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Interview Jeremy Hunt - Conservative
NEWS FOCUS: INTERVIEW with Jeremy Hunt - Conservative MP
Labour, Conservative – what future for the nation’s past? Britain will be in the financial doldrums for a long time, whoever is in power after next year’s general election. And money lies at the heart of most, but not all, of the long-unresolved issues surrounding the survival and protection of our heritage. Jeremy Hunt is likely to be the next Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – a remit which includes safeguarding that heritage – should the Conservatives win. He talks to ‘Cornerstone’. Interview Robin Stummer. Photographs John Lawrence
The early morning sun shone bright over Farnham Castle as the local MP, the man who is likely to be the first Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the first Conservative government of the 21st century, pulled into the car park. While the rest of the country battled with torrential rain under late November’s yellow-grey skies, this corner of south-west Surrey basked in an eerily June-like clear blue.
Little clouds were, however, beginning to form. “You can’t go in the castle today, or any day at the moment,” said the receptionist at the adjoining conference centre. “They’re pulling it all down. It’s going. The whole lot.”
“Are you sure about that?” asked Cornerstone.
“Yep, it’s all coming down. Demolition.”
“Repair work, you mean, surely?”
“No, total demolition,” she replied, with absolute certainty.
Controversial. Not even Parliamentarian general Sir William Waller, who captured Farnham Castle in 1642 and ordered its partial demolition, contemplated the imposing Norman stronghold’s complete eradication. Was this a test-bed for heritage asset management policy under a future Conservative government? – Just pull the tiresome buggers down.
“But you can’t do that,” remonstrated Cornerstone.
“Sorry, it’s begun.”
“But…”
THANKFULLY, Farnham Castle was not scheduled for annihilation on that, or any, day. The grade I listed structure is, however, undergoing major renovation work – including the removal of a large and ugly, helicopter-pad-like sprawl of concrete within its grounds – as part of a £700,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant awarded to the castle in October. Works will see the Keep and the Bishop’s Palace re-united under single ownership, when English Heritage hands custodianship of the Keep over to the Farnham Castle company, a private business.
Securing that grant has been seen as something of a personal triumph for the fresh-faced Member of Parliament for South West Surrey, the very man now striding across the castle car park with the nonchalant gait of a batsman taking the crease with a two innings and 300-run advantage. “Smile, wait, don’t do anything rash, it’s all in the bag,” the team captain might have advised him. “Tories head for landslide”, trumpeted that morning’s Daily Telegraph. Is the game over already?
JEREMY Hunt, 43, the shadow culture secretary, has been an MP since 2005. He is already tipped as a future leader of his party, a “man of substance”, a wealthy Charterhouse and Oxford man – PPE, First Class – who is nevertheless light on the aloof, patrician air which hangs heavy about some of his shadow cabinet colleagues. A politician, then, who if elevated to government might not wish to linger too long at the helm of the cash-strapped, demoralised DCMS. After all, Labour has been changing its Culture Secretaries more frequently than some people change their socks – three since June 2007, a current average of just 10 months each in the post. It was curious behaviour for a party which made such great claims to be the champion of Britain’s cultural vitality. The eternal age of change at the DCMS scuppered any real chance of significant reform of the way we protect and pay for the historic landscape. Surely Mr Hunt would try to hold out for a decent innings, long enough to actually get something meaningful done?
“If I were to become Culture Secretary,” he says, “which is something I would love to do more than anything else, I hope I would have a good long shot at it, but in the end that would depend on whether David Cameron thought I was doing a good job.”
Which is a statement of fact – but hardly a promise of stability.
“It’s not really about David Cameron saying ‘This is one of our most important posts’,” continues Hunt, “ – I think he would say that now if you asked him – he’d say that the culture brief was incredibly important. It has one of the smallest budgets, but is one of the most important and influential ministries across the piece.
“If you look at some of the things I’ve been saying in the past few months, at a time of economic crisis, in many ways the DCMS is an economic ministry, it’s responsible for the creative industries… all of these have massive economic strategic importance, and if we are trying to rebalance the economy away from dependence on financial services, away from dependence on debt, then we need to look at the other assets we’ve got. Our heritage is one of the greatest of them all.”
Yet that oft-avowed importance of the DCMS is not reflected in the amount of cash made available to it by the Treasury, a shortfall which has its origins in the days of the John Major government and the arrival of Lottery funding. Pressing the Chancellor of the Exchequer for an increase in funding for culture and heritage will not be a priority for whoever takes over at the DCMS following next year’s General Election.
“I think in the current economic climate it’s very unlikely that we will see an increase in public spending in any of the DCMS areas of responsibility,” says Hunt. “The overriding priority of the next government, whoever wins the election, is going to be to get the national finances back in order.
“The reality is that £1 in every £4 the government spends at the moment is going on the national debt… That doesn’t mean there aren’t other things you can do.
“The other thing we’ve looked at is reforming the Lottery. We’ve a series of reforms that will generate around £200m per annum for good causes.
‘ENGLISH HERITAGE AND THE HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND NEED A RENEWED SENSE OF PURPOSE; IT DOES MEAN LOOKING VERY HARD AT THEIR COSTS’
The Conservatives first floated the idea of merging some of the grant-making and administrative functions of English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund nearly a year ago, a move that would lead, the party says, to a putative annual saving of some £40m. Oddly, at the time no one noticed this undoubtedly significant proposal. Cornerstone shed light on the overlooked idea in its autumn edition. Despite initial denials from Conservative Central Office – mildly panicked during conference season that the party might be shown to be soft on spending cuts – the Tories went on to swiftly dust off the EH/HLF merger idea and have made it the centrepiece of their heritage funding strategy.
