About the National Lottery Heritage
Fund (the Fund)
The National
Lottery was created by the John Major government with the first
draw taking place in November 1994 and the unprecedented flow of
funding to good causes starting soon afterwards.
Parliament
ultimately decides on which good causes should benefit and in 2010
set the shares at 40% for community and 20% each for sport, arts
and heritage. Funds are awarded by the 12 independent and
expert arm’s length distributors around the UK - of which the
National Lottery Heritage Fund is one.
Created in 1994,
the Fund, then known as the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) supports
projects involving the national and local heritage of the United
Kingdom. A UK-wide arm’s length public body, we receive
policy directions from the UK Government and from the Welsh
Government (see Appendix One). Over the past 25 years
we have invested over £400million of National Lottery funds
into more than 2,600 projects in Wales.
The Fund invests in
the full breadth of heritage, from museums, libraries and archives,
to historic buildings and industrial sites, parks, landscape and
natural heritage, and the intangible, cultures and traditions and
people’s memories. We understand ‘culture’ as
referring to both heritage and the arts.
Heritage is for
everyone
We see heritage as
broad and inclusive; it is not defined by us but by those seeking
our funding – applicants tell us what they value from the
past and want to sustain and hand on to the future. In this way our
funding helps to tell the stories of the many communities that make
up our countries today and of our diverse, shared, heritage. Our
projects speak to this inclusive approach, one strongly supported
by National Lottery players. Regardless of the
respondent’s background, our work with National Lottery
players in 2017 revealed strong connections with heritage.
Heritage has wide appeal and is highly valued.
How effective has
the Welsh Government been in improving participation in and access
to culture for people in poverty?
The recently
published National Lottery Heritage Fund Strategic Funding
Framework 2019 – 2024, recognises explicitly, the potential
of heritage to improve community cohesion and empowerment, to
promote inclusion and
enhance health and
wellbeing. We are raising our ambition to achieve
greater inclusion in the heritage sector and for the next five
years, every application for funding for every
project, will need to achieve our new inclusion outcome “
a wider range of people will be involved in
heritage”.
25
years of grant-giving experience and
evidence shows the positive impacts of participation in heritage on
health and quality of life. Commissioning Baroness Andrews to
produce the report and to recommend ways in which cultural and
heritage bodies could work more closely together, demonstrated that
Welsh Government understood the difference that heritage can make
to people and to communities. Introducing legislation such as
the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, further
recognises the potential for culture and
heritage.
There is
considerable anecdotal evidence and examples to demonstrate that
the Fusion model has been effective in improving access to heritage
and culture for a wider range of people. National Lottery
funding has added value to the funds allocated by the Welsh
Government.
The Fund has been
represented on the Cultural Inclusion Board since its first meeting
in May 2015 and considers that the leadership and convening role of
Welsh Government colleagues and the funding of Fusion Coordinators
has enabled much of this success.
Our ‘Changing Lives’ advocacy campaign has highlighted
individuals from around the UK who have benefited from HLF projects
and gained social mobility:
https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/search?keys=changing+lives
How effective have
the efforts of Welsh Government sponsored bodies (namely the Arts
Council, National Museum, National Library and the Royal Commission
on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales) and local
government been in using culture to tackle poverty?
The Fund works closely with each of the organisations identified in
the Inquiry, either as a partner, a funder or within the National
Lottery family. Submissions to the Inquiry and evidence
already presented to the Committee have highlighted the good work
that is already happening across Wales, thanks to the investment of
the National Lottery Heritage Fund. In the case of the named
organisations, these usually large scale projects reflect the
priorities that have shaped our work over the last five
years. For example,
to bring a further step change to our impact on work with young
people, we launched Kick the Dust, a UK £10m programme
designed to increase the ambition of heritage organisations working
with young people aged 11-25. We commissioned young people to name
the programme and recruited 16 youth ambassadors from around the UK
to help us make funding decisions. National Museum Wales
successfully applied for a grant and is currently delivering a
project with a grant of £874,554.
Our
funding has supported great strides in delivering increased
participation over the last two decades. We are clear there is more to
do. There are still many cultural, social and economic
barriers that exist in accessing heritage. We are committed
to showing leadership and working in partnership to achieve higher
levels of participation in heritage, key to a flourishing, more
equitable society.
Our
future work will be supported by a new inclusion
strategy, informed by our public consultation. As well as
setting
clear expectations that our funded organisations and the
beneficiaries of the projects we fund should reflect more closely
the demographics of the population across the UK, we want to drive
the heritage and cultural sectors, alongside other agencies, to
deliver better evaluation and collect more robust data on who is
– and who is not - engaging with heritage to inform grant
making moving forward
The lack of
diversity in the heritage workforce and a culture of
graduate/post-graduate entry routes to employment are also problems
we have sought to tackle with targeted funding.
In 2017 we
funded a third round of Skills for the Future funding and
challenged
organisations to recruit and train a more
diverse workforce representative of the UK
population. Creative and Cultural Skills Wales received a grant of
£696,000 from the Fund to deliver a programme of activity
that will provide high quality, accredited training to 33 trainees
with the aim of addressing issues relating to lack of diversity in
the workforce.
Training will take
place across Wales within a network of 7 lead heritage partners
(MALD, Cadw, National Museum Wales, National Library of Wales,
Wrexham Museum and Archives, Glamorgan Archives and Cardiff Story.
and their sites (National Waterfront Museum, National History
Museum, Big Pit, National Slate Museum, Conwy Castle, Caerphilly
Castle, Wrexham Museum, National Library of Wales), supported
further by 15-20 additional heritage partners spanning the cultural
heritage sector who will host the 3-month placements.
How effective have
the Fusion pioneer programmes been in stimulating local
collaboration?
As a
result of the Fusion programme, organisations have collaborated in
new and innovative ways.
The
programme has created new opportunities for partnerships to be
developed between heritage and non-heritage organisations. A
platform has been provided for the heritage sectors to contribute
to wider discussions and agendas demonstrate and
communicate the
value that heritage can offer to addressing issues of inclusion and
wellbeing.
In addition to
local collaboration, the Fusion programme has enabled wider
strategic discussions to take place. For example, as a result
of Baroness Andrews’ report and the Fusion programme, the
Public Transport Users Advisory Panel (PTUAP) had reported to the
then Minister for Economy, Science and Transport with a series of
recommendations around overcoming the barriers around transport to
cultural sites. This was the first time in Wales the issue of
transport barriers to cultural participation had been considered in
a strategic context. A new resource was created and published
on the Welsh Government website that provided best practice around
transport considerations for heritage and cultural
organisations.
There
is evidence to suggest that as a direct result of Fusion, the
networks and range of partners that heritage organisations work
with has increased significantly.
What impact has the
Welsh Government’s Fusion programme had on using culture to
tackle poverty?
There is no doubt
that the Fusion programme has created new opportunities for
partners to come together to work and think differently in a way
that may not have happened without it. The National Lottery
Heritage Fund has welcomed the programme and recognises that small
amounts of money can create change. The programme has
increased capacity in the sector through the creation of new
resources (for example the ‘Getting Started with
Volunteers’ toolkit, created by the WCVA). New
training opportunities have been created and we are yet to see the
impact of many funded projects.
There is a
continued need to continue to evaluate the programme and the impact
it is making, including collecting robust data that can be shared
more widely across Welsh Government Directorates and priorities
(health, education, social services).
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