National Trust for Scotland
09:31
It is a great pleasure to welcome our former Presiding Officer, the Rt Hon George Reid, to give us a presentation on his review of the National Trust for Scotland. Following the presentation, he will take questions from members.
It is pleasant to be back, although it is a little odd to be sitting at this end of the table.
The committee should have a full copy of the report. I want to spend seven or eight minutes on headline stuff, which will inform the subsequent discussion.
The report is called “Fit for Purpose”. It was started in October last year and finished at the end of July and contains some fairly radical proposals for reform.
The National Trust has been around for a long time—80 years in Scotland. It is a good thing, and everybody accepts it. It is important for two fundamental reasons. First, there is its vast and wonderfully diverse portfolio of 129 buildings, 200,000 acres of some of the best wilderness in Scotland, islands and battlefields. Further, it looks after more birds than are looked after by RSPB Scotland. That is a wonderful portfolio that is important to the nation.
Secondly, by telling Scotland’s story, from Neolithic to contemporary times, it helps to shape the identity, sense of place, sense of time and sense of continuum of all of us. It is also important to the wellbeing of the nation. People of very few nations can get out of cities and on to the land in the way that we can in Scotland. Further, it is not unimportant to the economy of Scotland, with the heritage environment bringing in about £2.4 billion and employing, directly and indirectly, about 40,000 people.
The National Trust is a key issue in how we manage this particular sector.
In November last year, there was dismay in the jam-packed annual general meeting of the NTS at Murrayfield when, out of an apparently blue and cloudless sky, came notice of redundancies, closures and the sale of the headquarters in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh. At the time, the press carried headlines such as, “NTS Crisis”, “A Bankrupt Management”, “A Decade of Decline”, “NTS Must Merge”, “Books Don’t Balance” and printed stories that said the cuts would result in more of the same being done for less money, that NTS’s system of governance was byzantine and that NTS had forgotten its basic purpose.
Into that situation, I came to carry out a fit-for-purpose strategic review, commissioned by the trust’s council, which asked that the review be robust and independent and that it do three things. First, it was to consider not only governance, which all previous reviews had done, but resources, to see whether the organisation was able to address current and future challenges. Secondly, it was to do so independently, taking into account all stakeholders’ and thirdly, it was to report within a very tight timescale of nine months, which is a tight turnaround for a strategic review. We achieved that target, with the report going to council at the beginning of August.
I will say a word about fit-for-purpose reviews, which seem to be my fate since I left Parliament. I carried out the big governance review in Northern Ireland in 2007 and 2009, I have been engaged in an effectiveness and efficiency review of famine aid to Africa, and now I have done the National Trust review. The model, as you know, was put forward by the Treasury in the 1990s, and was intended to improve service delivery and value for money. I will outline, in a simplistic way, how it works. It is not unimportant to understand the methodology, as other third-sector organisations will have to go through the same process, given the economies in state spending.
First, we asked key questions. What are your vision and values? What are you for? Everyone thinks that that is the easy bit, because they already know the answer. However, once you divide that by the resources that are available to an organisation, you sometimes find that they just cannot deliver what they say they are for, given the resources that they have.
That took a fair bit of time. If you get those elements in sync, you can begin to do a corporate or a strategic plan. However, the NTS did not have one. A strategic plan informs the corporate plan and cascades down through departments to individual members of staff so that everyone from the chief executive to the gardeners knows how they fit in and what value they add to the organisation. Performance indicators enable performance appraisals—using traffic lights: red, amber and green—and determine whether targets have been delivered quarter by quarter. You can report back on that to the stakeholders at the annual general meeting, and the process rolls on for another year.
Given that the trust has 315,000 members, it was important for the process to be an iterative one. One must deal with the individual members and hear their concerns. I therefore engaged in 32 public meetings across the country, and we had a massive questionnaire. Some 12,000 members contributed to the review, which is a sizable number. With the help of the Scottish Futures Trust, we had a look over the horizon at some of the challenges that are coming in terms of economic cutbacks, climate change—with increased downpours overwhelming Victorian rhone pipes—and, in relation to demographics, how the ageing of the population will affect visitor numbers.
The iterative process comes in four stages. Everyone was asked to identify the issues. Some people in the NTS did not like this, saying that it was giving voice to dissentients. It is very difficult for “Get rid of the chair” to be issue number 1, so we came out of all the meetings with six issues, graded. We then went on to consider options—What do we do about a, b, c and d?—and graded them and took them through to analysis by a steering group that was made up of some pretty weighty people, including Tom Farmer, the Duke of Buccleuch and Susan Deacon, who was helpful in terms of local community engagement, and finally we arrived at a decision in July.