Yet, as some heritage insiders have pointed out, merging these two very different bodies, which have very different grant-making criteria, might result in a very troubled marriage.
“Doing something like that is never going to be easy,” concedes Hunt. “But what I’ve said to Carole Souter [HLF head] and Simon Thurley [English Heritage head] is that George Osborne made a pledge at the Conservative Party Conference that we would reduce the cost of Whitehall by a third… If we possibly can we want the brunt of the savings to come in the administration, and not in the amount of money that’s given out in grants. It’s not going to be easy, they have very different remits.
“If they can come to me with a better solution as to how to save those administration costs I will listen to it.
“Boosting the amount of Lottery cash available will be one thing, and the other that we’re developing is a programme to boost private giving and philanthropy. We don’t have a philanthropic culture in this country in the way that they do in the United States, but I don’t believe that we couldn’t, and it’s worth having a go and seeing what we can do.”
CHARMING mounds of cash out of the wealthy and super-wealthy has been the dream of culture and heritage Secretaries of State since time immemorial. Yet private and corporate funding of culture has been sporadic, at best. And even if millionaires and billionaires did suddenly open their wallets and purses upon the arrival of a Conservative government, how many of them would willingly choose to pay for unglamorous yet vital heritage work – say, emergency weather-proofing a derelict manor house, re-leading a parish church roof, surveying an ancient barn, repairing stonework on an old country bridge, shoring up a listed garden wall – as opposed to backing a high-profile ballet company, an orchestra, a modern art gallery? Not many.
So why not just stump up some real money for English Heritage, and reverse years of decline? “English Heritage has a very important role, and I think it does some very good work,” says Hunt, now with a touch of wariness. “It’s not always popular. Part of its job is to be unpopular from time to time. I obviously don’t agree with everything it does, but the question I will be asking, if I’m Secretary of State, of Simon Thurley and indeed Carole Souter, and everyone heading up heritage organisations, is: ‘Given how tough times are, what more can you do to reduce your expenditure on administration so you can protect and indeed increase the amount of money you give out as grants to heritage organisations?’ … English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund need to have a renewed sense of purpose, but it does mean looking very hard at their own costs.”
In other words, save, save, save, and try not to spend.
OF course, viable, privately- owned and run “public” heritage buildings can be found across the country; the hundreds of country houses great and small, building preservation trust projects, churches and chapels in the care of charitable bodies. Yet few, if any, are thriving, and all are exposed to the vicissitudes of the economic climate. As English Heritage has found, visitor numbers can rise during a slump, but that additional income merely reduces pressure on government to stump up extra cash.
But at Farnham Castle at least, the sun is still shining. “Farnham Castle is a superb example of a public-private partnership that’s worked very well,” says Hunt.
Indeed, once the current works are complete, the castle will be a real asset for local people and visitors. The number of public open days will be extended, and admission charges scrapped. But the company which will run the entire site is well established in its field, conference and event hosting, and Farnham is one of the most prosperous towns in England. Would the public-private partnership model function well in, for example, inner-city Manchester, or for an historic pub jammed between a Midlands motorway and a sink estate. Or for a remote ancient country barn?
“In the end my responsibility is to protect out heritage assets for future generations,” says Hunt. “The question I would ask is how you would ensure that those assets are protected for future generations and how you would ensure that the public was able to benefit from those assets. We do have some interesting models in this country, a number of stately homes where partnerships have worked.”
‘WE HAVE TO REMEMBER THAT HERITAGE ISN’T JUST THE HERITAGE OFTHE ARISTOCRATS IN OUR COUNTRY. IT IS ACTUALLY ALL OF OUR HERITAGE’
That mention of stately homes fuels the growing suspicion among heritage professionals that, for the Conservatives, “heritage” tends to mean castles, cathedrals and stately homes, and little else. So, what does the likely next Secretary of State responsible for looking after the nation’s heritage think that “heritage” actually is? For once, Hunt hesitates, uncertain of how to reply. “To answer that question I would need to give it a little bit of thought,” he says. Then, after a few seconds of silence, he’s back on track. “English Heritage took me around the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, they’re embarking on a project to preserve one of the old jewellery factories in exactly the condition it would have been 100 years ago. It’s an incredibly important part of our industrial heritage.
“I don’t think it is just about castles and stately homes, and I think we have to remember heritage isn’t just the heritage of the aristocrats in our country. It is actually all of our heritage.”
Well, nearly all. Hunt is not under the spell of modernist architecture. “There is a very lively debate, which I don’t think is anything to do with party politics, about which buildings should be listed and which shouldn’t. We support the measures that were going to be in the Heritage Protection Bill [which Labour abandoned after years in preparation], and we seek to bring in similar measures, if we win the next election, to simplify the whole process of listing buildings. It’s a matter of judgement. I personally supported Margaret Hodge’s decision over Robin Hood Gardens [the Secretary of State for heritage recently refused to give listed protection to the decaying modernist housing estate in East London] and I do think that we have some horrific eyesores in central London. I struggle to see why they are part of our heritage.”
SO, how will the hard-pressed heritage sector get through the coming years, whoever is in power? As long as millions of Britons keep picking the wrong Lottery numbers every week, the bedrock of heritage funding will more or less remain in place. That and tourism. “Three-quarters of visitors to the UK come because they want to go to heritage and cultural attractions,” says Hunt. “It’s a major part of our tourist offer. That’s very important in terms of regeneration.”
Vital, important, major, key, essential – the epithets attached by politicians of all shades to heritage and culture abound. Yet still there is no prospect of one extra farthing from government. Heritage, it seems, has it all to play for, but remains something that government simply will not pay for.