Supplementary memorandum submitted by
The Art Fund
When the Minister for Culture, Mr David Lammy,
gave evidence to the Committee last month, he responded to a question
about the shortage of funds for acquisitions by citing evidence
from the Travers Report to challenge the idea that there was a
"crisis" in relation to the funding of acquisitions.
"Crisis" is an over-used word: but there certainly is
a very serious and growing problem. The extraordinary success
of our public appeal for the Blue Rigi not only reveals the extent
of the problem, but also the enthusiasm of the public for our
public art collections.
As an organisation that deals on a daily basis
with museums and galleries, large and small, all over the UK which
are trying to build their collections, The Art Fund is uniquely
well placed to comment on this subject. I would therefore like
to make the following points in response to the evidence given
by Mr Lammy:
1. The Art Fund's own research published
last year based on a survey of more than 300 museum and galleries
throughout the UK revealed that 96% of museums complained that
"inadequate core funding" was a barrier to collecting;
that fewer than 10% of UK museums allocated a fixed proportion
of their core funding each year to collecting; and that 60% of
all museums allocated no income to collecting in 2005.
2. Mr Lammy cites Travers' table regarding
how our museums compare with their counterparts abroad. The Art
Fund also compared the amounts of money available for collecting
purposes to the major British National collections and some of
their overseas counterparts for the year 2004-05, a more recent
year than Travers. Briefly, this revealed that the British institutions
were very much worse off than all the museums and galleries with
which they were compared—including those in Europe. Comparisons
of this kind are always tricky, but the figures we cited were
accurate for the year in question.
3. Mr Lammy goes on to say that "it
is hard, because of the relation of the art market, to compete
with some of the private museums in the United States and indeed
there are going to be pressures in relation to what private money
can do in relation to museums in Russia and China over this and
the next period". This almost sounds like an admission of
defeat before battle has been joined, and one wonders whether
that is what the Minister really meant, or an acceptable course
of action for what is still one of the world's richest countries.
4. Mr Lammy stated that "our museums
are spending just shy of £300 million on acquisitions and
I am afraid that is a large sum of money". Firstly this figure
is for 10 years, and secondly it includes funding from the National
Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the Heritage Lottery Fund, as
well as tax foregone under the Acceptance in Lieu programme. Given
that the NHMF in particular funds a few, exceptional and costly
works, it is misleading to include their funding—such an
aggregate figure is unhelpful as it distorts any analysis of the
funding challenge faced by the museum community as a whole. Our
survey—of 305 museums of all types and across all regions—revealed
that the majority of museums have little if any spending power.
5. The Travers Report makes it clear that
museums and galleries do in fact face serious problems in funding
acquisitions. He states that "the amount spent on acquisitions
is very small" (p 21); and that "there are a number
of important museums and galleries in other countries, particularly
in the US, where the annual level of expenditure on purchases
is significantly higher than in the UK leading institutions"
(Ibid).
6. More generally Travers makes the point
that museum "income has not been rising as fast as staff
and other inflationary costs in the economy (p 8); and that "put
simply, the availability of resources for investment in museums
and galleries appears to be unrelated to the needs of the sector"
(p 19). He concludes by asking "whether, collectively, there
is a national desire to deliver, maintain and expand this particular
creative sector".
Against this background—and I could supply
further data if required—I do not see how anyone could deny
that there is a real problem here.
2 March 2007
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