“Heritage is part of my bloodstream,” says Peter Luff, who took over from Jenny Abramsky as the chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in March.
“The great thing about giving up politics is that I can do more culture, as part of my job as well as in my spare time,” he says after having been a Conservative MP for 23 years for the Mid- Worcestershire constituency.
His time as a politician taught Luff much of what he needed to know for his role at the HLF. And because the organisation is so strongly linked to the government it has been crucial that he is well versed in the politics of arts, culture and heritage.
“Legally I’m the chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund [NHMF], which reports to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” he says. “We can’t lobby – statutorily you’re not allowed to – but we can create a forum for opportunities to discuss cross-fertilisation and enable the sector to discover what it should do better.”
Grants below £2m are decided by the HLF’s 12 regional offices, and for anything above that figure Luff meets with the 13 other trustees at the HLF board 11 times a year to discuss them before distributing the money.
The HLF’s annual budget for grants is a healthy £430m, but with the economy in its current state “there’s more competition for funds, and more good schemes applying than we can afford to fund”, Luff says.
He realises that helping organisations to forge new resilience strategies is an important way to use the funds the HLF offers, to help museums, galleries and heritage organ- isations through such a difficult financial environment.
“The financial situation is the biggest single issue facing the sector at present – the reverse of the situation 20 years ago when revenue funding wasn’t so much of a problem and capital was,” Luff says.
“Now capital funding, thanks to the generosity of National Lottery players, and its distribution through the HLF, is less of a problem than it was for museums and galleries, but revenue funding is a real issue.”
With a pay freeze for the past five years, HLF staff have been suffering like the rest of the sector, which Luff is acutely aware of.
“The thing that worries me most is public sector pay restraint because though the staff are incredibly committed and motivated and do enjoy their jobs, those sentiments don’t pay mortgages or utility bills. Retaining the excellent staff we have and rewarding them the way they deserve is going to be a real challenge for us.”
Industrious by nature
Luff has been engaged with heritage from a young age – when he was at school, he used to go to the Barry Scrapyard “where some of the Great Western steam engines ended up – we got them back into museums,” he says. Luff is now the vice president of the Severn
Valley Railway and says he has always been a railway buff.
So even before he joined the HLF, he knew about its work through his passion for indus- trial heritage. An HLF grant of £5.6m helped fund the Droitwich Canal project in Luff’s old constituency. “This has been transformational for the area, a real success story,” Luff says.
“The dream to do it was kept alive by volunteers for years. The old regional foundation and the two local authorities helped fund it as well, so it is also a good example of partnership working.”
Another project close to his heart is the regeneration of The Regal, an art deco cinema in Evesham, Worcestershire, which he says has led to the regeneration of a whole area.
But over the past eight months with the HLF, he says that one of the projects he is proudest of funding is Derby’s Silk Mill museum, which is bidding for nearly £10m for a project that will be complete by 2020.
So how does Luff define heritage? “Heritage can be anything that a group, an organisation or community wants to treasure and hand on to the next generation, so we deliberately don’t have a definition,” he says.
“But essentially it’s about stories. I believe that a society that doesn’t understand its past can’t navigate its future, and heritage helps do that.”
The HLF’s stakeholders are “very, very positive” about the organisation, he says, and museums and galleries are obviously very switched on about what the HLF does.
But Luff is not so sure that the wider world understands the organisation. “In a sense that’s not a problem – what really matters is that National Lottery players understand their money is being well spent.”
But explaining the HLF’s mission to the broader public is still important for Luff, although he says it can be difficult to communicate this. “We talk about grants, we talk about openings, but we don’t talk about what happens after and what flows from that – what’s happened as a result of the investment that we have made.”
Telling the tales
Luff says it is not the noughts on the bottom of a cheque that matter, it is more the stories about the positive impact made on people’s lives, and the ways that communities have changed for the better. “We just need to find ways of actually communicating the stories,” Luff says.
The projects that Luff highlights certainly put an emphasis on those that help communities understand their story further. They include Beamish, an open air museum in County Durham; the William Morris Gallery in London; and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
The importance of communities and the diverse range of ethnicity, faith, ability, disability and ages that they involve are absolutely central to Luff’s vision for HLF funding in the future.
“One of my highest priorities is to make sure that this organisation is diverse, that who we’re giving grants to are diverse and the audiences they serve are diverse.”
This is something that Luff wants to address in the HLF’s strategic framework review next year. “It’s a challenge not just to this organisation, it’s a challenge to everyone in the museum sector,” he says. “We do need people with arts degrees, but we also need more general skills from a broader socio- economic background.”
