Written evidence submitted by Geoffrey Hunter
I provide this evidence as an individual with many years' experience of working with volunteer-led heritage buildings.
I work for the Diocese of Ely, covering Cambridgeshire and part of West Norfolk. I also serve on the national Church Buildings Council and several other aligned organisations and trusts.
What I write below is not on behalf of any of them, only my own, personal views on the subjects raised in this call for evidence.
Geoffrey Hunter January 2025
1. What are the most significant challenges facing owners and operators of built heritage assets, and how are they affecting what those sites can offer?
What interventions are needed to prevent the managed decline of heritage assets on publicly-owned land?
What can the Government do to make it easier for communities or local businesses to take ownership of historic buildings?
Climate change is providing some notable challenges. More severe weather requires historic building to adapt. In most cases I have seen, historic building have proved highly adaptable (unlike many modern buildings), so in most cases this challenge is really just one of funding, to improve rainwater drainage, ventilation, etc.
The more serious fallout from the climate agenda is the regulation-led burgeoning gravy train of ill-thought-out retrofitting proposals. There is a lack of expertise in how best to adapt historic buildings (indeed, any buildings) to become more energy efficient. Too many people seem to set themselves up as experts based on the most rudimentary of training which exclusively deals with modern buildings, often with apparent government endorsement. We need to develop enough actual expertise, avoid formulaic approaches, and ensure that building regulations are applied intelligently to historic buildings. More testing of different approaches to various types of historic materials and structures at the BRE would be helpful.
2. How effective are the current funding and finance models for built heritage?
What should long-term public funding for the sector look like?
The Lottery seems to take an ever-larger share of the public funding burden for the historic environment. John Major was very clear that was never the intention of the Lottery - that it would provide "new money" for good causes. Indeed, he probably wouldn't have got the legislation through parliament back in the 1990s if they were honest then that the Lottery would mostly be picking up what had been government and local authority spending. The demographic of most Lottery players makes this incredibly regressive. The current labour government has just added to this problem with its changes to the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme, which will load VAT onto Lottery-funded projects for churches and other LPWs.
All that said, it's clear that we will never have Continental-style public funding for the historic environment, and neither should we. I would support more entrepreneurialism in heritage and seeing public spending as an investment, not a burden on the tax payer. But we have to be honest about that. There is a definite blurring of the line between capital investment and revenue funding at the National Lottery which is unhelpful in making this case. The word “investment” is used too liberally and without proper though about what it means. We need to work more on defining what is a return on investment in heritage terms, and then apply that more rigorously in judging where to invest.
3. What role does built heritage play in the regeneration of local areas and in contributing to economic growth and community identity?
How can heritage buildings be supported to increase energy efficiency and contribute to the Government’s net zero targets?
I've answered the energy efficiency question under 1.
I have always believed that old buildings can be the glue that binds a multicultural society together. A white, English, middle-class male like me might look at Stone Henge and say "that's my heritage". But I really have no more in common with the people who built that monument than does anyone else on this planet. "The past is a foreign country" and I would certainly appear very foreign to our pre-historic forebears. If we take the starting point that all heritage is a "foreign country", today's generation is put on an equal footing across all cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, and we can all enjoy together learning about how these places were, and how they became what they are, and how they form the context today in which all our identifies can coalesce into a single society.
4. What are the financial, regulatory and practical barriers to preserving built heritage?
What policy changes are needed to make restoring historic buildings easier and less expensive?
In 1948 we chose to manage built heritage through the town planning system. Increasingly, I have come to feel this is the worst way of managing heritage..."apart from all the others". Local authority conservation officers risk becoming one-man Committees of Taste, defining what an entire district can and cannot do with its heritage, in their image. For the first time in our history, the people who own and use historic buildings find themselves hampered in expressing their current needs and wishes in their buildings. Is that not the essence of built heritage? The things that buildings speak about their history?
Working with churches I see everything from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, with great expressions of architectural innovation, societal wealth, poverty, turmoil, revivalism, etc. The future will see the past fifty or so years as the silent time when not much heritage happened. I would argue for a more enabling system of heritage management, where the aspirations of the people and organisations that own and manage heritage are encouraged and assisted to an appropriate realisation, not hampered and turned down flat. I often feel that doing nothing has become the safest option. People are challenged and criticised for permitting change, so it's safer to do nothing - to much detriment of the future's "heritage" in my view.
I think VAT is something which has a detrimental impact on historic building. New-builds and conversions pay no VAT, and yet these are profitable, sometimes profiteering, activities. The good care and maintenance and appropriate capital development of our historic buildings is slapped with a blanket 20% tax.
5. What policies would ensure the UK workforce has the right skills to maintain our heritage assets?
Specialist apprenticeships can be good (I've employed several), but the biggest block to expanding this is the lack of educational institutions to support the learning element. Because provision is patchy, uptake is even patchier and some apprenticeships have fallen away as a result. More incentives for both employers and educators would help to get more people into the relevant specialisms. The VAT situation outlined above also has a dampening effect on the whole sector.
If the Select Committee would like any clarification of what I’ve written, please do get in touch.
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