.  However, the study also showed that civic pride decreased rapidly where that heritage was in poor condition – with this condition being seen as emblematic of decline of the community. We would welcome measures of the condition of the historic environment as a measure of the effectiveness of levelling up. This could build on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk data, a publicly accessible data set that records the condition of highly graded designated heritage assets across the country (for details see the online published register at: https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/heritage-at-risk/search-register/. The register provides an official statistic recognised by the Office for National Statistics.

25. In addition to condition, we feel that the levelling up mission requires assessment of people’s pride in their environment and the role it plays in the community cohesion and identity. The concept of place satisfaction is well developed and has been proposed to measure ‘pride in place’. However, we have some concern that the methodology as developed by Demos and Local Trust is focused on the services provided by places and does not adequately address the emotional and communal aspects of a sense of community or pride. We have particular interest in the role of heritage in the alternative concept of ‘place attachment’ or ‘sense of belonging’, as the element that can give place a unique identity and with historic associative and communal value. We are also aware of the pride that engaging with the place (including developing understanding of its past) and contributing to the restoration of its buildings and places can make to civic pride. We know that people feel greater pride where they have directly contributed to regeneration or learnt about the past of their area than if they simply appreciate the services that are available. An outstanding element of our High Street Heritage Action Zones programme has been the use of cultural programming to engage communities with the heritage of their high streets alongside the funding of physical works to buildings and spaces. This has enabled far greater participation than a purely capital works focused programme could have delivered and we will be keen to measure that. The contribution that buildings and spaces make to social fabric (and the social capital this engenders) should also be measured and related to the social return on investment of levelling up funding considered in assessing the value of funding delivered.

26. At present we feel the first metric for Mission 9 “Percentage of adults who are satisfied with their local area as a place to live”, lacks the desired connection to pride and sense of community or will require expansion to include these. The second metric “Percentage of individuals who have engaged in civic participation in the last 12 months” goes some-way to measuring engagement with place, but could be expanded to include the outcome of this civic participation in terms for individuals such as discovery, learning or expressing attachment. We feel that an additional metric is required to assess the return on social investment of levelling up funding, in terms of the development of social capital, such as formation, growth or activity of community organisations. This should include understanding of how these are associated to the places that have been enhanced through investment.  This reflects the understanding of the contribution made by heritage that was seen in Public First’s report ‘Heritage and Civic Pride’ (https://www.publicfirst.co.uk/heritage-and-civic-pride-public-first-report-for-historic-england.html).

Metrics for Mission 12

27. With such significant expenditure on culture, including our built heritage, through the Levelling Up Fund, we want to see that local leadership through devolution is guided to broaden this approach by supporting more opportunities both to use heritage to support communities in levelling up and to safeguard the value that heritage already provides. Rather than relegating heritage to a cultural section of devolution deals we recommend that the inherited resources of the historic environment are used to support many initiatives; the constructive use of this heritage should be a golden thread running through devolution that gives communities ownership of new initiatives by rooting them in their sense of identity and by supporting engagement. As such we would propose a metric for this mission could be linked to the masterplans that we advocated earlier in this response through a simple checklist of inter-related issues that have been considered in the masterplanning process.

November 2022