Luff, like many others, believes that engaging a diverse public can be difficult when an organisation’s workforce is not sufficiently diverse itself. Does he have a solution? “I particularly want to talk about the importance of apprenticeships as a way to achieve that,” he says.
Luff will deliver a keynote speech at this year’s Museums Association Annual Conference in Birmingham on 5-6 November.
And although at the time of this interview he was not entirely sure of what he would cover in his talk, he did say that diversity and recognition were important buzzwords for him.
He says that the “cultural sector consistently over-delivers” largely through the work of an invaluable force of volunteers, but thinks the sector is close to “stretching this elastic too far”. He also thinks that the sector could get better at sharing best practice.
Taking the HLF forward
“I love chairing organisations, I love running collegiate structures, and I love encouraging people to say what they want, but I’m really just the facilitator,” Luff says.
He likes getting organisations to work more effectively, so one of his key aims is to make some practical changes at the HLF, including making the process for applying for funds more straightforward.
Luff says that he played the National Lottery in its first week back in 1994. Since then, more than 20 years of lottery money has transformed the heritage sector and the HLF has become a vital funder for museums all over the UK. Luff is confident that he can use his experience to build on this and take the HLF forward.
“Careers are understood backwards, and now I understand mine,” he says. “Every- thing I’ve done has built up to this moment.”
The National Lottery – and with it lottery funding for good causes such as heritage, the arts, sport and charities – was established in 1994.
Responsibility for the UK-wide distribution of lottery proceeds allocated to heritage was given to the Trustees of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). The lottery- distribution arm of the NHMF became known as the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
The HLF is a public body accountable to Parliament via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). This means that, although the HLF is not a government department, the Secretary of State for the DCMS issues it with financial and policy instructions, but its funding decisions are entirely independent of the government.
There are 12 regional offices, and the London headquarters, which houses about 300 employees. There are 11 board meetings a year to decide on grants of £2m or more.
Peter Luff joined the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund as its chair in March.
Prior to that he was a member of parliament for Mid-Worcestershire for 23 years. He served as the chairman of two select committees, Agriculture and Business Innovation & Skills, and as the defence minister for Equipment and Technology.
Before entering politics he was a public and corporate affairs consultant and managing director of his own company.
He is a vice president of the Severn Valley Railway and of the Worcester Birmingham and Droitwich Canals Society.
He was knighted in 2014 for political and public service.
“The great thing about giving up politics is that I can do more culture, as part of my job as well as in my spare time,” he says after having been a Conservative MP for 23 years for the Mid- Worcestershire constituency.
His time as a politician taught Luff much of what he needed to know for his role at the HLF. And because the organisation is so strongly linked to the government it has been crucial that he is well versed in the politics of arts, culture and heritage.
“Legally I’m the chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund [NHMF], which reports to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” he says. “We can’t lobby – statutorily you’re not allowed to – but we can create a forum for opportunities to discuss cross-fertilisation and enable the sector to discover what it should do better.”
Grants below £2m are decided by the HLF’s 12 regional offices, and for anything above that figure Luff meets with the 13 other trustees at the HLF board 11 times a year to discuss them before distributing the money.
The HLF’s annual budget for grants is a healthy £430m, but with the economy in its current state “there’s more competition for funds, and more good schemes applying than we can afford to fund”, Luff says.
He realises that helping organisations to forge new resilience strategies is an important way to use the funds the HLF offers, to help museums, galleries and heritage organ- isations through such a difficult financial environment.
“The financial situation is the biggest single issue facing the sector at present – the reverse of the situation 20 years ago when revenue funding wasn’t so much of a problem and capital was,” Luff says.
“Now capital funding, thanks to the generosity of National Lottery players, and its distribution through the HLF, is less of a problem than it was for museums and galleries, but revenue funding is a real issue.”
With a pay freeze for the past five years, HLF staff have been suffering like the rest of the sector, which Luff is acutely aware of.
“The thing that worries me most is public sector pay restraint because though the staff are incredibly committed and motivated and do enjoy their jobs, those sentiments don’t pay mortgages or utility bills. Retaining the excellent staff we have and rewarding them the way they deserve is going to be a real challenge for us.”
Industrious by nature
Luff has been engaged with heritage from a young age – when he was at school, he used to go to the Barry Scrapyard “where some of the Great Western steam engines ended up – we got them back into museums,” he says. Luff is now the vice president of the Severn
Valley Railway and says he has always been a railway buff.
So even before he joined the HLF, he knew about its work through his passion for indus- trial heritage. An HLF grant of £5.6m helped fund the Droitwich Canal project in Luff’s old constituency. “This has been transformational for the area, a real success story,” Luff says.