The fitness test asked a series of questions, because I went in with no preconceptions. What resources do you actually have? That was one of the problems. How does your governance move the show forward? That was a difficult area. Are you really communicating with your members, given that you are the biggest third-sector organisation in Scotland? What is the culture of the organisation? I have to say that I found the organisation to be a bit 1920s-ish in terms of corporate bureaucracy.
About three to four months in, I had identified some matters of real concern to me. There was no strategic plan, which makes it difficult to do a fit-for-purpose review. The budget was prepared on a needs-must basis, with planning added on afterwards instead of informing the budget.
There was no single inventory of assets. The cabinet had been stuffed with bits and pieces accumulated over the years, but different divisions held what they owned in separate systems, ranging from file indexes to written records. The work to put that right is almost finished.
For me, the biggest problem of all emerged when I said to the trust, “Give me some idea of the likely costs for maintenance and repair,” only to be informed in writing by senior management that
“The cost of maintaining the estate is unknown”.
That is the key question: how much is it going to cost to keep the show on the road over the next 50 years? The board admitted in writing that
“We have known for five years that NTS is unsustainable”.
There has been an almost preponderant concentration on unrestricted reserves rather than on the operating position and the big question of what the bills over the next 50 years are going to be like. Of course, there are reasons for that, as indicated in my next slide, which shows just how constrained NTS’s finances are. At the moment the trust has quite substantial funds of almost £170 million but its unrestricted funds amount only to £8.5 million. That is all that it has to play with; in fact, on the far side of the economic crisis, those funds had fallen to a dangerously low £3.2 million. In order to keep going for six months, it should have £17 million, which means that, even after the respite, it is only about halfway there.
The reason for that is that most of the money is locked away in endowment for properties, is restricted in use or is designated for specific purposes. NTS can play with only 5 per cent of its funding simply because it has accumulated so many properties over the past 80 years. Someone would ask the trust, “Will you take my castle?” The trust would say, “Yes”, and the castle would go into its hands without any accompanying funding or endowment. Such offers were, of course, very tempting when tax breaks were available. However, as the next slide shows, only 12 properties—or 10 per cent—are fully endowed; almost 50 per cent are partially endowed and a vast number are not endowed at all. A former very senior board member told me in writing that the trouble with acquisitions in the past was that they were based on sentiment rather than on financial common sense. That is the fundamental problem.
That led to my next question. Given that the board knew for five years—and plenty of people had been saying for 10 years—that the trust was not sustainable, why had it not done something about the situation? I think that the reason is 1920s corporatism. Before the formation of this Parliament, Scottish legislation—in this case, the National Trust for Scotland Order Confirmation Acts of 1935 and 1938—was based largely on the English model, which was appropriate to a big country. Moreover, the system of governance was appropriate to the 1920s, when people took the train, used telephones and every so often came together in big meetings to discuss things.
In the 1990s, Lord Mackay of Clashfern attempted to sort out the situation by creating for management purposes a board that came out of the council of trustees, but strategic direction was left to the council. There were some very odd things, such as the fact that the audit and risk committee still reports to the council—which is not concerned with day-to-day operational management—and the vast numbers of people involved. I could not find another charity that had 87 trustees and 100 other non-executives to keep the show on the road. As one submission put it, that has resulted in a “Constant Culture of Consultation” and a “dysfunctional system of Governance”.
Although I was primarily interested in the stability and sustainability of Scotland’s heritage, it became very clear to me that, if the governance did not change, nothing would change. The next slide shows my first set of recommendations, the first of which relates to charity best practice. We dealt with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and charity auditors and the message was that changing the governance was the fulcrum of reform that would allow the trust to be given strategic direction.
It was all a bit slash and burn but, with that approach, the number of trustees was reduced from 87 to 15. That is appropriate and gives a reasonable mix of skills and decision making. No representative organisations—of which there were 30-plus on the council—should be involved in a trusteeship role in the future. No senior staff should be trustees. We must make a clear distinction between governance and management. Previously, chief executives were charged with scrutinising themselves, which does not work. There should be a split between the two.
09:45
God bless the trust; it has got a move on. A new board will be in place by April, or perhaps slightly earlier. Its first task will be to set the five-year strategic plan and to report transparently to the AGM. In other words, if measures such as selling Wemyss house in Charlotte Square are not in the plan, the board must go back to the members to tell them that.
