Search

• home
• about us
• what we do
• working with us
• reference library
• press

• home
• reference library
• ministers' speeches
• andy burnham
• Andy Burnham's speech at launch of Heritage Counts 2008

Andy Burnham's speech at launch of Heritage Counts 2008

What particularly impressed me about Sandy was not just his grasp of the priceless nature of our flagship heritage – the Canterbury Cathedrals and Windsor Castles – the great icons of our national identity. The sources of national pride and international cultural significance.

But he also understood so well that heritage is just as important regionally and locally to our sense of personal and individual identity, as I know you do too.

A week or so ago I went with my mother to the UK premier in Liverpool of Terrence Davies’ new film, Of Time and the City. One of the benefits of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture is to have brought Terrence Davies back to filmmaking. Among the old footage used in the film are shots of St Peter’s Catholic Church on Seel Street in the centre of Liverpool, where my mother went to confession 40 years ago. It’s now a very flash Cuban-themed bar and restaurant where we went for a drink after the showing.

Not everyone will be happy about that transformation. Part of me isn’t. But heritage is always going to raise difficult and complicated questions. It is delicate and sensitive territory – for politicians and place-makers - how far we go in adapting historic buildings to give them - and us - a viable future.  In a changing world we need flexible and responsible systems alongside local debate.

My constituency, Leigh, boasts some of the best industrial heritage in the country, direct, unbroken connections between the town today and the birth of the industrial revolution. But this can be a difficult inheritance for local politicians to deal with, and leads to some challenging debates.

It’s absolutely right that we should be encouraging people to get more involved and have more of a say in what happens with their local environment. But ‘preserve’ is an interesting term.  Because to my mind, we don’t have the option of creating hard and fast rules for the protection of most of our heritage.

We are a country blessed with a long and spectacular heritage. Though actually only a relatively small proportion of our sum total of buildings and sites are to all intents and purposes inviolable. That’s why we have and will continue to have Grade I listing.

More are designated under a regime that seeks to ensure that their cultural value is first recognized and then taken into account when later decisions are made that affect their future. At this point, at the planning stage, architectural and historic value has to be weighed against economic, social and other relevant considerations, including as this year’s Heritage Counts makes so apparent, environmental pressures. Wise judgements have to be made.

I know you understand this, so together we need to challenge those who see conservation as being necessarily in conflict with what I’d loosely call ‘modernisation’ objectives – finding new uses for redundant buildings or lowering the carbon footprint of older buildings. We need to make it clear that in the last decade we’ve seen heritage playing a prominent, if not a leading role in economic and social regeneration throughout the country. Older buildings can present the solution not the problem.

It can’t have been easy to think of a new and sustainable use for a huge, awkward building like Fort Dunlop in Birmingham. But it’s been done, and very sympathetically.

The Midland Hotel is the focus for regeneration of Morecambe. Likewise the De la Warr Pavillion in Bexhill.

Even the building we are in today, London Transport Museum, is an example of a listed building having undergone sensitive and effective energy saving refurbishment.  It is the first historic Grade II listed building in the UK to install a large scale solar panel system.

There are lessons here for Government buildings and the rest of the cultural sector, as a number of the buildings owned by our sectors didn’t fare particularly well in the ratings. We are working to address this.

Local authorities need to, and in many cases are, getting inside these debates, looking for ways of making their community’s heritage part of its future prosperity. As of April 2008, 271 Local Authorities have a Historic Environment Champion, an increase of 25% since July 2006, when first reported in Heritage Counts.

But heritage experts still need to make sure they are involved in these debates right at the start. Nothing brings the case for heritage into disrepute more than vocal conservationists attempting to apply the brakes at the last minute, often making sensible objections easier to dismiss. 

It’s actually the case that developers who work with heritage at an early stage often credit the partnership with producing something better, more interesting and more appropriate than without the involvement.

English Heritage - and the heritage sector in general - is, I know, alert to a new kind of  ‘constructive conservation’. Of managing change, not just saying no to change – encouraging people to think about heritage at the start of the process, not at the end.

One of the best examples I’ve seen recently is the renovation of All Souls church in Bolton. An Anglican church that had lost its traditional congregation and found a new multi-faith, multi-racial community to serve.

