Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 23 OCTOBER 2002
MR NEIL
MACGREGOR
AND MS
DAWN AUSTWICK,
OBE
Chairman
1. Mr MacGregor and Ms Austwick, thank you for
coming here and opening our inquiry. We invite you to make an
opening statement.
(Mr MacGregor) The British Museum is,
I think, one of the great ideals made reality by Parliament. The
decision in 1753 by Parliament to create a museum where any curious
person/any studious person from anywhere in the world would be
able to examine, free of charge, the artefacts and the natural
history of the world set a model and a standard that the rest
of the world has followed. The idea of the universal museum, the
national museum, in both cases, was the first around the world.
In that ideal, the Museum has remained absolutely constant. The
purpose today is as it always was, that any visitor should be
able to explore the whole world and every place in it. In terms
of the collection, the Museum is now more able to do that than
it ever was and it has always been the central part of the purpose
of the Museum that, as well as looking at objects, visitors should
be able to read and find out about them. So although the library
is no longer there, we still have a library on the collection
and of course we have a website information of great extent on
the collection. We never felt that we could achieve the purpose
of allowing the entire population to explore the world other than
through free admission, that no barrier should be put to one visit
and repeat visits and that everybody should know that this collection
belongs to them for them to explore as they choose. We believe
that it is because of free admission over two-and-a-half centuries
that we now have the happy position, I think, for a worldwide
museum. Fifty-five per cent of our visitors are international,
only 45 per cent from the UK. Within our UK visitors, 45 per cent
are from London, 55 per cent are from the rest of the UK, and,
within our British visitors, the declared non-white British visitors
form 13 per cent of British visitors and our C1 category visitors
is 36 per cent and our C2, D and E 14 per cent. We believe that
breakdown is the result of, as I say, two-and-a-half centuries
of free admission and we hope we will be enabled, through Government
funding, to extend the reach and the purpose of the Museum. We
have inherited, all of us, an absolutely unique resource in the
British Museum. We have in place many programmes and many activities
to make that resource available to the world and especially to
the whole of the UK. The great challenge for us, I think, is to
found the financial resources to allow the Museum to become really
the Museum of the entire nation and the world.
Michael Fabricant
2. You have received a small increase in funding
from the Department via the Treasury, but it is only a small increase
and, in your written evidence to us, you tell of the difficulties
that the British Museum faces. You will be aware that a Treasury
spokesman told The Sunday Times in its publication on 13
October that the reason for this is and I quote, "The Treasury
awards excellence, not incompetence." Have you been incompetent?
(Mr MacGregor) I do not think it is fair to say that
the British Museum has been incompetent. The British Museum has
faced over the last ten years a challenge really equalled by no
other museum: the withdrawal of the British Library and the evacuation
of those spaces and the need to transform the reading room of
the Great Court while keeping the entire collection open to the
public. As I say, that is a challenge that no other museum has
addressed. The effort has led to many difficulties in the museum.
All administrative and all financial resource had to be put to
achieving that end. It has been achieved; I think it has been
magnificently achieved. The result is that we have a backlog of
building work to be done on the rest of the building, we have
the rest of the British Museum spaces to develop and we have to
refocus the administrative work in the administrative roles of
the Museum to the tasks ahead. I think the Treasury was unduly
harsh in the way it judged an institution coping with such an
enormous task.
3. I noticed in the allocation being made this
year that there has been simply a transfer of around £400,000
from your resource allocation, which are your ongoing costs, to
your capital costs. Given that you now know what the capital and
resource allocations are going to be for the next three years,
are you going to be able to operate within those budgets?
(Mr MacGregor) Obviously the Museum can operate on
any budget that it has. That is our job. The question is, can
we operate effectively to the maximum public benefit and I think
the answer has to be, sadly, "no". Our first task, once
the collection is safely conserved and stored, obviously is to
make it available to the pubic in as many ways as possible. The
need for security in galleries that are open to the pubic is evident
and the £400,000 will certainly be very helpful in that area
but it is only there for one year and then it is absorbed. What
it does not take into account are the two major developments.