There are a number of immediate issues. The trust needs a new mission statement. People think of that as being public relations—it is not. Fundamentally, it is about the organisation’s purpose. There will be a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the purists, who believe in pure conservation, and people who believe in visitor attractions. They must sort out the matter in the next year. There will be a single inventory of all assets and a rigorous audit of the cost of maintaining the estate, which will lead on to a full property planning process—statements on the significance of each property, business plans and action plans.
The trust already has a transition committee that is putting the changes into effect. Its proposals must be signed off by the AGM on 25 September. I am confident that they will go through, but with membership organisations you never know. None of the changes will be signed off until the end of the month.
In concluding, I return to the big question. The cost of maintaining the estate is an unknown. There are various formulas for working it out. The Chorley formula looks at a property over 50 years, assumes a 5 per cent return on investment and gives a figure for how much you will have to pay for downpipes, roofs and so on. I have not used the actual estimate because it tends to be on the high side. The trust had a stab at it in the 1990s in the north-east and, again, the figures were far too high. However, the condition audit must go through.
A quick audit, which will give Ken Calman a ballpark figure, is being done now. The trust must look at the significance of each property—how it relates to the story of Scotland, the local community and the landscape. Then, you get on to action plans and business plans.
However, what will get people excited is the issue of inalienability, which some outside organisations have described as
“A Pact with the Nation to preserve properties for all time”.
I see no reason for the trust to keep byres, bungalows and bits and pieces of sheds; those can be used to bolster the general income fund in the short run. However, once the ballpark figure is clear, there are some real questions for the trust to address. The endowment of £67 million will probably need to be doubled; three times as much may be needed. That should not cause panic, because universities have faced exactly the same situation. You do not have to raise the money now—you have 50 years in which to do it. There are good prospects for a big endowment appeal, once the trust has got its affairs in order.
On balance, the trust will have to go for a smaller portfolio—it is too big and too small at the same time. The key issue for constituency members is to look now at alternative management at local level, while retaining National Trust for Scotland ownership. There is plenty of that already. The picture at the bottom of the slide that I am now showing is of the national museum of rural life at Kittochside, a National Trust property that is run by the National Museums of Scotland. The top picture is of Balmerino abbey. The trust has only two stonemasons, but Historic Scotland has masses. Why should such ruinous structures be under the management of the National Trust for Scotland? It does not make sense.
So, under the pressure of the economic cuts that will obviously hit Historic Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and other agencies, I am looking for much more joined-up working with Historic Scotland in the form of guardianship, national museums, local authorities, community groups and restoring tenancies.
If we look up the hill to the gardens and properties that lie just this side of Edinburgh castle, we see Patrick Geddes’s flat, which is owned by the NTS and is lying empty. We should restore tenancies of 10 years. There are people who would pay £50,000 a year to live there—it has five bedrooms—but they would have to live there in accordance with agreed conservation conditions.
On going local, the top picture on the slide is of Seaton Delaval hall, which is probably the best example of the English baroque style. The National Trust south of the border took it on after a consultation exercise with 100,000 local people. It is in an area of significant multiple deprivation outside Newcastle. The community raised £1 million in six months. The property was turned over to a large extent to the community. You will not get tea with doilies there; you will get fish and chips, and why not?
There are allotments and adventure playgrounds in the grounds, along with farmers’ markets. Children from the local school use the basement for a theatre. The property is being given back to the people and new members are being brought in at the same time. There are heritage properties in Scotland that could be used for community regeneration in the same way. Braemar castle has never been owned by the trust, and the community of Braemar owns its castle. It is the centre of village life, and why not? There are similar good examples of community partnerships at Arduaine, Brodick, Cromarty, Kellie, and Leith hall. Smail’s printing works in Innerleithen is now back in the market and producing commercially.
Of course, the challenge is for the centralisers to just let go, and if a number of properties are going to get alternative management, there is going to have to be a letting go.
That takes me to something that the committee has examined in times past: a joined-up team Scotland strategy. The other day, I saw a statement from the minister for culture south of the border saying that heritage is not going to be immune from cuts. He diced around 25-30 per cent, and I think that we all realise that that order of cuts is going to come in Scotland as well; they will have to. Heritage cannot be immune.
There is opportunity in that. As I worked my way around the heritage agencies, I still found an awful lot of the old protective silo mentality—“Oh, we can’t do that. We have a different system. We are rather special.” The charity position and VAT were mentioned, and so on. My general conclusion on heritage in Scotland is that there is still far too much duplication and crossover, and too many sectoral interests down silos. That issue must be addressed.
