Capturing the Public Value of Heritage - HELM

Introduction
‘What is aught, but as ’tis valued?’
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
In March 2005, Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport, produced an essay challenging the sector to find a new language to describe
the importance of the historic environment (Better Places to Live, Jowell 2005). She put a
number of challenges to the sector, including the need to increase diversity in both audiences
and the workforce, to capture and present evidence of the value of heritage, to
contribute to the national debate on identity and Britishness, to ‘create public engagement
and to widen the sense of ownership of the historic and built environment’.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the major funding organisation for the
heritage, had undertaken a series of Citizens’ Juries, exploring public views on heritage
and, in particular, a series of projects funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Fund had
also commissioned a review of the evidence for the impact and benefit of the £3billion
they had given to approximately 15,000 projects. Demos – who undertook the work –
had suggested public value as an organising framework.
English Heritage, the government’s adviser on the historic environment, then
produced the first draft of a new philosophy to underpin decisions about the historic
environment. The document put the concept of value or significance at the heart of
decision-making, and also called for heritage professionals to operate in a new and more
transparent way (English Heritage 2006).
And finally, the National Trust, the largest voluntary organisation in the UK – conscious
of the need to produce more robust evidence of impact – had been working with the
consulting firm Accenture in order to find new ways of measuring performance and
heritage sites that were open to the public.
The question of value and how to measure it in public sector organisations was
also under debate in other arenas. The charter for the BBC was due to expire and the
Corporation had pioneered the use of public value as a framework within which to set
their bid for renewal; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and others had asked
the Work Foundation to explore the application of ideas of public value to arts and
culture while Gavin Kelly, Geoff Mulgan and Stephen Muers had produced a paper for the
Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office, setting out the idea of public value as an analytical
framework for public service reform (Kelly et al 2002). All of this was, of course, building
on the work of Mark Moore, author of Creating Public Value (1995).
Early 2006 was therefore an opportune time to bring together people from the
heritage community and beyond in order to look at the concept of public value, and how
it might be applied to thinking about heritage. We had anticipated something small and
fairly academic, perhaps of interest to a select few heritage policy-makers; in the event,
INTRODUCTION 1