About the Heritage Lottery Fund
The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) was set up in 1995 as one of the five good causes stemming from the Lotteries Act.
Qualifying reserves and the award
An opportunity was created for Trusts to put forward major capital works programmes for reserve management over year a five year period. In order to quailfy, the reserves had to be either freehold Trust properties, or on a long lease of at least 25 years to qualify. A programme was submitted to HLF in September 1997. After a number of technical modifications it was approved in November 1997, the contract being signed in April 1998.
The Lincolnshire Trust award was the second largest after Suffolk. The HLF grant level was set at 75 percent, with 15 percent to be made up from volunteer input and 10 percent from other sources. This worked out at a grant of £921,000, total project cost £1,228,000. Our Year 1 element involves 59 reserves and 388 individual projects.
The Trust has also received over £250,000 in direct grants for land purchase from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Project management
The 5 Year Capital Works Programme began in earnest in June 1998.
Five new staff appointments were:
| 3 Field Staff – |
 | South Lincolnshire Warden |
| Gibraltar Point Contract Warden |
| Estate Worker |
| |
| – with two headquarters staff – |
| Projects and Volunteers Assistant |
| Reserves Administrator (part-time) |
Once the programme was underway, the work evolved into its two strands of reserve work and administration.
Reserve work
The aim of the programme is to put money and time into new reserve works, over and above what our normal core management activities would be. This is allowing the Trust to purchase new equipment and tools, to encourage more species and survey work, to do more habitat management and to put resources into access improvements.
The first three elements are well understood, and HLF has allowed us to expand the activities in these spheres, rather than come up with anything radically new. The fact that we are now accepting considerable sums of public money for our nature reserves has implications for access management.
The contract with HLF states that the Trust:
"will arrange for the general public to have full appropriate access.....and that no person is unreasonably denied access..."
There is no one set of rules that can apply to all the reserves, as they all have very different visitor capacity. The small meadow sites such as Rush Furlong, Willoughby and Heath's Meadows are always going to have to be very carefully protected as they can tolerate little visitor pressure.
The reserves are the shop windows of the Trust, and are potentially a very good way of attracting new members. HLF encourages and allows us to spend money on some of the more aesthetic considerations, which, in the past, were not priorities due to scarce funding. The often complex habitat manipulations and restoration will be lost on many reserve visitors, but they can understand well-maintained fencing, gates and signs. This is often the image of Trust reserve management that they will take away with them.
Administration
The other major HLF issue to address is the administration. Recording of the project work and particularly the voluntary input is vital. Over the course of the programme volunteer time will release over £100,000 of funding. Because the programme is fully audited by HLF we have to have names, dates and hours to prove we are doing what we say we are doing.
The programme is set to run to the year 2003, with approximately £100,000 available annually for projects on the 59 eligible reserves.
