Examination of Witnesses (Questions 182
- 199)
TUESDAY 9 JANUARY 2007
MR MARTIN
LEVY, MR
JONATHAN SCOTT,
MR GERRY
MCQUILLAN
MBE, SIR NICHOLAS
GOODISON, MR
HUGH STEVENSON
AND MR
WILLIAM MASSEY
QC
Chairman: Good morning, everybody, and
welcome to what is, I think, the fourth session of the Committee's
inquiry into caring for our collections. We are covering quite
a lot of ground this morning, so I appeal to all witnesses to
be relatively brisk in covering the ground. Could I welcome, first
of all, Sir Nicholas Goodison who carried out the Goodison Review
three years ago and the members of the Goodison Review Group,
Hugh Stevenson, the Chairman, and William Massey. Could I also
welcome Martin Levy on behalf of the Reviewing Committee on the
Export of Works of Art and Jonathan Scott, the Chairman of the
Acceptance in Lieu Panel and Gerry McQuillan who, I understand,
is the Secretary to both of those committees. First of all, can
I call upon Helen Southworth who has a brief statement.
Helen Southworth: I want to raise a non-registrable
interest, that my husband is a museum director, was a member of
the Goodison Review and is a member of the North West Board of
the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Q182 Philip Davies: Has the Treasury
accepted any of the fiscal recommendations made in the Goodison
Review?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: No.
Q183 Philip Davies: That was very
brief!
Sir Nicholas Goodison: I was told
to be brief!
Q184 Philip Davies: How many of them
has it expressly rejected?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: The report
was published in January 2004 and I have had no contact with the
Treasury since that date. There has been no discussion and no
formal response to my Review. I have had, therefore, to glean
reasons for no acceptance from elsewhere, particularly of course
from parliamentary debates, I suppose the major gleaning that
I get from that is the feeling, expressed as a feeling, that present
concessions and present incentives are not used sufficiently.
That came out in a Lords' debate and it is what Lord Evans said
in summing up that debate, I think in the autumn of last year.
I find that a strange response because I was of course recommending
measures which encourage philanthropy and the only measure that
encourages philanthropy at present which might be relevant is
the gift of shares and land and, when I did my Review, the Treasury
were unable to produce any figures for what had happened as a
result of that inducement. When you think about measures such
as acceptance in lieu or private treaty sales, they are not philanthropy,
they are sales. The only other measure to encourage philanthropy
is gift aid which I do not think is suitable in this case because
the donor does not receive the total benefit. So I do find that
response odd. I am not without hope and I must observe that yesterday
the Treasury did ring me up and invite me to come and talk to
them about my Review and about the broader issues of philanthropy
and I am very glad about that. I am an optimist and in the long
run I think, I hope, we will see something.
Q185 Chairman: This was the first
contact you had had in three years?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: Yes, with
the Treasury.
Q186 Chairman: The day before you
came before this Committee?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: Yes. I
must say, I take it as encouraging. I am not a pessimist in these
matters and I think it is encouraging. Being an optimist, I like
to think that the real reason for nothing having happened is simply
that they have not got round to it.
Q187 Philip Davies: Are there any
other reasons, apart from the fact that they had not got round
to it, why you think they might have given such a poor response?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: I simply
do not want to speculate because I do not believe in speculating.
Q188 Mr Sanders: Assuming that the
Treasury do not want to go down the tax incentive route, are there
any other routes they can go down?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: Well, my
Review put forward a whole series of ways in which the problems
of acquisitions could be solved. It was not just about acquisitions.
It was trying also to persuade people to keep works of art that
they now have, with modifications to one or two present measures,
it was trying to persuade them to prefer selling to museums if
they were going to sell at all and, it was trying to improve the
museums' ability to collect and willingness and enthusiasm to
collect, and so on and so forth. It was a large package and all
of those things I would like to see done. I do not know if you
want me to come back to answering the question about what has
been accepted because that was, I think, confined to the Treasury,
was it not?
Q189 Chairman: It was, yes.
Sir Nicholas Goodison: I have
things to say on the other measures.