Firstly, the Treasure Act has laid new obligations on the Museum
by statute. We have had to create about ten new posts to meet
those obligations, which are very important and which we have
been very happy to meet, but only one of those posts has been
funded and, in a recent debate in the House of Lords, Lady Blackstone
said that it was for the Museum to allocate its resources in accordance
with its statutory obligations. It is hard to meet those new obligations
without repercussions elsewhere. Secondly, we have a very ambitious
and extensive programme for different communities in London and
across the country. Those require resources and staff above all.
You cannot have those programmes without the staff and it is very
hard to see whether or not we will be able to achieve those programmes
on the funding as announced at the moment.
4. Finally, you said that you do not think you
will be able to operate effectively and you have given the reasons
why. What would be the practical effects over the next two or
three years? In which ways will the British Museum not be able
to perform the sort of things that you would like to see it perform?
(Mr MacGregor) I think it will be less able to reach
the public outside London above all, which is obviously the main
concern. I think that will be the major area where the British
public will notice the result of under funding.
5. And that is it?
(Mr MacGregor) That is the major area. I am not talking
about capital, I am not talking about redeveloping the building,
all those things will remain evident, but it is easier for us
to try and raise other funds for those.
6. I hasten to add that when I said "And
that is it?", I was not implying that people from Manchester
nor indeed Lichfield should not be accessed by the British Museum.
(Mr MacGregor) No.
Mr Bryant
7. Many congratulations on your new job. What
is the difference between running the National Gallery and running
the British Museum?
(Mr MacGregor) There are two main differences. Firstly,
the National Gallery is a collection of one aspect of European
tradition and the British Museum is the place where the world
can discover the world. The scale of the ambition of the collection
is quite admirable. There is no other building in the world where
anybody can come and explore both their own culture and how it
fits into every other culture in the way they can. That is the
first difference. It is a quite different ambition. The second
difference is that the National Gallery had been well-funded to
achieve its purposes and properly funded, and it is perfectly
clear to me that the British Museum has not been over the last
ten years and is not adequately funded to make of the collection
what the public want to make of it.
8. Between the lines and from your original
comment and quote from the original founding document of the British
Museum about "any curious person"—the concept
of a curious person entering the British Museum strikes a sense
of trembling—I just wonder whether with the hotch-potch
that is the other side of what you have just described that is
the British Museum, which might, say, be full of a lot of knick-knacks,
very wonderful knick-knacks though they may be, there is too great
an ambition in there?
(Mr MacGregor) No. It is not a hotch-potch, it is
the story of humanity. It is the memory of mankind that you cannot
reach anywhere else. In the objects preserved in the British Museum
is the collective memory of mankind. The great challenge is to
make the collection physically visitable so that the coherence
of the collection, the oneness, the secret of oneness of humanity,
becomes apparent. That is why capital in the future is so important.
With the withdrawal of the British Library and the spaces available,
we are the first generation that can really think how this extraordinary
collection can be employed.
9. I used to spend a lot of time writing books
in the old library and was delighted when it went because I think
all the staff who worked there hated working in that confined,
cramped cabin space—it was miserable—and now you have
created a stunningly beautiful atrium or whatever you want to
call it, but I do feel, especially when you go upstairs in the
British Museum, that the sense of oneness is not, it is a sense
of hotch-potch: there is a bit of this and there is a bit of that.
I think one of the most beautiful things that you have is some
of the Assyrian Collection that you have which is truly stunning
and is not available anywhere else in the world and, if it was
in Assyria, would have probably been destroyed by now. Before
you get more money, I want to know what the British Museum is
there for.
(Mr MacGregor) The British Museum is to enable everybody
to understand the history of the world and how they relate. The
relationship between Assyria, where civilisation began in the
Western sense, and Egypt and Greece can be seen in the British
Museum as nowhere else in the world and, on the ground floor—and
our task is to make it more open—how the Greek achievement
then informs Rome and what happens in India. That is what you
can understand from the British Museum. There is no such thing
really as a separate culture.
10. I am sorry to interrupt you but you are
making yourselves a sort of world service of museums.
(Mr MacGregor) No other museum can do this and the
British Museum has to do what its collection is uniquely allowed
to do. It was set up to be the world service. It was always set
up to be the universal museum. Of course, there are inevitably
many narratives within a collection, many, many narratives, but
you are quite right, the key at the moment of redoing the upper
floor, which is indeed what we plan to do now that the building
of the Great Court Room has been undertaken, is to make more of
the links between the different civilisations.
