MONDAY 16 APRIL 2007

MR ROGER HANBURY AND MR ALAN LUTMAN

  Q400  Mr Jack: Nobody would disagree with any of that, and it is very worthy stuff and very good, but coming back to the core focus of what we are about, one of the things that worries me in what you have just said is you can have tremendous energy from people who have got the vision but unless British Waterways have got the hard cash to keep the core asset in good order or to develop it once a partnership has realised its vision, the whole thing does not happen. Is that a fair summary?

  Mr Hanbury: I think it is very heavily dependent on British Waterways. They have got the expertise, financial clout and experience to deliver these things so, yes, they are a victim of their own success, everybody looks to them, and sometimes that means people do not come forward and say, "We will make a financial contribution or do a particular thing" because they are all standing back and saying, "Well, British Waterways looks as though they have got plenty of money, why don't they do it?" and of course the reality is different, the fact of the matter is they cannot fund these schemes off their network unless they are separately funded and sustainable, hence some of the challenges which now exist with the Cotswold canals as to how those circles can be closed.

  Q401  David Lepper: I have two questions. On the issue of the museums, I was very impressed by what we were able to see briefly this afternoon but could you explain why it is necessary to have the museum and archive on three different sites?

  Mr Hanbury: Well, the archive is actually on 15 different sites. You have seen half of the archive today in the roof of Llanthony Warehouse. There is a smaller archive in Ellesmere Port and the rest of it is in public record offices around the country. It is an accident of history that material has ended up there. A point we did not explain to you earlier was we have just completed a £600,000 project to catalogue the archive across all those sites into an Internet accessible catalogue, so it is a virtually unified catalogue but physically if you want to go and see it you may go to a number of destinations. That works well, technology gives us an answer. None of the holders of that archive material want to hand it back to a central repository even if anybody had the money or the wherewithal to make that happen. The history of the museums is that they came together in 1999 from three separate sources. Gloucester was set up in 1989 as part of the first phase of regeneration here, Ellesmere Port in 1975 as part of an enthusiast driven set-up and Stoke Bruerne goes back to 1964 owned by British Waterways. They have come together as a designated collection now which gives some access to funding, although that is now much smaller than when we first set it up. You have then got to look at each site and say why it is there. Each of the sites interprets a different part of the waterway story. In Gloucester Docks we have got a superb historic site on which to explain the value of the port and I am quite convinced, as many others are, that the dock development would be a much poorer place without a serious interpretation of what Gloucester Docks mean to Gloucester. If you were challenging the idea that we might leave, that presents a whole series of knock-on effects and certainly if Chris Oldershaw was here from the Urban Regeneration Company he would be saying how concerned he would be if the museum ceased to be here to provide a cultural heart to the dock regeneration. In Ellesmere Port we have a seven acre site which is a narrow canal port, a trans-shipment port, to a broad canal, again a superb historic site. It has a large collection of historic vessels and if we were to exit there, there is a whole series of issues about where you would put that historic fleet and how you could deal with a collection which is substantially publicly owned. Each of those sites present huge challenges as well as huge opportunities. Stoke Bruerne is a much smaller site, it is really an outlier, a satellite to the operation, it is not a cost to the business, and if we can keep it going as a centre, which is valued by people locally and regionally, then we should, but if it became a liability we would have to take another view.

  Q402  Sir Peter Soulsby: Again, for the record, I was in fact the Vice-Chairman of the Trust when it was first established. Obviously it has moved on a long way since then and one of the things it has moved on to is the long-held aspiration to get the funding necessary to have free entry like other museums and to get the security that comes from that. I wonder how much progress there has been with that and what the response has been from DCMS to whom the approach was made.

  Mr Hanbury: Just for the record, we launched our campaign formally in August 2004. We asked supporters to express their views to their local MPs, which they did I think in reasonable number to the extent that questions were raised in the Lords and then there was an Adjournment Debate in the Commons which produced a response from Estelle Morris who said she understood exactly what we were trying to achieve, she supported it entirely and was only disappointed that she could not provide us with any funding at that particular stage. Usefully, and encouragingly, she said that we should keep asking. She, of course, ceased to be the Culture Minister at the following election, which was her choice, not the electorate's choice and certainly not our choice. Nonetheless, we took her advice and kept asking but also worked with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to commission an independent strategic review of our case which was run through 2005-06 which did indeed validate the case that it was not all made up by the Waterways Trust, it actually had some merit in the eyes of an independent assessor, and that report was presented to David Lammy about a year ago. It really set out not only the fact that the museums need some funding to sustain their position but also the huge potential which actually modest amounts of funding would unlock in terms of education and social inclusion, economic and regeneration activity around the three sites we operate. The conclusion of David Lammy's consideration was that he could not help us at that stage either even though he listened very carefully and quite clearly understood what we were asking for and saw value in it. The position has tightened somewhat since then because the Comprehensive Spending Review has taken a grip but in November we launched the second phase of our campaign, this time focusing on free entry because in the interim Government had trumpeted very much, and quite rightly so, the success of its policy of free entry which had seen visitor numbers to free entry museums increase by over 70 per cent, some of them by 100 per cent and some of them by more than 100 per cent. Our trustees felt that we could not stop asking, we should get on with it and do that in a positive way, so our angle in terms of our public campaign is to say for a modest amount of funding we can deliver a huge amount for you, the Government, and we can safeguard a publicly owned collection which is owned by Government, not by us, vested in British Waterways and on long-term loan to us, and also put in place the desires and policy aspirations of Waterways for Tomorrow that endorsed our existence as a museum operator when that paper was written in 2000.

  Q403  Sir Peter Soulsby: Have Defra been helping you press that case?

