Dear Secretary of State, welcome to your new job. It is an important post, because national heritage is not about paint-box nostalgia but about the here and now - the environment, steeped in many layers of history and prehistory, in which we all live and work.
It is also a unique asset. It contains answers to questions and mysteries. Boxgrove Man kept no diary, and the people who lugged the bluestones from Preseli to Stonehenge wrote no letters home. For over 99 per cent of the time people have lived in Britain, the evidence for what took place comes from the historic environment alone.
This environment needs cherishing. You would not countenance bulldozing the Public Record Office, yet sources for the Bronze Age are being ploughed up every day - too often as a result of misdirected agricultural support payments. Such damage is irreversible. Turf scuffed by tourists' feet will regrow. Archaeology will not.
Sustainable stewardship matters not only for its own sake, but also because this year tourism will contribute about £24 billion to Britains economy. Those visitors won't come to see out-of-town superstores, fake Georgian UPVC windows or oncehistoric towns where diversity has been replaced by tatty uniformity. Many bad developments are recent, the result of short-term expediency. So please, in considering these matters, think long-term.
To do your job you will need head and heart together. The well- being we derive from our surroundings often rests in things which lie beyond the measures of accountancy. Business disciplines are useful in government, but remember that experiences which enrich daily lives are not easily reducible to figures in business plans.
There are a few points I would like you to bear in mind as you start your new job. First, when you consider conservation, a key lesson is that `national heritage' is the sum of `local heritage'. It is the collective values of typical local buildings and landscapes which invest different parts of Britain with their personality. Conservation is about what is characteristic as well as what is exceptional.
Achieving this calls for a national strategy, an understanding public, and the continuing presence of local organisations which can provide the necessary information and guidance. Today, the strategy is missing, many people imagine that conservation is some sort of nuisance, and local government is being pressured to do more with less.
For example, your Department's policy assumes the presence of up- to-date local authority Sites and Monuments Records - because information is the starting point for effective stewardship - and people with the skills to interpret them. It also requires experienced county archaeologists and conservation officers, and good back-up from bodies like English Heritage and the Royal Commissions.
All these things have been weakened by curtailed funding and reorganisation. We can all be more efficient - but there comes a point where the search for marginal efficiencies begins to undermine the primary business. In many local authorities that threshold has already been crossed. You need to address this.
Secondly, you should take a look at the Governments own approach. When the DNH was created after the 1992 election we were told it would provide a focus for heritage affairs and robust advocacy in Cabinet. Neither has happened. With laudable exceptions - like PPG15 and the Treasure Act - the advocacy has been muted. More fundamentally, responsibilities are split between several Government departments and, for practical purposes, increasingly, the Lottery.
The Lottery is at once a blessing and a destabilising influence (see BA, February). It is welcome because it can bestow large resources; but destabilising because its funding is episodic rather than continuous, and is applied with no overall vision. You owe it to posterity to settle the Lotterys long-term role.
It is a practical reality that our national heritage - buildings, landscapes, archaeology - exists in the environment. This leads to double-handling between DoE, DNH, English Heritage, and others. There is no clear policy centre. There should be.
While you are thinking about this, bear in mind that the Highways Agency now spends more on new archaeological fieldwork than the British Academy, that the Ministries of Agriculture and Defence have more direct impact on some aspects of the heritage than your own department, and that conservation in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is under separate management. A strategy which makes more of this interconnectedness, and reconciles policies which are sometimes conflicting, might not be a bad idea.
One last thing. Did you know that while Britain's cultural history spans half a million years, the English History Curriculum begins only with the Romans? Stonehenge and Avebury were built longer before the Romans than we live after them. Britain's inheritance will be better cared for in years ahead if tomorrow's citizens have some consciousness of the time depth and meaning of the nation's past.
Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA
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