Memorandum submitted by the British Museum
1. SUMMARY
(i) The British Museum holds in trust for the nation
and the world a collection of art and antiquities. The collection
is one of the finest in existence, spanning two million years
of human history and every continent, and is housed in one of
Britain's architectural landmarks.
(ii) Access to the collection is, and always
has been, free. Free admission is an essential part of the British
Museum's mission to inspire and provide lifelong learning for
all, ensuring that everyone can visit and explore mankind's shared
cultural heritage.
(iii) With up to five million visitors per annum,
the British Museum has been the most visited institution of its
kind in the UK for more than a decade, making a major contribution
to tourism and to public education. Details of the achievements
of 2001-02 are included in the published Review which is
enclosed as an Appendix to this evidence. (not printed)
(iv) However, retaining this commitment to free
admission, has cost the British Museum an estimated £80 million
in lost income and reclaimed VAT over ten years.[1]
(v) The British Museum has increased opening
hours and public access following the departure of the British
Library in 1996 and development of the Great Court in 2000. Our
on-line collections and educational websites are visited by more
than four million users per annum.[2]
(vi) In this period, the British Museum has
also welcomed the introduction of its new statutory duties under
the Treasure Act but received no recompense for the extra £500,000
costs per annum.
(vii) Over the last 10 years, the value of grant-in-aid
has fallen progressively and, had the British Museum been charging,
it would have been eligible for £8 million compensation in
the Autumn of 2001 for giving up charging.[3]
(viii) The British Museum has addressed these
financial pressures and a growing structural deficit through:
— Fundraising and enterprise—raising
£87 million from private sources over the last decade for
capital projects alone[4]
and increasing income from on-site services
— Modernisation—especially in
relation to the operation of the Great Court and the creation
of the on-line collection
— Rephasing expenditure—resulting
in a backlog of maintenance including essential roof repairs and
gallery refreshment
— Cost reduction—including the
daily closure of 20 per cent of galleries
(ix) In the first months since the introduction
of free admission at all national museums, the British Museum
has lost 10 per cent of visitors, worsening its financial position,
and anticipates that tourist numbers will take at least three
years to recover.
(x) It is only through partnership with stakeholders,
funders and peer bodies that the British Museum can make its full
contribution towards social and regional development in the UK
and the role and reputation of Britain in the world. Secure adequate
funding is the essential base for such partnerships.
2. NATIONAL MISSION
AND INTERNATIONAL
ROLE
(i) The British Museum was founded by Act of Parliament in
1753 principally from three private collections brought together
to promote liberal understanding of the arts and sciences and
was the first national public museum. It is now a recognised centre
of worldwide learning for the international community and a national
centre of expertise in conservation science. In the 1880s, the
natural history collections moved to South Kensington and became
the Natural History Museum and, in 1972, the British Library became
a separate institution.
(ii) The British Museum provides an international
context where cultures can be experienced by all, studied in depth
and compared and contrasted across time and place. As a "reference
library of world cultures," the entire collection is both
accessible and regularly accessed for study.
(iii) The British Museum's approach to cultural
heritage is based on the positive principle that the Museum exists
to further understanding of peoples, past and present. It is through
the richness and reach of the collection that the Museum offers
a global public a sense of shared heritage, fostering reciprocal
cultural experience and understanding.
(iv) Through the operation of the Portable Antiquities
Scheme and its assessment and conservation of treasure finds,
the British Museum makes a major contribution to the preservation
and interpretation of the archaeological heritage of the UK. The
research advances are communicated widely through touring, media
partnerships and skills sharing.
3. ACCESS AND
PARTICIPATION
(i) The Museum works to reach the widest possible audience
through its education, exhibition and loans programme. Some 200,000
school children make educational visits every year, many from
deprived boroughs, with around 20,000 students being assisted
with their research through departmental "study rooms".
(ii) The Museum loans thousands of objects
every year to UK and international institutions and has an established
educational outreach programme. This programme costs between £500,000
and £800,000 per annum. Last year the Egyptian exhibition
to Birmingham alone attracted 70,000 visitors and the exhibition
on Unknown Amazon, for example, brought to Britain artefacts
never previously seen outside Brazil.
(iii) In 2001, the Museum created a new
network of regional partners across the UK for the development
of touring exhibitions and skills development initiatives commencing
with Treasure: Finding Our Past which will then tour to
Cardiff, Manchester, Norwich and Newcastle and co-curation of
smaller touring exhibitions with the Henry Moore Foundation in
Leeds.