It can be addressed through savings and maximising value for Scotland in such areas as procurement—a lot of the agencies are buying exactly the same things from south-east Asia, but are putting different sweaters on teddy bears, for example. Other areas include warehousing, common marketing by VisitScotland, Historic Scotland and the NTS, common publications such as leaflets, and building maintenance: Historic Scotland has significantly more staff in building than the NTS. I would love to see a register of all conservationists in Scotland and agencies borrowing them from one another. Garden tours in Scotland could be joined up from the botanic gardens right through to Arduaine. There should be a common electronic point of sale system, and NTS properties should be used as visitor information centres. There are savings to be had and value can be maximised if we have the courage to put all that through.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern said something rather wise when he attempted his review in the 1990s. He said that the NTS had been set up not for the members but for the benefit of the people of Scotland and then said:
“There are times when the interests of the nation have to take precedence over the interests of NTS members.”
The National Trust for Scotland is part of a heritage sector that is of substantial benefit to the nation. The sector is worth £2.3 billion in tourism, travel and construction and it employs 40,000 people. It is bigger than whisky. It also provides spiritual and cultural benefit for the nation’s health and wellbeing—in Scotland we have a wonderful benefit of space—and for determining who we are as a people. Our heritage and our land shaped us—they made us what we are—and we have an obligation to future generations.
We do not need a plethora of policies, programmes and consultations in heritage. In a small country such as Scotland, we probably need to work towards a single joined-up heritage policy into which all fit, because we all need a future for our past. As I said, the land and the built heritage have made us what we are, and how we conserve that will say what we value as a people and how we pass it on to generations who are still to come.
It has been a tough review. It was not easy to do it in nine months, but it has delivered. I am enthused by the positive attitude to change that the trust has taken. It sees that change is necessary and I think that it will go through. Ken Calman, who is not without skills and strategic direction, is the man to do it, with the backing of Kate Mavor.
Thank you for that comprehensive summary of your report. Having read through it, I get the picture of an organisation that was not so much in crisis but in disarray because, over its 80-year history, it acquired properties and liabilities without any clear strategic direction as to why it was doing so. I also get the picture that, last year, the trust rather panicked about its financial situation and rushed into decisions that were perhaps premature or, in some cases, as the report highlights, ill advised. Is that a fair summary?
Yes. Undoubtedly, the trust got a fright with the economic crisis. The value of investments fell radically, as did income, and the general income fund—the trust’s unrestricted reserves—fell perilously close to £3 million.
The way that the trust has kept going in the past five years is interesting. It has sold off assets, but it cannot keep doing that to infinity. We are talking about properties of no great heritage value but, each time it sells one, it is gone and the trust does not get that chance again. It has also delayed projects. That is dangerous because, given climate change, the more it puts off essential maintenance repairs, the more expensive the bill will be down the road.
The trust took the decisions that it did at some speed. Some were ill advised. For example, it paid off its painters in Glasgow and it now has to spend much more in contracting out to outsiders. However, taking those decisions did one thing: although it had not addressed the big issue of maintenance, the trust bought itself breathing space. Its reserves are up to more than £8 million at this point.
The trust will not implode, although it got close to that last year, and must now take the much broader, strategic approach that I suggest. It must establish forms of governance that are appropriate to 21st century Scotland, not rooted in some Westminster legislation from the 1930s, and take some courageous decisions about whether it is too big or too small and what its core portfolio should be.
From the figures, it appears that the trust’s breathing space has been created by increasing income rather than reducing expenditure.
10:00
No. Obviously, if there are staff redundancies, there will be a redundancy bill in year 1, but the trust will make savings down the road. Savings have been made, but the trust is now in some difficulty because it must address the question of staff salaries, which it is doing. I understand that it has gone to the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service this week. That will put more pressure on the general income fund in the year ahead. However, the vast majority of staff are in the bottom quartile for the third sector, and if it does not pay for the people who have the skills, we cannot be sanguine about its future.
You highlight the need for more local control of properties. That was raised with us last year, when we looked at the redundancy situation at, for example, the Hill of Tarvit mansion house. The evidence that we received then was that there was a lack of opportunity for the management to bring in new ideas and new ways of generating income because of the overcentralised approach within the trust. Is that a fair comment, and is that situation changing?
