Last week, we had the pleasure of speaking to the Gibraltar Heritage Trust to learn more about their work and what Gibraltar needs to effectively preserve our heritage.

We fully support the GHT’s push for a championing of our heritage, a commitment to preservation and development of heritage as a public good, and to properly investing in our heritage: financially and through a push to develop local expertise.

One topic that kept coming up was the importance of properly investing in our government organisations and civil society groups. We need to do significantly more to train and empower workers who are the ones maintaining the sites we love, keeping our tourist product thriving and protecting our heritage for future generations.

Despite this, these organisations are constantly hampered from doing their work effectively. Government departments need greater autonomy in prioritising, planning and implementing projects. This has to go hand-in-hand with a focus on building up technical and managerial skills as well as with vocational opportunities for people who want to work in heritage, a major part of our economy with so many more opportunities than we can tackle.

This leads to what we’re seeing now: the government ends up introducing piecemeal projects such as an aquarium and natural history museum, months before an election and with no coordinated strategy to actually preserve Rosia Bay, or develop it for public benefit.

Together Gibraltar would fully commit to the Heritage Vision which has been published and received and as per the GHT’s advice, would use this as an opportunity to create a better culture around heritage. This would include a series of heritage audits of Gibraltar’s assets and performance management against the published Heritage Vision.

Finally, we discussed urban regeneration, another difficult topic which previous administrations have neglected but which needs a courageous, coordinated approach from government. We need to be honest about the conditions and challenges which have led to the state of buildings in the upper town and ensure Gibraltar has appropriate rental stock to help tenants. Only then can we work with landlords to care for our historic buildings, creating strong incentives to renovate these properties or sell them on to developers who will.