(iv) The Museum is also working to utilise
new communications tools to increasing public access, curriculum
support and lifelong learning. The immensely popular Ancient Civilisations
series of websites for schools (Key Stages 2/3)—funded by
NTT—recorded more than two million users in the last year.
(v) COMPASS, the Museum's multimedia public
access system was launched online in 2000 and now has a special
version for children supported by the Ford Motor Company. The
Museum is now working to create a Timeline of History in conjunction
with four partners—Exeter, Chester, Norwich and Sutton Hoo.
Funding from the Mellon Foundation has enabled the digitisation
of the Stein collection of Chinese paintings.
(vi) The experience of visiting the Museum
was improved substantially with the opening of the £97.9
million Great Court development including the Hamlyn Library,
devoted to world cultures, in the historic Reading Room, the Clore
Education Centre and the new Sainsbury Africa Galleries. The percentage
of UK visitors increased by 50 per cent and there were significant
increases also in the number of repeat visits and the average
length of a visit.
(vii) In 2003, as the culmination of the
250th anniversary year, The British Museum will open two new galleries.
The Wellcome Trust Gallery will explore health and well-being,
a central theme for today's public. The restored King's Library
will feature 5,000 objects to engage visitors with the process
of discovering the world since the age of the Enlightenment. Both
developments are funded by donations and offer a great opportunity
for public education.
4. FUNDING POSITION
(i) The British Museum is a non-departmental public body
funded by grant-in-aid from the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport and is an exempt charity under Section 2 of the Charities
Act 1993. For the year 2001-02 the Museum received grant-in-aid
of £36 million and generated a further £10.8 million
commercial and private income. Over the last decade, this grant-in-aid
has fallen as a proportion of the overall operating budget and
fallen in real terms value by 22 per cent. At £7.48, the
grant-in-aid per visitor is one of the lowest in the sector.
(ii) The result of the erosion of core funding
has been a backlog of essential maintenance, progressive reduction
of grant funding for acquisitions (from more than £1 million
in the 1990s to £100,000 today) and the limitation on the
amount of outreach and educational work which can be supported.
Although the Museum has made bids for initiative and specific
capital funds, some of which have been successful, grant-in-aid
has yet to be increased in line with costs.
(iii) The British Museum has successfully
increased its income from private sources, from sponsorship and
benefaction. £65 million of the capital funding for the Great
Court development was raised from individuals, companies and foundations
including the largest ever gifts to the arts and to museum education
in this country. The Museum records thanks to all those benefactors,
friends and sponsors who continue to support our work. No additional
public funding was provided for running costs.
(iv) The British Museum operates two subsidiary
companies. The British Museum Company provides on-site and off-site
retail (including Heathrow Terminal 4), merchandising and publishing
(around 60 titles per annum). Great Court Ltd provides venue hire,
filming and on-site services such as catering. Since the opening
of the Great Court, the income per visitor has increased by 36
per cent.
(v) Overall, however, income has been less
than forecast. Although visitor numbers increased by four per
cent to 4.81 million for 2001-02, they were 15 per cent behind
projections due to the decrease in tourism to London.
(vi) For ten years, the Museum had attracted
30 per cent UK visitors and 70 per cent tourist visitors. In 2001-02,
following the opening of the Great Court, the profile shifted
to 45 per cent UK visitors and 55 per cent tourist visitors, with
the fall of around 600,000 international visits resulting from
the foot and mouth crisis being disguised by the growth in domestic
visitors and repeat visits.
(vii) The British Museum is distinctive
in the number of visitors it receives from North America (now
17 per cent of all visitors, some 818,000 visits). The effect
of the events of 11 September was an immediate fall of 10 per
cent in visitor numbers—disproportionately affecting attendances
to the exhibition on Shinto: the Sacred Arts of Ancient Japan,
for example—and a fall of more than 20 per cent in on-site
income.
(viii) The direct operating costs of the
Great Court were offset by internal restructuring and increased
operational efficiency; however, the Museum was not eligible for
support through the Capital Modernisation Fund. Running costs
have increased in the face of new requirements. The introduction
of the Treasure Act has significantly improved recording of treasure
finds; supporting this work now costs the British Museum an estimated
£500,000 per annum.