Yes, and I endorse what you and Menzies Campbell said about the matter in a very long campaign for Hill of Tarvit. It is now open for a limited number of weeks, and that is possible because of local volunteers. An arrangement has been arrived at with Heritage Catering to use the property, to a large extent, as a wedding venue. However, it is not very far from St Andrews and it strikes me that, if the trust were to think entrepreneurially, there would be opportunities in that area, especially with the Kingarrock Hickory golf course.
What I heard as I plodded around Scotland and attended meetings in remote locations and then had similar meetings in Edinburgh is that, on the periphery, people are accusing the management in Edinburgh of gross centralisation, while the management are saying that the people in the devolved areas do not have sufficient expertise in finance and conservation. I think that there is some truth in both arguments. However, it is clear to me that, in terms of fundraising and engagement with properties, the enthusiasm is to be found in the communities around Hill of Tarvit, Inverewe and individual castles such as Alloa tower. That is where one can motivate local rotary clubs and historians by giving them a sense of ownership. I am enthused by what is happening in the National Trust south of the border. It is bound to happen on the far side of economic cutbacks. We must trust people locally, but there must first be some training in financial management and core conservation. People who work in properties should also be paid a bit more. People are running vast, wonderful country houses on extraordinarily low salaries.
Rob Gibson (Highlands and Islands) (SNP)
The challenge that you have laid out is enormous, but it is one that people are at last beginning to take up at the national level. You recommend the idea of having a heritage forum here, in the chamber of the Parliament. Would you like to say a little bit more about that?
There are bilateral arrangements all over the place—I list quite a number of those—but they are people working quietly at a bureaucratic level and there is no real national debate. That would be a very helpful debate to inform the Parliament as to what the trust is for. I think that the core purpose of the National Trust is to be the guardian of a story that never ends—the story of this land from Neolithic times through medieval wars and the industrial revolution. The trust has had no money, so it has not been acquiring—as it should have been—some of the artefacts that we have needed in the past 40 or 50 years. We need a national debate on that and leadership at ministerial level. Mike Russell had a very good day in the Bute hall at the University of Glasgow, and I would like to see more of that. The business community, the disabled community and young Scots are brought into the Parliament to engage, and it might be useful also to hold a heritage forum at Holyrood one day a year, at which issues of wellbeing, economy and national identity are debated from a heritage perspective.
That would be a means to motivate people to think about the form of new legislation in two or three years’ time.
There will have to be new legislation. Whether it is a specific National Trust act or a heritage act—I would prefer a heritage act, given that there are bigger issues—it will need a lead time of something like two to three years. The work that the committee is doing now is therefore part of that. I see no reason why there should not be the odd members’ business debate and other debates in the chamber along the way.
In a post-sovereign world, with the remarkable history that we have, we should be discussing issues of time, place, identity and how we fit—and that should lead to a bill.
I wish to return to a local matter, although I am conscious that many members wish to speak. Corrieshalloch Gorge is an important visitor stop on the road to Ullapool, but the Highland Council has closed the toilets that are attached to the car park there. That is a classic example, and local people are already saying that they could be running the facility as a business and could look after the gorge, although that is quite a challenge, given its nature. That seems to be a social enterprise job. How would any thinking about the setting up of groups of that sort within the family of the National Trust figure at the organisation’s AGM?
Very positively. There is a bigger issue here: how Scotland addresses issues of state subsidy, which have applied for so long. The third sector is crucial when it comes to social enterprise, community engagement and devolution out of Edinburgh. That is one way to get some balance back.
If the state provides public value and the banks provide capital, social value comes from community groups such as those at Corrieshalloch. It is not too difficult, provided that protocols are put in place—some things must be reserved to Edinburgh. Are the proper conservation agreements in place? It is not difficult to write protocols on that. Is there a reasonable business plan? Are people trained?
On the far side of that, I suggest that, when it comes to many of the non-core properties, it is best simply to let go. The amount of enthusiasm at local level is quite extraordinary, and we should be tapping into it.
I can attest to that.
Ms Wendy Alexander (Paisley North) (Lab)
George, I had the opportunity to read your report in full—that is not always true for committee papers—and I think that it is a simply outstanding piece of work, whose significance in the current climate, as you have suggested, goes beyond the immediate issues at hand. The committee has engaged previously with issues to do with the National Trust and found them intractable. The most important aspect is the way in which a number of outsiders have been called on, collectively, to come up with answers. It has troubled me that Governments of all colours in Scotland have been reluctant to call on outside expertise—perhaps understandably, given that the Parliament is so newly with us. Perhaps unlike the UK model, which usually involves inviting an individual to tackle an intractable issue, there has been a collective effort in this case, which has drawn on some extraordinary expertise, and to outstanding effect. The report is a vastly superior piece of work compared with what a parliamentary committee, the National Trust itself or the Government could have produced.