“The dream to do it was kept alive by volunteers for years. The old regional foundation and the two local authorities helped fund it as well, so it is also a good example of partnership working.”
Another project close to his heart is the regeneration of The Regal, an art deco cinema in Evesham, Worcestershire, which he says has led to the regeneration of a whole area.
But over the past eight months with the HLF, he says that one of the projects he is proudest of funding is Derby’s Silk Mill museum, which is bidding for nearly £10m for a project that will be complete by 2020.
So how does Luff define heritage? “Heritage can be anything that a group, an organisation or community wants to treasure and hand on to the next generation, so we deliberately don’t have a definition,” he says.
“But essentially it’s about stories. I believe that a society that doesn’t understand its past can’t navigate its future, and heritage helps do that.”
The HLF’s stakeholders are “very, very positive” about the organisation, he says, and museums and galleries are obviously very switched on about what the HLF does.
But Luff is not so sure that the wider world understands the organisation. “In a sense that’s not a problem – what really matters is that National Lottery players understand their money is being well spent.”
But explaining the HLF’s mission to the broader public is still important for Luff, although he says it can be difficult to communicate this. “We talk about grants, we talk about openings, but we don’t talk about what happens after and what flows from that – what’s happened as a result of the investment that we have made.”
Telling the tales
Luff says it is not the noughts on the bottom of a cheque that matter, it is more the stories about the positive impact made on people’s lives, and the ways that communities have changed for the better. “We just need to find ways of actually communicating the stories,” Luff says.
The projects that Luff highlights certainly put an emphasis on those that help communities understand their story further. They include Beamish, an open air museum in County Durham; the William Morris Gallery in London; and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
The importance of communities and the diverse range of ethnicity, faith, ability, disability and ages that they involve are absolutely central to Luff’s vision for HLF funding in the future.
“One of my highest priorities is to make sure that this organisation is diverse, that who we’re giving grants to are diverse and the audiences they serve are diverse.”
This is something that Luff wants to address in the HLF’s strategic framework review next year. “It’s a challenge not just to this organisation, it’s a challenge to everyone in the museum sector,” he says. “We do need people with arts degrees, but we also need more general skills from a broader socio- economic background.”
Luff, like many others, believes that engaging a diverse public can be difficult when an organisation’s workforce is not sufficiently diverse itself. Does he have a solution? “I particularly want to talk about the importance of apprenticeships as a way to achieve that,” he says.
Luff will deliver a keynote speech at this year’s Museums Association Annual Conference in Birmingham on 5-6 November.
And although at the time of this interview he was not entirely sure of what he would cover in his talk, he did say that diversity and recognition were important buzzwords for him.
He says that the “cultural sector consistently over-delivers” largely through the work of an invaluable force of volunteers, but thinks the sector is close to “stretching this elastic too far”. He also thinks that the sector could get better at sharing best practice.
Taking the HLF forward
“I love chairing organisations, I love running collegiate structures, and I love encouraging people to say what they want, but I’m really just the facilitator,” Luff says.
He likes getting organisations to work more effectively, so one of his key aims is to make some practical changes at the HLF, including making the process for applying for funds more straightforward.
Luff says that he played the National Lottery in its first week back in 1994. Since then, more than 20 years of lottery money has transformed the heritage sector and the HLF has become a vital funder for museums all over the UK. Luff is confident that he can use his experience to build on this and take the HLF forward.
“Careers are understood backwards, and now I understand mine,” he says. “Every- thing I’ve done has built up to this moment.”
HLF at a glance
The National Lottery – and with it lottery funding for good causes such as heritage, the arts, sport and charities – was established in 1994.
Responsibility for the UK-wide distribution of lottery proceeds allocated to heritage was given to the Trustees of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). The lottery- distribution arm of the NHMF became known as the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
The HLF is a public body accountable to Parliament via the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). This means that, although the HLF is not a government department, the Secretary of State for the DCMS issues it with financial and policy instructions, but its funding decisions are entirely independent of the government.
There are 12 regional offices, and the London headquarters, which houses about 300 employees. There are 11 board meetings a year to decide on grants of £2m or more.
Peter Luff at a glance
Peter Luff joined the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund as its chair in March.
Prior to that he was a member of parliament for Mid-Worcestershire for 23 years. He served as the chairman of two select committees, Agriculture and Business Innovation & Skills, and as the defence minister for Equipment and Technology.
Before entering politics he was a public and corporate affairs consultant and managing director of his own company.
He is a vice president of the Severn Valley Railway and of the Worcester Birmingham and Droitwich Canals Society.
He was knighted in 2014 for political and public service.
