The wild illogic of sustaining communities by destroying them was obvious to all but a few ideologues and economic theorists. In the most celebrated case, at Nelson in Lancashire, local people were helped in defence of their homes by, among others, the Prince’s Foundation,
Save Britain’s Heritage, the Victorian Society, a section of the national press – and, most forcefully, English Heritage. Its expert witnesses helped defeat the local authority – and, by extension, the ODPM – at two public inquiries, and it is now turning its attention to schemes in Liverpool. As a result, says an insider, “there are some quite cold feet in the government about the whole Pathfinder project”. The same man, who has the ear of ministers, described the conduct of one particular scheme in the northwest as “terrible, corrupt, really monstrous”.
You might think that handing victory to Nelson was a textbook example of the kind of thing the government had in mind when it charged English Heritage with helping to deliver its “central ambitions to improve the quality of life for the country’s citizens, reduce inequality, build a sustainable future based on improving economic performance, and improve the delivery of public services”. But the central ambitions of a centralising government do not include having its own policies thwarted.
A “sustainable future” is one where heritage properties turn a profit; not one where historic housing is granted some special value simply by virtue of its age and architecture. Worse: English Heritage had challenged the very bedrock on which the Pathfinder policy was built – the idea that it costs less to replace Victorian houses than it does to restore them.
As the Nelson inquiries showed, this is nonsense. English Heritage’s own research has demonstrated that repair over a 30-year period is between 40% and 60% cheaper than replacement. Thurley is inclined to play the issue down. “I might be young and naive,” he says,
“but I don’t believe that the government is going to penalise us because we fought them over Nelson and won.” Naive he is not; diplomatic he most certainly is. Nobody else was much surprised to hear Jowell’s henchmen mouthing off about vengeance.
Other battles are looming. The lord chancellor, for example, wants the proposed new UK Supreme Court to be sited in Middlesex Guildhall, opposite the Palace of Westminster in Parliament Square – a listed building of historic importance, which English Heritage does not want messed about with, but into which the government wants to slot a modern court that will reflect its own forward-lookingness. Teeth may not be dislodged but they will certainly be gritted, and the first oaths may not be of the kind expected from the witness box.
The problem is that confrontations with ministers are seldom likely to be trivial. “Obviously,” says Thurley, “we are different from a lobbying NGO, because we are funded by government and we are the government’s official advisers; and so we have to pick our fights very, very carefully. We need to make sure we’re going to win, and we need to be sure the fight is not over something that is just a single issue, but something that will influence a whole policy.”
The corollary is that bias against the historic environment runs deeper than any irritation the government may feel over specific buildings or policies. “It’s just as important to understand,” says the National Trust’s Tony Burton, “why it is not choosing to introduce new tax breaks on the historic environment.” This is an old and festering sore. Knocking down and replacing a building is exempt from Vat, but restoration is charged at 17.5%.
The consequence hovers somewhere between Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. Restorers are forced to reduce perfectly good buildings to wrecks – knocking out roofs, party walls, floors – simply to upgrade the job from repair to new-build and get it zero-rated. In a speech in November 2003, John Prescott made all the right green-pleasing noises: “I believe passionately in the value of our heritage and the need to preserve old buildings. In the past, regeneration has often meant wholesale demolition. But demolition is not an essential part of regeneration.”
To underline the point, he commended a scheme in Salford, where Urban Splash was “turning the inside of old terraced houses upside down to create attractive modern living spaces in a traditional Victorian house”. There were 349 homes in the scheme that, since Prescott spoke, has undergone a sad and significant transformation. Instead of retaining as much of the original structures as they possibly could, the developers are keeping only the facades. “Rather than retaining the existing party walls and first-floor structures,” says Urban Splash, “we are now demolishing these elements in order to avoid paying Vat.” The result is an increase in development costs of around £1.4m, and a significant rise in the amount of public funding needed to pay for it. The supreme irony, therefore, is that the government is shelling out more money to avoid one of its own taxes.
At the base of such conflicts, Burton suggests, is “a much more deep-seated political philosophy, which is about modern and tomorrow and the future and the young country – all that stuff, which is anathema to the way people understand what English Heritage is for. There are internal tensions between new bodies like the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which is part of that shiny new future, and English Heritage, which is seen as part of a slightly anachronistic former life. And then you’ve got the very straightforward: ‘We want to save money.’”
It is 10 years since English Heritage last had a grant increase: 10 years in which costs have escalated and the demands of government have grown ever more clamorous and tangential, veering further and further towards social inclusion, outreach, fairness, and all the rest of new Labour’s elastically undefinable “core values”, and further and further from English Heritage’s own mission to identify, understand and maintain historic buildings. It has been like watching a grand old kitchen turn into a political fast-food joint.
In the funding agreement signed by the DCMS for 1999-2002, English Heritage’s aims and targets were set out over nine tightly written and more or less comprehensible pages. The equivalent document for 2003-6, with Defra and ODPM now added to the signatories, is six pages longer and dripping with lines that might have been lifted from Bremner, Bird and Fortune. There are targets for “financial management training roll-out”, “organisational awareness”, “comprehensive characterisation coverage” and “mainstreaming the contribution English Heritage makes to citizenship studies”.