The report is right for the times, not least because it does not look to Government to provide the answer to everything. Following on from what Rob Gibson has said, I think that our experience of community land ownership suggests that there is wide, untapped potential, with some interesting ideas around.
Having said that, I have two questions. Obviously, the focus on governance has to be right given the situation that you have uncovered, but you have touched on legislation and the wisdom of perhaps leaving it until later. Will you expand a little on whether the issue of inalienability will need to be addressed at some point and whether we can look to the trust to come forward with thoughts on how that issue can be helpfully addressed in the new context?
Thank you for your kind remarks.
First, there were people such as Tom Farmer who contributed and were extraordinarily helpful. Tom can read a bottom line on a balance sheet like nobody else. Susan Deacon, in just thinking her way through community engagement and third ways in terms of the three-legged stool, was very helpful. The Duke of Buccleuch was consistently focused and one of the best facilitators I have come across in a long time.
The second thing was engagement. There was nothing particularly wrong with some of the areas that the previous board looked at but, coming out of the Red Cross, I knew in my lower bowel that in the voluntary sector you cannot do things to people—you have to do things with people. That was the reason for the plod round Scotland. Doing things with people is how attitudes change, and I think that there is a general majority in favour of that.
Governance has to change, and then we come to the big question, to which I cannot give you an answer. If I were to know how much the maintenance of the estate cost, I could begin to address issues of inalienability. I have given you a clue—I think that £67 million is not enough. I think that that amount probably has to be doubled or even tripled. The trust has 50 years to do that—universities have done the same and I think that it is doable, if other cuts are made.
I think that the trust is both too big and too small. It is too big from just accumulating things. One of the founders said that it is
“a sort of cabinet into which could be put valuable things”.
It is jam packed, and some parts of it are better than others. With statements of significance it does not take too long to have a stab at a core portfolio: it will be the great houses, so that they stay for all time.
If we take what I call the B list—properties such as Alloa tower—I think that those buildings should go into alternative management. Alloa tower is in the middle of an estate of multiple deprivation—I know it very well—and it is where, dare I say, bourgeois Alloa meets. I would like to see it used for health programmes and apprenticeship training programmes. There is a wonderful walled garden, which we could turn into community allotments, using the past as a generator of future change. There are a lot of similar opportunities. Such properties would remain in the trust’s ownership and there would be no change in inalienability, but there would be a different management structure and we would save money.
We then come on to the last question. As there is no full list at present, my suspicion is that one or two properties that you and I would think should be on the inalienable list are not, and maybe on a damp Friday, somebody moved that property X should be inalienable. There should therefore be some adjustment. That is a presupposition. In time if at all possible, there may be some marginal adjustment.
One last example of that is Plewlands house at South Queensferry. It is a pretty good Scots merchant’s house, but it was never visited—you could not get into it. It was moved to deinalienate it and turn it into remarkably good housing. Why not? A few such properties might be eased away and things such as ruinous structures could fairly easily go to Historic Scotland.
That is down the road. I wish I could give you a full answer but, until I know the ballpark figure, it would be dangerous to try to do so.
I have one final question. What can Parliament and Government do to encourage faster progress on the joined-up agenda? As you beautifully and graphically illustrated in the report, with the best will in the world, progress in that arena—under Administrations of all colours—has been somewhat slow. There is clearly a tension between giving time for the evolution of a debate about the historic and natural environment and giving a degree of urgency to the joined-up agenda that mere ministerial or parliamentary invocation has, on its own, not hitherto delivered.
You talked about the landscape. In thinking about the proposed bill, one of the critical issues will be how you appropriately draw the boundaries to get really joined-up approaches that encompass the whole territory.
What do we need to do now to quicken the pace on the joined-up agenda? Thinking about a bill two or three years down the line, what do you think the relationship is between the historic and natural environment and how will we think that through?
10:15
You can do things at constituency level. I bring you an offer from Kate Mavor that I think you should take up. She will arrange a briefing for every single member of the Parliament that relates to their constituency or region, which I think would be helpful. That takes you into engendering community awareness and ownership.
