The National (Dis)Trust
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I should assure readers from the outset that this Substack is not dedicated to National Trust issues (that publication already exists in the form of Restore Trust’s regular newsletter). Nevertheless, it is only fitting that The Custodian’s first proper article—after last week’s introductory one—should be on this subject, given that it is one I have spent the last three and a bit years studying in some depth. My most recent report, written for the Prosperity Institute and published in May, explored the managed decline taking place within this once highly prestigious and respected organisation and suggested policy solutions to bring the National Trust back on track. In the run-up to the report’s publication I also submitted written evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s much-needed inquiry on “Protecting Built Heritage”, explaining the root causes of the Trust’s derailing and why it is such an important case study that deserves proper attention.
In today’s Substack I make the same arguments in a somewhat less monotonous way, changing things up by imagining that I am having a conversation with an antagonist whom I equip with the most compelling devil’s advocate positions I can think of. Let us give her the name Ophelia Dickinson and imagine that she is the Communications Director for the National Trust (sadly—for all her confidence on social media—the real Comms Director Celia Richardson has for some reason always tried to evade me whenever she encounters me in person, but maybe one day she will deign to sit down with me for an interview!).
National Trust is abbreviated to NT throughout the exchange.
ZEWDITU: I think my foremost question to you would be why has the NT been straying so far from its original aims and ethos, and why have you taken it upon yourselves to champion causes that are outside your remit? It seems to me that so much of the Trust’s core work of heritage preservation has been de-prioritised in favour of irrelevant and intrusive identity politics and social justice agendas. Examples would include the rainbow lanyard fiasco, the Colonial Countryside Project (where primary-aged children were being invited to write unflattering poems and stories about past British figures and to educate long-serving volunteers about the slavery and colonial links of properties), the Pride and Prejudice programme uncovering “LGBTQ+” links, the infamous slavery report, the inclusivity training for volunteers, prayer mats and signs pointing to Mecca in the Peak District… I could go on but you get the gist.
OPHELIA: Look, I simply don’t recognise your claims that we’ve strayed from our original aims. The NT was always meant to be for everyone, and what we’ve been doing in recent years is making this dream come true by making sure that the organisation is as accessible and inclusive as possible and that anybody—whether they’re from the Global Ethnic Majority, Muslim or queer—can come to our sites and feel like they’re in a safe and welcoming space.
ZEWDITU: Well, actually, the NT was founded with an extremely clear purpose, as set out in the original Memorandum of Association and subsequently enshrined in statute and in the charitable objects: “To promote the permanent preservation, for the benefit of the nation, of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest”.
An organisation cannot promote something they themselves are not doing to a high standard, and it must follow that the “permanent preservation” comes first, before the promotion. Yet the NT has not been committed to this core aim of permanently preserving the heritage—especially the built heritage—in its care. Look, for instance, at fire-ravaged Clandon House, for which you have taken the £66.3 million insurance payout but have subsequently decided to renege on your initial commitment to restore it to its former splendour; instead you are going to add funky and unsympathetic modern additions. That doesn’t sound like permanent preservation to me. Or how about fellow Grade I-listed country house, Barrington Court in Somerset, closed during the pandemic ostensibly to allow vital “significant work” to take place? This work has still not taken place, meaning that the house is now affected by severe water penetration and internal damage and remains closed off to the public several years later.
And look at the strategy you’ve been pursuing on the Sherborne Estate in Gloucestershire, where you’ve allowed the ornamental lakes—formerly the centrepiece of the estate—to silt up, with Sherborne Brook clogging up with dead branches and vegetation rather than flowing freely as it used to (see below the startling comparison of Sherborne Brook in 2009, top, and now, bottom, taken from the same vantage point). These are just a few examples of the systemic neglect of heritage that has taken place under the watch of the current management.
Even on the promotion front I would argue that the NT has not been doing this in the way it was originally envisaged, as many of the ideas and agendas the management has been promoting are irrelevant to and even counter to encouraging “permanent preservation”. For instance, by propagating the idea that a large number of the historic houses are somehow tainted through connection to slavery and colonialism (however tenuous these links may be) you are undermining the notion that these are valuable and enjoyable places to visit and to preserve.
In any case, I really do not understand how modern identity politics (and, by the way, there is no such thing as a “Global Ethnic Majority”!) even come into the NT’s remit. To my knowledge, the organisation has never discriminated about who can and cannot visit their sites. Your “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” drives are therefore not only irrelevant but also unnecessary and an unjustifiable way to spend scarce time and resources.