Q190 Chairman: You said that you
have made contact with the Treasury since the publication of the
report, but has the Review Group had contact with the Treasury?
Mr Stevenson: We have put in papers
to the Treasury, copies of which we have made available to the
Committee. Apart from an acknowledgement that they have received
it, we have had no further contact at all.
Q191 Philip Davies: Have they given
any indication as to when they might actually accept or reject
these proposals? Do you have any timescale for that?
Mr Stevenson: Not to us.
Mr Massey: If I could come in
there and just give chapter and verse on that, we submitted a
paper on the future of conditional exemption for heritage chattels
on 6 October 2005 and we submitted a paper entitled, Proposals
for UK Tax Relief on Donations of Cultural Property, ie, the
gift aid for works of art proposal, and that was submitted on
22 October 2004. We also submitted, with perhaps the not too catchy
title of, Possible Modifications to Administrative Practice
Relating to Negotiated Sales of Objects to Institutions, and
also a draft model agreement for acceptance in lieu in situ,
over which there has been a certain amount of debate, and that
was submitted to the Treasury again on 22 October 2004. We have
had acknowledgements of receipt, but nothing substantive from
the Treasury.
Q192 Chairman: Who appointed you,
Sir Nicholas? Who appointed the Review Group?
Mr Stevenson: The Review Group
is just a private group of people. We have not been appointed
by anybody.
Mr Massey: The Review Group is
simply an ad hoc group of lawyers, largely lawyers, of museum
curators and other interested bodies. For example, a member of
MLA is on it and also a former director of Christie's. We have
all read the Goodison Review and we all thought there was considerable
merit in most of the proposals. We thought it could perhaps benefit
from further analysis and possibly research into other jurisdictions,
fiscal incentives, et cetera, and we, therefore, formed a group
on an ad hoc basis, so we represent really nobody other than ourselves.
We are an ad hoc group and we simply are there really to explore
and perhaps back, as far as we can, the Goodison proposals.
Q193 Chairman: Sir Nicholas, you
were formally appointed by?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: By the
Treasury, by the Chief Secretary.
Q194 Chairman: Who was Paul Boateng?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: Paul Boateng,
yes.
Q195 Chairman: So you were presumably
led to believe at the time that your report would receive some
kind of response from the Treasury?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: In normal
circumstances I would expect some response and maybe some discussion.
Q196 Chairman: But none of that has
happened?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: There has
not been any, no.
Q197 Helen Southworth: Could I ask
whether you are aware of any representations being made by the
DCMS about the recommendations of the Review?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: I have
had a number of discussions with officials in the DCMS and my
impression, but you will have to ask them, is that they wish to
see things done and would back quite a lot of the recommendations
of my report. I sincerely hope they do because they represent
museums and collections in this country. I have never discussed,
and never been summoned to discuss, anything with a present DCMS
minister incidentally, so there has been, as far as I am concerned,
an aching void.
Q198 Chairman: Although the DCMS
have discussed it?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: The DCMS
have shown interest in the field of acquisitions and summoned
a meeting in July chaired by a senior DCMS official, which I thought
was encouraging.
Q199 Mr Evans: How would you best
describe the state of acquisitions in the UK at the moment?
Sir Nicholas Goodison: I would
not change a word of what I wrote in my report today. I did take
the trouble to re-read it before appearing here and I think it
still stands. I think it is very sad that the enthusiasm to collect
has been damped down by the difficulties that museums have been
having. I think that remains true today. The national museums
are to some extent fortunate because they have access to larger
funds and larger backers, but even they are finding it difficult
to allocate sufficient money to acquisitions to enliven and improve
their collections. You have had evidence from them and that is
what they have told you, and I agree with that. Out in the regions
I think it is much more serious still because the local authorities
are always, for reasons that you know, penny-pinching and acquisitions
are a very easy thing not to bother about if you are trying to
save money on your budget. I do not think anything has changed
since I went around the country when writing the Review. I heard
these very depressing statements from regional museums about the
state of their collections, the storage of them, the conservation
of them, the lack of curatorial expertise, the lack of training,
the lack of proper career prospects. So I think there really is
a serious issue here of improving collections management across
the country.
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