Secondly, let us see what the nice Mr Swinney does about cuts and how that works through to Ms Hyslop. You should all be asking questions about that. There are savings to be had. For example, I cannot understand why, when you go to Stirling castle, you have to produce a Historic Scotland card but, when you go to Bannockburn, you have to pay again, because it is managed by the National Trust. The joint marketing is not as good as it should be, and yet, during homecoming, one homecoming pass was available, provided that you lived in the States or Geneva, which gave you entry to both Historic Scotland and National Trust sites. I am told that it is terribly difficult to bring things together but, if it can be done for people overseas, why can it not be done at home? Ms Hyslop should be pressed on that.
There are lots of other savings. There are dangers in cuts, but opportunities, too.
Gavin Brown (Lothians) (Con)
I want to ask briefly about your view on the short-term financial position of the trust? I think that when we took evidence from Kate Mavor about a year ago, the general income fund was about £4 million. Today you tell us—it is in your report, too—that it is about £8 million.
It is £8.5 million.
I think that you said that it needs to be about £17 million or thereabouts, in an ideal world.
Seventeen million pounds would cover six months of operating expenditure and a year of planned repairs.
Given what you have done so far, do you think that the trust is on the right trajectory to get there in the next couple of years?
I think that the trust has stabilised. The effect of these cuts and economies is that it is stable for the next three years, but the cuts do not address the fundamental issue in the long term.
Marilyn Livingstone (Kirkcaldy) (Lab)
I echo Wendy Alexander’s comments on the report, which I think is an excellent piece of work. It is obviously very much needed.
On community involvement, what you have suggested would be really helpful. I had the opportunity to speak to you earlier. Many communities are now starting to think very positively about how they can save some buildings, including in my constituency. Until now, there has been a feeling that there has been a great deal of centralisation. How can the trust get the message over to communities that it is now open to having discussion?
I think that Ken Calman is well aware of that. People like you can push the trust—that is your job and duty as an MSP.
The trust has done remarkable work. We think of great castles such as Craigievar and Culzean. I take enormous pride and pleasure in the little houses scheme on the Fife coast and in other parts of Scotland. There are two or three semi-derelict Georgian buildings in Peterhead that are being turned into social housing. There should be more of that. There is funding available for that.
You should push at a local level and, if that goes ahead—as it did in England—you will find a whole new range of people willing to become members. The National Trust has been perceived as a pleasant bourgeois organisation; that is its profile. It could perhaps be charged with making the past more pleasant than the present. If you get community engagement, as has happened in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, you bring in people who begin to identify with their place, their time and their community. That is how regeneration begins.
This is a little bit academic—I saw Wendy Alexander smiling a little at my reference to a “post-sovereign world”—but in France, where I lived for a long time, “mon pays”, “ma terre” and “ma patrie” can mean either the state or one’s own village. I was struck, in the part of France in which I lived, by how much people identified with their natural community and how that spreads out to the state. There are real opportunities for that to happen in this country.
I should declare an interest—I live in one of the houses on the Fife coast that was renovated in 1969 under the National Trust’s little houses improvement scheme. George Reid is right—the trust is keeping those for future generations, which is so important. Without the National Trust, those properties would be lost.
Capability reviews inevitably concentrate on what is wrong, but there is an awful lot that is right, and wonderful work has been done over the years. In some areas, properties would have disappeared, and our story would have vanished if it was not for the National Trust for Scotland. It is full of wonderful, opinionated and committed people and is a resource that can be unlocked, provided that you get the governance structures right and agree on a clear way ahead.
Communities are very worried about delays in relation to buildings—we have all seen what delays can do. Some buildings cannot be restored because they have fallen into such a state of disrepair, and that is a great concern for local communities.
As George Reid is aware, I chair the cross-party group on construction in the Parliament. We have lately had representations from the traditional trades, in particular from the Scottish Stone Liaison Group. There is great concern that, although we may make progress on community partnerships, we do not have a workforce that is skilled enough in areas such as traditional lime casting, which is an example from my constituency.
The townscape heritage initiative in my constituency links in with the training of apprentices. It is now warning us that there is a severe shortage, particularly outwith Edinburgh, of stonemasons, lime casters and so on, and telling us that we should encourage training in the built environment—particularly through the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council—so that we can preserve our heritage.
What discussions did you have during your review on the issue of traditional skills?
There are opportunities for modern apprenticeships in stonemasonry. I know that, because I need to have lead flashings fitted—subject to planning controls—on the roof of a Victorian house at present, and it is extraordinarily difficult to find someone who has the skills to do it.
I go back to what I said about ministerial leadership. Conservationists are working away quietly in corners; they should promote themselves a good deal more. Questions should be lodged about training in traditional skills. If it were not for Historic Scotland and Stirling castle, central Scotland would have no one who is skilled at lime washing; the numbers are precariously thin.