OPHELIA: All I can say with regard to your first point is that we are a huge organisation and of course some mistakes are bound to happen. That doesn’t mean we have systemic failures when it comes to heritage preservation, which is something we remain committed to. As for our DEI programmes, everything we have been doing and saying is motivated by good and pure intentions. I, along the Director-General and the whole management team believe passionately in what we preach, whether that’s about bringing new audiences to our sites, empowering everybody to enjoy green spaces or making sure the nation becomes more eco-friendly. I really don’t understand why you—or anyone for that matter—would have a problem with that.
ZEWDITU: First, you suggest that the NT’s numerous cases of neglect are one-offs rather than signs of a systemic problem. I have to disagree. During the pandemic the NT took the chance to get rid of a large number of long-serving and highly-qualified staff members and to replace them with individuals more in line with the management’s way of thinking. This helped catalyse the fall in standards within the NT and helped cause a lot of the issues we are talking about today (I say “catalyse” rather than “cause” because the decline started several years before that, with the dismantling of the regional committees and the advisory panels which had been crucial to ensuring proper expertise in decision-making as well as greater accountability).
That the NT knows there has been a decline in standards can be seen from the Annual Reports of recent years, which show how the one Key Performance Indicator relating to how well the NT has been preserving heritage has surreptitiously been got rid of. The Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI), which had been “used to measure how well we are putting conservation into practice at our properties”—in other words, how well it was carrying out its principal duty—was described in the 2020–21 Annual Report as having been “paused”. The following year’s Annual Report states that the use of CPI “remained paused”. Finally, however, the 2022–23 Annual Report reveals that the suspension was always intended to be indefinite: “In respect of the Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI) process it was considered that change was required. It was clear that it provided elements of value, but the overall balance of time spent following the process versus time spent considering assets and how they are managed felt disproportionate”. The quiet abandonment of the CPI as a performance indicator—confirmed in the most recent Annual Report of 2023–24—suggests that the Trust’s management knows the standard of conservation at Trust properties is falling, but does not want this to come to light.
By the way, I would disagree vehemently with you on the suggestion that you [the management of the NT] are acting virtuously when it comes to your more controversial programmes. I am firmly of the belief that you are virtue-signalling; there’s a big difference between genuine attempts to get more people interested in heritage and the NT—say, by giving local inner city schoolchildren passes to visit sites—and doing box-ticking exercises which focus on trendy identity politics.
It is surely not a coincidence that your research priorities and strategy align perfectly with those of your hoped-for major funders. It is therefore the NT management’s prioritisation of money as an end in itself—rather than as a means to an end of heritage conservation—which has led to the erosion of the charity’s standards and reputation, as funding incentives are dictating your strategy and encouraging you to undertake projects that have little or nothing to do with heritage preservation but rather with advancing particular agendas that are outside your core remit.
By the way, you say that your motivation for pursuing identity politics-related initiatives is to make the NT more inclusive, but you appear to forget that at the same time you have raised one of the only tangible barriers to entry for would-be visitors and members by steadily increasing membership and entry prices. Over the past four years, the price of membership has increased by a third, from £72 for an individual adult and £126 for a family to £96 and £169, respectively: significantly higher than inflation in that period. Your “inclusivity” justification is extremely unconvincing in light of this.
This is not the only example of the NT’s hypocrisy and double standards. You constantly emphasise your commitment to climate and to the environment, so much so that your Director-General has repeatedly taken it upon herself to criticise successive governments supposedly on behalf of the NT’s members regarding green issues. The NT also recently announced a policy of ensuring that at least 50% of the food served across its premises would be vegan, again on environmental grounds. Yet at the same time the Trust has replaced its crockery and cutlery across its cafés and restaurants with single-use items, not only reducing the (still expensive) customer experience but also creating more waste and emissions. The reason for this change, initially explained away as a temporary Covid-19 pandemic measure to avoid transmission, would appear to be simply that it is cheaper for the Trust to use single-use items than to hire the necessary staff to wash up crockery and cutlery.
The Trust has also been—antithetically to its own pro-tree rhetoric—cutting down large numbers of trees on land they own to make way for new car parks, strategically relocated to create rat runs through new visitor centres with shops and cafés. Sites where such car park relocations have taken place include Winkworth Arboretum, Trelissick, Lyme Park, Kingston Lacy, Belton Estate, Shugborough Hall and Morston Quay, but there are many more.