My department has worked with the Churches Conservation Trust to save All Souls, and the CCT has come up with a brilliant solution. The community didn’t need a museum piece, but they did need somewhere to meet. They needed a gym, a health centre, space for community education, space for interfaith learning. Now thanks to the CCT and the Heritage Lottery Fund who has awarded them a grant of £3.3 million, they are going to get all that and they have been able to preserve some spectacular architecture as well – architecture to admire in ways that few people would have done otherwise.

Given the major contribution that I believe places of worship make to our communities and our national heritage as a whole, I think we could do more to help these buildings to remain in active use. To build capacity on the ground to keep them in good repair.  And I am grateful for the steps that English Heritage is taking in this direction.

There’s a tiny, beautiful church in my constituency. The congregation is down to less than a dozen, all elderly, and I worry about what is going to happen to a beautiful, irreplaceable building.

We need to preserve our churches. Where there’s a good congregation, to keep them as viable places of worship. If not, we need to find new purposes, with the support of the local community. And we need to increase secular interest in our church heritage. This is something I’m really passionate about, and very committed to finding the right solutions.

This Government has, from the start, recognized the value and power of culture in enriching people’s lives and regenerating communities – both the physical structures and the regeneration of a sense of community and a rekindling of human spirit. Protecting heritage is an important part of that.

That’s why this Government is committed to heritage protection reform and to pursuing the first heritage protection bill for several decades.

It is in a good state of readiness to be introduced at the earliest opportunity and the Government is committed to doing so.

I can’t pre-empt the Queen’s Speech, but I can make sure that we build maintain momentum behind reform whether or not the Bill is part of the legislative programme for the next session of Parliament.

We need to push ahead now with reform and we can do that on a range of fronts.

With the help of English Heritage and of the many voluntary bodies that play a vital role, I want to encourage greater public involvement, both by consulting more widely about the kind of things people value and want the planning and protection system to recognize. And by taking informed views about the interest of individual buildings and sites.

We can offer more information to the public by making details of all designated heritage assets accessible through a single internet portal – the Heritage Gateway.

We can introduce more transparency by giving better explanations of the system, and better explanation of the reasons why individual assets are designated and of the  specific obligations that go with it so that owners and managers know clearly where they stand.

The system needs to work more flexibly. We can look to the Heritage Partnership Agreements pioneered by English Heritage in partnership with the planning authorities and site managers for this – showing how the issues around sensitive sites can be identified early and dealt with before they become a problem.

We can also encourage earlier consideration of heritage issues when development proposals are being made, as I said earlier.

I’m personally very keen to see greater recognition of things that are of local importance, such as Conservation Areas and other locally designated heritage. The national system is of course focused on protecting our national treasures, I think we need more emphasis on the local heritage that really defines who we are and where we come from.

A crucial plank in these reforms is the new policy planning statement from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

I had an extremely positive discussion with Hazel Blears earlier this week, who reaffirmed her commitment to working closely with my Department and with English Heritage to replace the present outdated planning guidance.  We aim to produce a new Planning Policy Statement which is clear and up to date, which brings together the various heritage protection regimes and underlines their essential place in the planning context. We will of course circulate the draft for full public consultation so that you can have your say.

Alongside this, we are also working closely with colleagues at both CLG and Defra to develop a clear statement of the Government’s vision and priorities for the historic environment – a statement that properly captures its value in the widest sense across government and puts heritage at the heart of the planning system.

This statement is at the early stages of development, but I strongly welcome Hazel Blears’, Hilary Benn and Ed Milliband’s commitment to taking this forward.

Climate change is, of course, the theme of this year’s Heritage Counts report, and the Government has recently moved to ensure the issue is receiving the prominence it deserves with creation of Ed’s cabinet post as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

I started by talking about heritage providing us with a panorama of the past. Actually, it also provides us with a plan for the future. Historic buildings do not create a problem for the environment – it is only how we chose to use them that creates the problem.

I’d like to thank you all for your commitment to the historic environment – the evidence of which is clear in today’s report. It tells us we need to find ways of using our heritage wisely. If we do that in saving the past, then we are also saving the future. 

[ENDS]

top

Back to main

Back to top