My final comment is on the issue of joined-up government that you mentioned. The Scottish funding council intended to cut courses on the built environment by either 22 per cent or 26 per cent, but that has been put on hold after lobbying by the Parliament and outside agencies. We need all departments of Government, external bodies and communities to work together. As Wendy Alexander said, the quicker we can get people working in that way, the better.
Yes, more of that, please.
One bit of good news in Glasgow is that, when the University of Southampton shut its school of textiles, the school moved to Glasgow. I think that that is terrific. Given the needs of the Burrell collection and of the Kelvingrove gallery, those are valuable skills. We must ensure that the training is in place and is sustained. It does not cost that much.
Stuart McMillan (West of Scotland) (SNP)
The first of my two questions, on the silo approach, has already been touched on, so I will not go back to that. The second is on the inventory of all assets. In your wider research looking at other organisations, was the lack of such an inventory a common theme, or was that quite unique to the National Trust?
I think that there is a particular issue in the National Trust. In the Red Cross, we had a similar problem with prisoner-of-war cards when information technology came on stream in the late 1980s, as it was not easy to put the details into a common database. The issue goes wider than the National Trust. I suggest that any heritage bill should be looking at having a common database for the whole of Scotland, with the ability to plug into geopolitical mapping. All that happened in the National Trust, with its volunteer culture, is that people said, “This is my bit”—people can be terribly protective—and did their bit according to their models. Only now is a common matrix being developed so that all the assets can go in together. However, the development should go wider than the National Trust. It should be possible for people to go into a common database where they can look at the artefacts in Alloa tower or look at who deals with the toilets at Corrieshalloch. All that information should be available at a single press of the button, but it is not at present.
Lewis Macdonald (Aberdeen Central) (Lab)
George Reid alluded to the impression that the National Trust has sometimes created of having quite a narrow social base. Therefore, I very much welcome and applaud what he said about the opportunities for community engagement. I also very much support his governance proposals, which offer a modernising mechanism. Do those proposals go beyond modernising the management and efficiency of the National Trust and offer an opportunity to broaden out the social base that the organisation is reputed to have?
That will be up to the trust’s members. It is a democracy as well. We will see who is voted in on the far side of the AGM. I have had several conversations with Ken Calman. It is encouraging that someone with his background from the west of Scotland will now head the National Trust. I know that he has been extremely active at local level, so I am confident.
The problem with the previous vast governance structure was that it was a confederation of interests. One cannot run a show with a confederation of interests, as Lewis Macdonald will know as an ex-minister. One of the extremely bad things was that senior staff got drawn into the political process. I was appalled to find that decisions could be taken by the board and then challenged by a middle manager, who would go and speak to a chum on one of the advisory committees who would then raise the issue again through the council. Frankly, decisions that should have been taken for £4,000 or £5,000—with a stroke of the pen, done—were still doing the rounds two to three years later. I am hopeful that all that will now change. Kate Mavor, of course, is building a new management team that I think shows signs of good collegiality down the road.
Let me conclude by asking what response your report has had both from the National Trust itself, which I think you have indicated has been quite positive, and from Government ministers such as the First Minister and the Minister for Culture and External Affairs.
From the National Trust itself, the 12,000 consultees are on board for reform, for localism and perhaps for a slimmer, more focused trust. The board of the trust has unanimously endorsed the report. The slightly larger council had a debate on the report, in which three abstained, three were against—for reasons of purism—but there was a majority of 95 per cent. You never know what will happen at a National Trust AGM, at which 310,000 people could turn up. However, bodies that have been extraordinarily critical, such as In Trust for Scotland, have been very supportive, so I think that that is all right.
The First Minister has a very real interest in this area. Remember that he is not just an economist but a medieval historian who grew up in Linlithgow. I think that he takes the point about identity and time and place. Fiona Hyslop has indicated that she very much hopes that the recommendations will be accepted and will set the trust on a future secure path for the benefit of the people of Scotland.
One other point on which you might want to reflect—perhaps you could write back to us or perhaps to the Education Committee—is whether any immediate legislative changes could be made through the Historic Environment (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill that is currently before the Parliament.
I do not know, but I will ask the trust’s communications manager, who is sitting behind me, to ask Kate Mavor and Ken Calman to send a letter to you on that.
Thank you very much for what has been a helpful session. Thank you also for the work that you have done on getting the National Trust for Scotland going in the right direction.
And my thanks to all of you. It is nice to be back.
10:31
Meeting suspended.
10:35
On resuming—