In the view of many people—of whom Alistair Lexden is one—the answer to this question is: not entirely.
Of course, the National Trust does much valuable work, particularly as regards the maintenance of a huge amount land for public access and recreation. It retains the loyalty and support of a vast membership, some 5.7 million strong, dwarfing all the main political parties put together and other major organisations.
But criticisms have been gathering over recent years, to which the Council of the National Trust has failed to respond. It gives an impression of high-handedness, saying that if any motions should be passed at its annual general meetings in defiance of its views it would not feel bound to implement them.
It is often hard to avoid feeling that today’s National Trust managers do not love the historic houses in their care, but regard them almost as an encumbrance. They refer disdainfully to an “outdated mansion experience.” In one of several totally misguided recent initiatives, the Trust ran a Colonial Countryside Project which incited schoolchildren to write poems attacking former owners of Trust properties.
Alistair Lexden brought a number of the concerns which have been widely discussed in the media before the House of Lords through an oral question which he asked on 21 January. He suggested that a review of the legislation under which the Trust operates might be appropriate and went on to say:
“How can an institution function satisfactorily when it has a voting system that effectively bars those of whom its current leadership disapprove, when history is distorted by an undue emphasis on colonialism, and when a great house, Clandon Park, is left in ruins after an insurance payout that should be used to restore it? National Trust managers profess to see ‘ raw beauty’ in this blackened shell. Raw folly and betrayal would be more like it.”
He concluded: “Are there not worrying features about the activities of the National Trust today which should trouble us all?”
Labour contributors to the ensuing short discussion were uncritical in their praise for the Trust. On the crossbenches, however, the Earl of Devon expressed concern that the Trust’s plans for extensive rewilding breach its “statutory purpose to protect permanently places of natural beauty or historic interest for the benefit of the nation.”
Another crossbencher, Lord Tyrie, a former chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority, referred to the case for looking at “accountability mechanisms” in view of “the huge amounts of public money [it receives] not only directly in grants but indirectly through taxpayer reliefs.”
So whatever the admirers of the Trust may say, Parliament should not ignore the wide concern “about this huge national institution that touches on all our lives”, as the final contributor to the Lords discussion put it.
