Sir, It’s great news that the Harold Pinter archive will remain in this country, at the British Library (report, Dec 12). Your readers should not suppose that all other important contemporary literary archives are departing to America. American universities successfully built relationships with British writers at a time when enthusiasm among British institutions for acquiring archives, and the funding available, did not provide strong competition.

Things are now different. The advocacy first of Philip Larkin and later of Andrew Motion has created new attitudes. The UK Literary Heritage Working Group was set up in 2005 and, with the British Library, held the Manuscripts Matter conference in 2006. With the indispensable help of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the University of Hull has acquired Philip Larkin letters, and the University of Nottingham D. H. Lawrence papers, and institutions large and small are actively acquiring the archives of modern authors, publishers and critics. We know that the magic of seeing the actual sheet of paper and the crossings out and revisions of a great poem inspires new writing.

US collecting ambitions remain unsated, however. Grants in Britain are scarce and procedures complex. The UK Literary Heritage Working Group particularly seeks reform, therefore, of our tax regime, which does not encourage authors to enter into negotiations with potential public buyers in the UK. We have made the case that the douceur — an exemption from capital gains and inheritance taxes on heritage assets sold privately to a public institution — should be extended to income tax. We have also proposed that the acceptance in lieu scheme, which enables pre-eminent cultural items to be transferred to public ownership in lieu of inheritance tax, should be extended to all types of tax due on a deceased’s estate and that it should be possible for an archive to be accepted under acceptance in lieu during an author’s lifetime. This would be attractive to authors and would encourage collecting institutions themselves to negotiate and to start cataloguing, conserving and making archives accessible earlier.

Authors may need to sell their papers to enable them to continue writing. At the moment there are no incentives for them to approach UK institutions in preference to overseas ones. Tax reforms, at indiscernible cost to the Exchequer, would assist collecting and would be a way of recognising the cultural contribution of our writers.

Lord Howarth of Newport

Chair, UK Literary Heritage Working Group

House of Lords

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