No one can claim that the job of the Heritage Lottery Fund is done. There is still a backlog of neglect. Some of our great treasures are languishing in dowdy or unsafe surroundings. As more people come to see that the past they value qualifies as everyone’s heritage, the demand for funds to protect and share it grows. Technology brings new opportunities. Post-War Britain is now entering the realm of heritage and posing new challenges.

We warmly welcomed the Government’s announcement that heritage will remain one of the National Lottery Good Causes after 2009. With so many projects still to come to us, the heritage can ill afford any reduction in funding. Yet we know that, for a number of reasons, even if we retain the same share of our good causes income, we will have less money to commit to new awards in future.

So the consultation which the Government has launched – and to which we hope you will respond – is a crucial moment for the UK’s heritage. The outcome of the consultation will have a real effect on our ability to keep making such a radical impact.

You only have to look around you to see what is at stake: the last eleven years of National Lottery funding for heritage have transformed our country.

HLF money has kick-started the regeneration of areas of towns and cities as diverse as Glasgow and Nottingham, Halton and Hartlepool. It has funded theatres and steam trains, castles and piers, oral history projects and photographic records. Nature reserves, mountains, moors and forests have all benefited, along with the species that inhabit them.

Our funding has brought about a renaissance in our museums and galleries – imagine no Great Court at the British Museum, no Playfair Project at the National Galleries of Scotland. It has saved for the nation works of art from Titian’s Venus Anadyomene to Barbara Hepworth’s Wave and Stubbs’s Whistlejacket. It has breathed new life into hundreds of public parks, opening them up for the enjoyment of new generations.

In every corner of the UK, projects funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund are enriching people’s lives. We set out to change the perception that heritage is something charming but marginal and only for experts. One of our biggest successes has been to broaden by a mile the number of people in this country who are now involved in caring for our heritage, and to start to change the way we think about the meaning and value of the past for a modern country.

The decision to give the Heritage Lottery Fund a share of the National Lottery proceeds changed the face of the UK’s heritage. Now the time has come to look again at how much each good cause receives from the National Lottery pot.

HLF is a small organisation and we couldn’t have done anything over the last eleven years without our many partners: the expert organisations and the people who work with tireless enthusiasm and commitment to deliver the projects and nurture their bit of our diverse heritage.

Now it is time for us to work together again – to safeguard Heritage Lottery funding for the future and to enable us to keep making the difference.

I hope you will make your views known.

Liz Forgan, Chair