Data for Heritage Places research methodology

The UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund (the principal funder of built and intangible heritage) needed to create a politically neutral, evidence-based approach to prioritising regions and localities within its flagship £200m Heritage Places initiative. 

Hitherto, project funding decisions had been made by regional committees on a project-by-project basis without an overall prioritisation of places, thus not providing for the balance of the portfolio of projects and funding to be managed on a geographical basis. 

Work to date on heritage indices created for other purposes had been broad brush, whereas this decision-making framework needed to explicitly separate out different heritage, social and economic ‘factors’. 

Collaborating with the Heritage Fund’s place-based policy and research and insights teams and building on our previous research for the Fund on their working with local authorities in a more collaborative way, we: 

• Provided expert review and constructive challenge to heritage, social and economic factors in the Fund’s draft decision-making framework 
• Defined use cases for the framework – ie who was deciding what, within what process and which governance structures – against which we could design a basket of indicators and methods for generating and applying them 
• Reviewed 400 potential data sources for indicators and measures for multiple aspects of every factor – from funding history and existing heritage assets to socio-economic deprivation and opportunities afforded by initiatives and investments from others 
• Applied the indicators and measures to a sample of places to pilot the new framework, creating evidence-based ‘pen portraits’ of regions and localities that could be enrich by the Heritage Fund’s local team’s knowledge and consultation with stakeholders 

• £200m of funding is to be allocated to the places with the greatest need, opportunity and potential 
• The indicators and quantitative research methodology have provided a more nuanced view of heritage within place-based policymaking and regeneration 
• The place-based evidence-based pen portraits have provided a new way of discussing priorities and developing partners with local, region and national stakeholders in places