Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 23 OCTOBER 2002
SIR NEIL
CHALMERS, MS
SHARON AMENT
AND MR
NEIL GREENWOOD
80. Leading on from that, I notice from the
biographies which we were given beforehand that you manage a team
of 150 people, which seemed quite a lot to me. Can you give the
breakdown between communications, revenue generation and the business/commercial
element?
(Ms Ament) We have restructured to bring together
all of our communications. We see communications as one single
activity, whether that is education in the most in-depth sense—so
I manage the education team—right through to the people
who develop exhibitions, the website, publications, and more traditional
areas of communication such as PR, marketing, etc.
81. How many work there?
(Ms Ament) About 100 people altogether. The other
57 or so work in business units. Business activities are devolved
throughout the museum. Every area of the museum has a financial
responsibility to generate income, whether that is through scientific
grants, as Neil Greenwood has indicated, or through retail and
catering in the Visitor Operational Services Group. My group deals
with generating non-visitor-related income, a nd that might be
through running Conference and Events at the museum through to
picture library sales through to touring exhibitions throughout
the world. We tour exhibitions in 22 countries, and they get an
additional two million visitors.
82. Do those tours in other countries make money
for the museum?
(Ms Ament) Sometimes they do and sometimes they do
not. It is a costly business.
83. So you are at risk in doing that.
(Ms Ament) Yes, but it performs a very important outreach
objective for us as well.
84. Do all your business units make a profit,
if you can measure them that way?
(Ms Ament) Most years they do.
(Mr Greenwood) That is what they are there for. They
do make a profit, some better than others.
85. Which might be the best in terms of return,
in the way you would measure it?
(Mr Greenwood) The best return is the Conference and
Events business. You may be aware that we hold dinners in the
Main Hall, for example. That is a very good earner.
86. I do not expect you to be precise, but how
has that done in the last few quarters?
(Mr Greenwood) Last year was particularly difficult
following September 11. This year the business will net approximately
£1 million.
87. Having worked in the City, one year we used
the Natural History Museum for an event. We had walking dinosaurs
terrifying people, which was quite amusing. Has the decline in
the Stock Market affected you?
(Mr Greenwood) It certainly has. I do not know precisely,
but certainly the last financial year was not its best year. It
was not disastrous, by any means, but this year business has certainly
picked up, particularly currently. We are doing very well in the
run-up to Christmas, which is our peak period, as you might expect.
The business did take a knock last year of the order of about
£100,000 off the bottom line, which is significant but does
not put us in financial jeopardy.
Mr Bryant
88. This is not directly about your own museum,
but the Natural History Museum in Oxford is, as I understand it,
a university museum, and therefore not covered by the 1994 changes
in VAT.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) I am not an expert on that. I
think you are right.
89. I wonder whether you would support that
extension to university museums, if it does not apply.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) I think so. It was an anomaly
to have the situation that did obtain for many years, and I am
glad it was corrected in relation to national museums and galleries.
As I understand it, it does not affect local authority museums,
so I think university museums are an extraordinary anomaly and
I think it would be a good idea to put it right.
90. I agree. I was hoping you would say that.
I think the Natural History Museum is a wonderful institution,
and despite the fact that you deal with formaldehyde all day and
every day, you do not seem to be dipped in it yourselves! There
seems to be some strong commercial sense underlying a great deal
of the work in which you are engaged. How important do you think
that is in your work and across the whole of the museum world
now?
(Sir Neil Chalmers) I think it is very important that
we run ourselves in a business-like way. We are, after all, a
big organisation, we are using a lot of public money, and we must
be seen to be managing ourselves well and efficiently. We must
also, because we do not have sufficient resources from Government,
maximise the amount of money we get from other sources. But—and
it is a very big "but"—all of this must be utterly
subservient to our overall goal, which is maintaining the collections
and making them available to our audiences in this country and
around the world as effectively as we possibly can. It is there
as a necessary underpinning of what we are really trying to do.
91. What you seem particularly good at is enticing
people into their own curiosity, if you see what I mean, whether
it is through dinosaurs or seeing a head of a shark in a bottle
or whatever, the little details that lift it above the ordinary
level of just seeing something and not entering into it. Is there
a process whereby you help people become zoologists and botanists
and things like that as well?
(Sir Neil Chalmers) Yes, we go from attracting people
who have no knowledge of the natural world at all and no interest
in it, other than that they want a day out with their children
somewhere safe and pleasant, and we want to be able to entice
them in, to use your phrase, which I think is a good one, by capturing
their attention to say, "Yes, I would like to know more about
that." From there, we can take them right through the entire
academic, intellectual journey, through schools, through the primary
education, secondary, education, lifelong learning. We do a great
deal of teaching in universities at graduate level, at postgraduate
level, and we even do post-doctorate training. We can cover things
at every single level. One of the things we are most keen about,
one of the things that defines our philosophy, is to look at our
different users and say, "What do they need from us?"
and try and put ourselves in the position of our users. "How
is it that we can provide what they want?"