11. One question about money. I was in the Prado
last week in Madrid and the Prado is free to Spaniards but you
pay if you are from any other country. The Louvre has a similar
arrangement. There are a number of countries in the world where
the major galleries of the world are either free all through the
week or on particular days for their nationalities. Do you think
there might be value in exploring having a free charging policy
for the United Kingdom but paying for external visitors?
(Mr MacGregor) I think the Prado has had to abandon
that policy when Spain joined the European Union.
12. You do have to pay. Last Saturday I paid.
(Mr MacGregor) You are not allowed in any European
country to distinguish between nationals and other members of
the European Union. I may be wrong. The evidence I think from
all the other European major museums is that, since charges were
applied—it was all free until somewhere in the twentieth
century—the proportion of local visitors as opposed to foreigners
has declined and the social balance of the visitors has moved
in a way one would not want if one sees museums as part of an
educational system. I think the fact that we still have such an
enormously high proportion of UK visitors, particularly London
visitors, to all our public collections has a great deal to do
with free admission.
Chairman
13. It would be interesting if we could, say,
get the House of Commons Library to give us some information about
different forms of concession over the European Union. I was in
Italy last year and went to museums in Italy and I found that
all concessions at Italian museums extended to all nationals of
the European Union.
(Mr MacGregor) I am sure they have to.
Michael Fabricant: They cannot differentiate
within the EU for any charge.
Mr Bryant: Well, the Louvre and the Prado
both do.
Michael Fabricant: We stick to the rules
and nobody else does.
Chairman: That is because we are British!
Mr Doran
14. Congratulations from me also on your appointment.
I would like to look a little more closely at the financial arrangements.
You listed a long legacy which you inherited and you made a comment
about the Treasury in that you felt they had been unduly harsh
in the way they had dealt with your particular problems.
(Mr MacGregor) I was commenting on Mr Fabricant's
quotation from the Treasury when it declared the Museum incompetent.
Michael Fabricant: And I agreed with
you. Can I also congratulate you on your appointment.
Chairman: To get it out of the way, Mr
MacGregor, we all congratulate you!
Mr Doran
15. In looking at the issues that you have raised,
obviously the question of free admission is fairly high on the
list of difficulties you have had to face and, looking at it from
the outside, would you accept that you have been effectively punished
by sticking to your principles on free admission?
(Mr MacGregor) Yes, there is no question. The long
running absurdity that free museums had to pay VAT has meant that
the Museum has lost somewhere between £750,000 and £1
million a year over the last ten years. That is money that would
of course have been spent on building; it would have been invested
and could not be invested. The other area is of course the fact
that those museums that have charged have been compensated for
removing charges, but none of the free admissions were compensated
at the time for having not charged. So, it does seem to us inequitable
that there should be extra compensation now for those museums
that have removed charges and not a similar uplift for all museums.
16. Effectively, sticking by your principles,
you are losing about £8 million a year on your own figures
and you have lost £100 million over the—
(Mr MacGregor) We did not quite say £100 million
but certainly we think somewhere around £80 million.
17. Have you ever done a cost analysis of the
benefits of the British Museum to the UK economy? I ask that because
recently the Royal Shakespeare Company did it and they presented
us with evidence to suggest that about 80 per cent of all the
public funding they receive is returned in some way in taxes.
(Mr MacGregor) I do not think we have specifically.
Clearly, the British Museum is one of the reasons constantly cited
by foreigners coming to London. The role of the Museum and the
standing of the Museum internationally is hard to exaggerate and
I think the magnet effect that it has on visitors coming to Britain
is huge.
(Ms Austwick) I would just confirm that, to my knowledge,
we have not undertaken such a study but, if you look at other
common institutions that have, for example the Tate when they
were looking at developing the Tate Modern, they undertook an
exercise to look at how attractive London would be to international
tourism as a result of the arrival of the Tate Modern and I think
that there the economic benefit was predicated as somewhere in
the region of £50 million per annum ongoing and I suspect
that if we were to undertake a similar exercise—and perhaps
we should—we would find that indeed that magnet effect is
rather important.
18. It might help your case with the Treasury.
(Ms Austwick) Yes.
19. I do not understand fully the funding formula
which applies to museums.
(Mr MacGregor) Nor do I!
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