The National Trust spent a record £179.6m on the conservation of its historic buildings and collections in the last year in the face of significant challenges regarding rising costs.
Its coffers were boosted by an increase in the number of visitors to pay-for-entry venues and record amounts bequeathed in legacies, its annual report says.
The report, which also shows membership stable at about 5.7 million, was published on Monday ahead of the NT’s annual general meeting in November, at which it will face a fresh challenge from a group opposed to its alleged “politicisation”.
Restore Trust rejects what it has described as a “woke” agenda and has said it wants to steer the trust “back to its core purpose of looking after our heritage and countryside”.
The group has endorsed five candidates standing for election to the NT’s 36-strong governing council. Most prominent among the Restore Trust-backed candidates is Lord Sumption, a former supreme court judge, who has said the NT’s influence and power for good is being undermined by “disputes about [its] mission”.
Last year, none of the seven candidates backed by Restore Trust won seats on the council.
In 2022-23, the NT funded 13,245 hours of work on delicate historic collections in its two dedicated conservation studios as part of an ambitious programme to protect the heritage in its custody. It spent £25.6m on “significant acquisitions”.
The NT’s income from legacies topped £70m and its secondhand bookshops turned a profit of £2.5m.
Membership rose very slightly from 5.71 million in 2021-22 to 5.73 million in 2022-23. The cost of individual membership increased by 16.5% from March this year to £84 a year.
Hilary McGrady, the NT’s director general, said: “The record funds we dedicated in the last financial year reflects the NT’s enduring commitment to the beautiful historic places in its care, and the nation’s enthusiasm for this.
“We were able to make this significant investment during a particularly difficult economic environment, with rising costs and continued recovery from the pandemic, thanks to the millions of people who supported our cause.”
Rising costs included a doubling of the NT’s energy bill to £11m a year, said John Orna-Ornstein, its executive director of curation and experience. It also increased its workforce slightly after cutting 1,700 jobs during 2020-21 when the pandemic forced it to close its properties.
Orna-Ornstein said although the NT had spent money on “big, wonderful, presentation projects”, it had also devoted funds to maintenance and small repairs. “Spending small amounts of money as often as possible is better than having to repair more serious problems later on.”
Among its showpiece projects in the last financial year was a transformation of Dyrham Park, a 17th-century house and estate in Gloucestershire created by William Blathwayt, a colonial administrator.
“His colonial connections are an integral part of the Dyrham Park story and we tell it in a straightforward and accessible way,” Orna-Ornstein said.
With almost 6 million members, different views on how to treat issues such as historical links to the slave trade were to be expected, he added.
“These debates are healthy. We have members who like or dislike everything we do from changes in our recipes to how we present our history.”
Volunteers donated 3.4m hours in 2022-23 in historic homes, gardens, cafes and secondhand bookshops. More than 1m trees were planted and almost 17,000 hectares of new wildlife habitats were created by the end of 2022.