  Mr Hanbury: Yes, they have been helping us. Alun Michael, when Waterways Minister, was a great champion of our cause and probably went beyond the call of duty in promoting our case to DCMS. All along it has been made clear to us that Defra did not feel that they had any funding they could contribute to this exercise but they would give us every assistance, one might say short of actual financial help. They have continued to take an interest in it. I guess in recent months the Defra interest has declined to the extent that we have not been able to meet the Minister and debate the issues with him. We have tended to feel that it is a DCMS issue anyway and in the circumstances Defra find themselves it would be a hard call to ask them to put any funding in.

  Q404  Mr Jack: We have heard from the evidence of a number of people today about transparency of British Waterways, the relationships that it has with its customers, the relationships that it has with people with ideas who want to develop the waterway network. As a continuing interlocutor with BW, what is your assessment of that line of concern? Are they as open as they should be? Are they as co-operative as people would like them to be? How do you get on with them?

  Mr Hanbury: British Waterways de facto are a huge supporter of our operations, they do give us nearly £1 million a year. I am pleased to say that in recent discussions we have made real progress in advancing our work with them to the extent that they are working with us as we try to find a solution to the museum's funding and they are encouraging us to look at fund raising as a proposition which can see an expansion of our activity and ultimately help generate a greater contribution to our core costs. Those are two hugely important steps. If you like, the position in the short-term is more optimistic than our paper would have suggested in the sense that we were concerned about BW's ability to contribute more to the museums. This year they are giving us inflation on our contract, which is more than we could have expected, frankly, in circumstances where they have had a huge tranche of cash taken out from under them. That is very encouraging. However, the long-term impact of the cuts if they are sustained is more worrying because quite clearly they have got to cut their cloth and all the issues about the integrity of the network are absolutely key to the regenerative benefit of waterways, and you have heard that this afternoon. I hope some certainty can be put into this and perhaps ideas like the idea of a contract with Government, on which I worked when I was at British Waterways which would have put the Defra grant into a contractual framework for services rendered, would be a very positive way of building certainty for everybody involved, and I am talking about waterway businesses as well as others further down the food chain like ourselves who depend on a direct contribution. It is the uncertainty which is the real killer. If there is anything which comes out of this process of the review of the Defra cuts we hope it is about building that certainty and modernising the relationship between British Waterways and Government so that it is not so vulnerable to these short-term changes in direction which contractually at the moment are possible, but they need to be closed off so that this does not happen again. It is a very, very damaging and destructive position to be in because it threatens British Waterways, it threatens us, it threatens every business along the waterway and puts at risk their contribution to the welfare of society.

  Q405  Chairman: In conclusion, this particular area of British activity is probably as good as any to demonstrate the role of the great British volunteer, but to what extent does that take away in as much as many of the activities may not be completed? Stroudwater without the Cotswold Canal Trust would not have got anywhere. To what extent do the statutory bodies, not just central Government but local government, take voluntary activity as a given and that can be somewhat counterproductive because people do not engage from the statutory sector until it is probably far too late and they expect much in return for too little?

  Mr Hanbury: There are a number of points there. Yes, you are absolutely right, the volunteers have kept the waterways alive. I have made a career out of waterways, I am privileged to say, and if it was not for the fact that people fought the corner in the post-war years and made sure waterways were not filled in, we would not have those today. Ironically, it was the Chesterfield Canal (from whom we have heard this afternoon) which was one of the leaders in that respect because, as I recall, they managed to get the Chesterfield Canal, the bit that was owned by British Waterways, into cruising status instead of remainder waterway way back in 1968 when that might have seen the end of the whole of the Chesterfield Canal restoration project. Again, having worked in the sector for a long time I understand its culture and the fact of the matter is that waterways are very public sector dominated and you have only got to go and talk to the National Trust to realise how further progress could be made. They have a 1:9 ratio of staff to volunteers, that is one member of paid staff to nine volunteers. It seems to me that waterways have got quite a long way to go before they get anywhere near that level of involvement. There are people out there who would like to do it but getting there is a huge management task. The safety culture needs to be right and that presents a huge barrier. Turning round the sector provides co-ordinators and managers to unlock that. Within the midst of that there are people like the Cotswold Canal Trust who, as you have heard today, are very, very professional in the way they are setting about the task, they are putting on training, they are making sure they have people who are working as paid employees, trained properly and able to do the job. That is an exemplar of how the sector should move forward but it needs a lot of management input to get there. We know that in the museums and in our own waterway projects where managing volunteers is a huge challenge where there is water and moving objects like locks and bridges and boats involved, that is a big challenge in terms of training and safety management.

  Chairman: Gentlemen, again, thank you very much. That concludes the evidence. You have heard me say three times already but I will repeat it: what has been said cannot be unsaid. What you might like to have said may still be said in the form of further written evidence, although keep it brief because we have plenty of written evidence already. Can I particularly thank you for hosting us today, it has been a very pleasurable activity; getting us on water was always going to be a winner. We did use that period of time quite usefully and it was really helpful for those who do not know the area as well as I do to come up and see the regeneration that is going on alongside the canal and what potential that brings. I would also like to thank the audience who stuck it out with maybe less comfort breaks than Members of the Committee over the last nearly three hours. Without you it would not have been the same occasion. We like to get out and show that we are doing our business in as transparent a way as possible and it does make us feel it is worthwhile when people actually turn up to listen to us. You can always read the stuff, and no doubt you will read the stuff, in due course. It has been a very good session and I hope that we do similar things, if not here then in other places in the future. Thank you to our audience and obviously thank you to those who have made this possible, including our own Committee staff and the other people who have made the thing as worthwhile as it has been, including the witnesses because if you were not here we would have had a very quiet session even though I am sure we would have made good use of the time. Thank you.