HC 507

Written evidence submitted by Sir Neil Cossons [SMG 012]

I write as a former Director of the Science Museum - from 1986 to 2000 - concerned that financial constraints and government policy may lead to the closure of a museum in the Science Museum Group or prejudice the museum’s quality such that it can no longer fulfil its obligations to its collections and its audiences.

I should be grateful if you could place these observations before the members of the Select Committee at their meeting on 2 June.

1. Collections. The collections of the Science Museum Group are beyond compare. They are the most significant in their field anywhere, reflecting Britain’s role as the world’s first industrial nation and as an international innovator in science and technology. These collections have unparalleled strength in scale, depth, quality and relevance. No other museum in the world has such an abundance of material evidence that compares with the holdings of the Science Museum Group. If you wish to see the hundred objects that really changed the world they are to be found here.

2. Funding. Throughout its existence the Museum has been underfunded in relationship to its core responsibilities - of caring for its collections and presenting them to the public. There were crises in the 1890s when the South Kensington Museum split into the V&A and the Science Museum, in the 1900s when the Museum’s site was under threat, in the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s and again today. For well over a century such funding as there has been has been provided as an afterthought to the requirements of other institutions and has had to be fought for tooth and nail. If there was a golden age it was during the 1960s and ‘70s when the Science Museum was run as a departmental museum by the Department for Education & Science.

3. Under the Department of National Heritage and more recently the Department of Culture, Media and Sport the Science Museum has been grievously neglected. In the 1980s this led to the introduction of admission charges, which injected some £35 million into the Museum's economy without which it would have collapsed. Since the removal of admission charges and constraints on Grant-in-Aid, the Museum is again in crisis. This could have been foreseen and represents a severe indictment of DCMS and the incoherence of government policy.

4. The current government’s insistence on universal free admission, without debate on its justification or analysis of its wider implications, has – predictably – had catastrophic consequences for the Science Museum. The economies of the English national museums vary widely. For some free admission with a healthy charging economy based on special exhibitions delivers both income and visitor numbers. That option is not open to the Science Museum as there are no suitable exhibitions for which visitors in large numbers will pay. Only one Science Museum exhibition has ever produced significant income; this toured Japan in the late 1990s and delivered a net return, after all costs, of £750,000. No domestic exhibition has produced anything.

5. Admission Charges. The re-introduction of admission charges in the form in which they were applied in the 1980s would not be a solution to the problems of the Science Museum Group; a soundly-based Grant-in-Aid must continue to be the foundation upon which the Museum's funding is based. However, in a period of austerity when museums and galleries are expected to play their part in meeting the exigencies of the national financial situation, fundamentalist opposition to any form of charging is an irresponsible policy inappropriate to a modern pluralist society. And it is also deeply prejudicial to the interests of the Science Museum Group and its users and other areas of the nation’s cultural agenda that are being emasculated in order to pay for it.

6. There is no evidence that universal free admission widens access to those who cannot afford to pay. But there is a wide range of charging options that could be examined so that a balance may be struck between the Grant-in-Aid, the interests of the museum and its quality of service, and the wellbeing of its users. Charging, intelligently applied, can make a worthwhile and of course index-linked contribution. The best scheme, increasingly and successfully adopted elsewhere, is based on a Pay Once Only formula in which a ticket is valid for a year. This allows multiple visits [an important attribute of free admission], catches all categories of visitor without discrimination [e.g. on grounds of nationality] and allows multiple discounting [eg free for children, etc]. Modern swipe-card technologies enable this to be applied easily [as with Oyster cards], offers huge opportunities for flexibility and provides the museum with a means of communicating with its visitors.

7. The Current Situation. It is questionable whether DCMS has the intellectual, managerial or financial capability to be a responsible sponsor of a museum as important as the Science Museum, given the department's commitments elsewhere in fields other than science and technology. The current situation reflects a more widespread cultural negligence in which science, technology, engineering and industry have been allowed to decay, to the detriment of the nation as a whole. There is therefore a case for removing the Science Museum Group to a more appropriate department of state and this should be examined.

8. The Future. The prime requirement now is for a zero-based review and analysis of the Museum’s purpose, priorities, and funding. Ideally, this should be carried out in the context of a wider examination of the funding of the English national museums and galleries.

The priorities for a review should be:

8.1 Statement of the importance of the collections, with comparisons nationally and internationally;

8.2 The cultural and educational role of the Museum and its future potential;

8.3 Analysis and options appraisal of governance, direction, management and funding;

8.4 Analysis and options appraisal of where the Museum should be located in the Government’s departmental structure.

8.5 Conclusions and recommendations.

9. I should of course be happy to expand on these views or answer any questions you may have.

In the meantime I appeal to the Select Committee to recognise the national imperative to protect and nurture the world’s greatest museum of science, technology and industry.

June 2013