The theme of her speech was the role of heritage in the ‘national recovery programme’. Welcoming the appointment of John Penrose as the Minister for Tourism and Heritage, she said that: ‘Heritage is the mainstream of our tourism industry. Four out of ten people who come here say that they do so because of our heritage. Accounting for £2.6 billion from international tourism and a further £5 billion from domestic tourism, as an economic asset it is just below agriculture and well above motor manufacture. It creates jobs. Between them, the private and public sectors of heritage provide 270,000 jobs and they are not just in the south east. They are also in those remote and rural areas of the country where options are so few. It has the capacity to grow and become an even greater source of national reputation and wealth.’
She also placed heritage at the heart of the sustainability debate. ‘Some of the best and most sustainable examples of social and economic regeneration in recent years (such as Weymouth and Blackpool) have been successful because they are built around their heritage.’ She also spoke up for conservation standards in the UK, saying that ‘this country leads the world in the care and protection we give the historic environment. People from Moscow, Naples and all over the world come to see how we have done it and to learn from us. Other countries are waking up to what they have already lost. If we do not send the signal that this matters to us, we will lose not only culturally but economically. We will also lose our leadership, which is so important to the rest of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth than that this does not matter. Failure will carry an extremely high price.’
Baroness Andrews regretted the impact of the recession on our industrial and cultural heritage, saying that historic property owners and developers were finding it difficult to borrow money for restoration projects. “Local authorities are also losing skilled staff, including conservation officers and planners — the people who guarantee that the places where we live are the best they can possibly be”, she said.
This led to a concluding plea that the Government should now provide parliamentary time for a heritage protection bill that would ‘reduce red tape, simplify the system and increase our ability to protect buildings and places at risk’. “The cost of not doing that will be the huge bills of dereliction and social diminution in the next few years”, she said.
The full text of Baroness Andrews’s speech can be read in Hansard: LINK