(ix) Before the departure of the British
Library in 1996, the overhead costs of the historic building and
upgrading for new technology, for example, were shared between
two institutions. The British Museum now faces the challenge of
maintaining miles of roofs alone. Over ten years, for example,
the Museum has needed to invest around £30 million in fire
safety and improved access measures.
(x) In the face of the three-year funding
agreement, volatile market and increasing statutory responsibilities,
the Museum has projected that—were no action to be taken—it
would incur a deficit of £5 million by 2004-05. As a result,
the Museum has undertaken a fundamental review of its revenue
budget and far-reaching cost reduction measures are being implemented.
These include the introduction of a Gallery Availability Plan,
resulting in the periodic daily closure of 20 per cent of galleries,
together with a progressive reduction in the staff base.
(xi) With regret, the Museum cancelled its
plans for development of a new "Study Centre" designed
to improve public access to the collections and is in the process
of selling the building on New Oxford Street. The receipts from
this sale can only be used for capital purposes.
5. IMPACT OF
FREE ADMISSION
(i) Holding international collections, the British Museum
considers that free admission is the pre-requisite of the universal
franchise in culture and the essential basis for pursuit of its
mission. It did not introduce charging as grant levels fell. The
result was not only the loss of admissions income but the loss
of VAT which might otherwise have been reclaimed.
(ii) Free admission is directly linked to
the continuous growth in its visitor numbers to the British Museum
throughout the 1980s and to the sustained position of the British
Museum as the most visited destination in London throughout the
1990s.
(iii) Research and consultation undertaken
in the 1990s demonstrated that—had admission charges been
applied—the number of visitors could have been expected
to fall by 40 per cent (20 million visits over 10 years). Our
most recent visitor surveys show that free admission greatly influenced
the decision to visit of one third of visitors, particularly those
under 25.
(iv) It is for this reason that the British
Museum warmly welcomed the reintroduction of free admission to
all national museums and the improved VAT recovery under the new
Section 33A arrangements (which benefits the Museum by some £750,000
per annum).
(v) The British Museum works closely with
the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and values their commitment
to the museum sector. Since the introduction of free admission
at the previously charging national museums, however, attendances
at the British Museum have fallen and a decrease of 10 per cent
to 4.4 million is projected for 2002-03 affecting on-site income
significantly.
6. THE FUTURE
(i) Free admission is the start of a journey of discovery
which presupposes many, many visits. The key issue for the Museum
is, therefore, the support of its programme to ensure:
— research and public engagement (through
research, fieldwork and acquisition)
— refreshment of display (through exhibitions
and gallery renewals)
— increased outreach (through digitisation
and touring)
— UK/regional partnership (greater
lending of objects and skills-sharing)
— visitor participation (though object
handling and volunteer programmes, for example)
— educational support (on-site and
on-line).
(ii) To achieve this, all free museums require
sustainability of funding through both core grant-in-aid and initiative
and capital funding streams for programme innovation, maintenance,
digitisation and partnership.
(iii) The British Museum is committed to
an ongoing programme of modernisation to ensure that the operation
of the Board of Trustees, the management structure and administrative
processes are as effective as possible and that running costs
are minimised. The speed of change needed to place the Museum's
finances on a sound basis for the future whilst ensuring that
its primary duties of care of the collections and public access
are maintained will mean that difficult choices have to be made.
(iv) The British Museum will continue to
work vigorously to make the case for continued and appropriate
funding from the public purse and to raise private income to support
its mission. It is only in partnership that the British Museum
can realise its potential and make its full contribution to social
and regional development in the UK and to advancing Britain's
role and reputation in the world.
1 Calculated by the British Museum on the basis of
a charge per head on cumulative visitor numbers minus 40 per cent
for the reduction which the introduction of charging would have
caused plus the annual VAT which could not be claimed by the British
Museum as a free institution but would have been reclaimed as
a charging business. Back
2
The British Museum introduced extended opening hours by six hours
each week with the opening of the Great Court, which remains open
beyond the Museum hours (to 11 p.m. on Thursday to Saturday).
The virtual visitor numbers are those who remain on the site for
10 minutes. Back
3
Based on the average compensation to previously charging institutions
multiplied by the visitor numbers. Back
4
Calculated by the British Museum and including £65 million
raised for the Great Court from private sources and not including
£45 million grants for that project from the Millennium Commission
and Heritage Lottery Fund. Back
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