These are just two examples of environment-related hypocrisy which indicate at least some readiness to be environmentally unfriendly provided there is a commercial benefit.
All this seems to suggest that your rhetoric, agenda and actions are chiefly influenced not by a genuine motivation to better society but by external sources of funding, such as research grants, government subsidies and corporate sponsors, as well as by commercial interests in the form of rents, revenues and cost-cutting. So it is really quite ironic that you should adopt a moralistic, holier-than-thou attitude!
OPHELIA: Frankly, I think you’ve got it all twisted. Your narrative does not align with what the members think. We consult regularly and find that people support what we’re doing. The 50% plant-based food policy you mentioned was one introduced and voted for by the members themselves, for example. Talking of which, all motions criticising the NT and our approach have been decisively defeated in recent years and we have been consistently successful in the annual Council elections. I think that’s a damning indictment of your claim that we aren’t doing a good job.
And don’t forget the recent independent poll which even showed that we are the second most trusted institution after the NHS—a real signal of the public’s confidence in us.
ZEWDITU: Contrary to your suggestion, it does not seem that the public and membership of the NT support your current strategy at all. Just one clear sign of the widespread public dissatisfaction is the Trustpilot rating for the NT, which is 2.1, “Poor”, with 74% of visitors giving the Trust just one star out of five. Meanwhile, as a point of comparison, English Heritage’s rating is 4.5, “Excellent”, with 76% giving it five stars. This is quite striking.
You claim that you have been successful in recent elections. May I remind you that your “success” is chiefly the result of the clever Quick Vote you introduced by stealth in 2022 and with which you have stitched up all elections from then on. You know full well that, as the foremost option on the ballot form, Quick Vote nudges unsuspecting members towards approving the Trust leadership’s voting recommendations “in full” without considering the merits of each candidate or resolution. I have explained at length in my report of last year how this works and how it is unfair, but suffice it to say that never before in the history of the NT has it been the case that only leadership-recommended Council members and resolutions have succeeded at the AGM.
Your claim that you consult members on decisions is similarly disingenuous. You did not consult NT members (and I am not talking about ones you cherry picked yourself!) on major decisions such as the introduction of Quick Vote, the drastic change in plans for Clandon House or the ending of in-person AGMs which it seems you are going to spring on members having made the decision internally. Even where consultations take place, they tend to be purely nominal, with crucial information only revealed information after an internal decision has been made, meaning that any subsequent feedback or criticism is not taken into account.
In relation to Clandon, the Trust’s two requests for planning permission to carry out its internal modernisation—submitted to Guildford Borough Council on 18th November 2024, almost a decade after the fire—received over twice as many objections as supporting comments from the public.
Yet more evidence against your claim that most people are happy with the NT’s current trajectory is that members have been leaving the Trust in large numbers, with the number of members falling from 5.95 million in 2021 to 5.38 million in 2024: even lower than during the pandemic. There has also been a marked decline in volunteer numbers, from 65,000 in 2018–19 to under 40,000 now: the lowest in over a decade. This has significantly impaired the Trust’s ability to fulfil its duties, and many houses have had to restrict access to visitors and close off floors due to a shortage of volunteers.
OPHELIA: Why have you spent so much of your career so far criticising the NT? Does this stem from hatred towards us?
ZEWDITU: Far from hating the NT, my motivation for everything I have been doing stems from a deep love of the institution. A memorable portion of my childhood was spent in North Devon, which boasts several NT sites from Baggy Point to Arlington Court where we spent many a happy day. It makes me all the more angry and sad that the charity has been taken over by managers who seemingly have less interest in fulfilling the aims of its founders and much more in soliciting as many grants as they possibly can and looking trendy. This attitude is not, I should add, reflected in much of the volunteer body and many of the staff members, especially the longer-serving ones.
OPHELIA: I must admit, Zewditu, that over the course of our discussion today I’ve started to see things in a different light and you’ve certainly managed to convince me that I should make the time to read your reports. It sounds like there’s a lot in them I didn’t know about!
ZEWDITU: Well, glad we have finished on a constructive note! Here are the links to my latest report on the managed decline within the NT, and to last year’s report on the NT’s dismantling of internal democracy. Please be sure to send on to your colleagues too.
Needless to say the final exchange would never happen in real life—the real NT management has sadly proved to be about as receptive to critique as an ostrich with its head in the sand—but since the entire conversation was fictional we might as well imagine a positive ending!
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Zewditu Gebreyohanes
The Editor