92. I note though that in the last three years
children in school parties have fallen from 147,918 to 114,381,
which is a drop of nearly 30 per cent.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) Yes. This is something we are
concerned about. There are reasons, some of them external to the
museum and some of them internal to the museum.
(Ms Ament) It is something we are focusing on very
strongly. People are using the different resources the museum
has to offer now in different ways. Website visits have taken
off in a way which perhaps is different from the more formal school
visits. Classes are using the website more. We definitely are
focusing on addressing some of those issues, but it is part of
a big restructuring of the museum.
93. I hear you have gone up to 4.7 million page
impressions. That would not cover the 50,000 by the time a child
has done 10 page impressions. This is quite a worrying trend.
(Ms Ament) It is a worry to us, and we need to do
some more work on it.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) Some of this is due to the fact
that we have changed the main education centre, which is in the
basement. It is very attractive, but the throughput is slower;
people are involved in lengthier investigations, so fewer people
come through. Secondly, there is the ability of schools to send
children on visits, which is, I am told, somewhat impaired through
the budgets that are available to schools for extra-curricular
visits. I am not an expert on that, but I think it is something
which is worth exploring more.
94. You talk about extending your reach, which
sounds a bit like the BBC talking about its share and its reach,
but the other thing that the BBC and other organisations try to
evaluate is their audience appreciation. Presumably you do some
kind of MORI research or whatever on what people think about their
experience of coming to the museum.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) Yes. Again, this is Sharon's area.
We regularly poll our visitors on our own account. We also take
part in a collaborative poll through the Association of Leading
Visitor Attractions, which is an interesting body which has as
a criterion of membership that you have to have over a million
visitors a year. It contains ourselves, the Canterbury Cathedral
and Blackpool Tower, so it is a very diverse group. We get a number
of visitor indicators from that.
(Ms Ament) We regularly receive in excess of 80 per
cent excellent satisfaction from visitors.
95. The National Museum of Wales also has a
Natural History element to it. I just wonder what cooperation
you have with them.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) That is on several levels. We
work on the science side, working with collections, sharing expertise.
A lot of that goes on, not just with the National Museum of Wales
but with the National Museum of Scotland, with the national museums
and galleries on Merseyside and in Northern Ireland, and with
many of the other larger museums.
96. Devolution has not produced any new problems
in that regard?
(Sir Neil Chalmers) It could do. It depends very much
how the Renaissance in the Regions implementation goes. That,
of course, is confined principally to England in terms of building
up hubs. We as a national museum wish to work closely with a number
of leading museums in England which have major collections where
we can help them work. There is a question of how you enable that
network to work effectively with the big museums in Scotland,
Northern Ireland and Wales, and I think that is a complexity that
would not have existed without devolution.
John Thurso
97. My late father, when a child living in London,
used to visit the museum regularly, but called it the "bony
museum" so in our family I am afraid you will for ever be
the bony museum. You said earlier on that you had no understanding
of how figures were reached by government in allocating funding.
Can I explore your planning process, how you build your business
plan and what the cycle is? Presumably you would begin yourselves
by having a fairly clear objective, a vision even, reduced down
to objectives, current action plan, and from that you would build
both a reasonably long-term business plan and a short-term annual
plan. I assume that is what you do.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) You have just précised
exactly what I was going to say. Yes.
98. What are the sort of timescales you are
planning on?
(Sir Neil Chalmers) We have set ourselves in terms
of a vision, a ten-year vision, which is from 2010, and we are
clear what we want to have achieved by 2010 across the range of
the museum's activities in terms of the public experience, major
exhibitions, the completion of the Darwin Centre, and creating
a more adult experience for adults who want to come without their
children in a calmer atmosphere in the upper floors of the museum
and such like. We have a vision of where we want to go in our
science, and particularly important and difficult is the development
of our information technology. We then plan within the three-year
period covered by the Spending Review allocation period. We have
just received a letter from the Secretary of State, and we will
between now and January do a lot of work on preparing the business
case to put to our trustees based upon the allocations that we
now know we shall receive and on the predictions of the income
that we will have from our other sources. We will produce a worked-out
business plan for a three-year period.
99. Therefore, in business terms, your major
real plan, your three-year rolling plan, is actually driven by
what you are going to get from the Government more than anything
else.
(Sir Neil Chalmers) It is, yes.
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