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The success of the National Football Museum has been achieved with core revenue funding from the DCMS which, until this year’s settlement, had not increased by one penny since 1 April 2003. One consequence is that it and other smaller museums, such as Locomotion at Shildon and, before its recent closure for refurbishment, the People’s History Museum in Manchester, can afford only a tiny marketing budget. As a result many people are still unaware of the museums’ existence and that they are free to all visitors.

I shall stay with the National Football Museum for a moment. The trustees welcome the decision by the principal football organisations to set up, under the Football Foundation, a review of the contributions they make to the museum with the intention of placing the museum on a much more secure long-term financial footing. I know that the Government believe that football should come up with substantially more money, and I think there is now evidence that the game is willing to accept that responsibility. But it

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would be good to hear from my noble friend that the Government are considering additional funding for smaller museums to enable them to draw attention to their free access and to contribute further to the success of government policy.

I wonder whether the Minister would agree that there is a gulf in policy between setting objectives that envisage lively and well-managed museums able to deliver the breadth of government education agendas to an increasingly diverse audience of young people nationwide and a funding regime that sustains the status quo; namely, well-funded art museums in London serving an audience that, frankly, does not reflect the nation as a whole. I know that the DCMS is sensitive about comparisons such as these, but can it be right that grant in aid per C2DE visitor to one of the principal art museums in London is around 11 times that for the National Railway Museum? In other words, it costs the Government 11 times as much to get a C2DE visitor into the former as it does to get one into the NRM, yet we know that the National Railway Museum can deliver experiences and education programmes of at least equal value to young people.

My message to the Government is that they must not rest on their laurels over free entry because, having delivered extra visitors, the opportunity to deliver on their priorities and objectives is not being met to anything like its potential. One key reason is that the grant in aid for the national museums—once the compensation for free entry has been deducted—has not kept pace with inflation, and certainly not with their hugely increased usage following free entry. The cost of education programmes, events and activities through which the museums deliver for the nation rises proportionately with the number of visitors. So although they have more visitors, they are unable to provide the quality of service that those visitors deserve, and the positive programmes that could engage those broader audiences are not being delivered to anything like their full potential.

In practice, while absolute numbers of C2DE visitors have risen with free entry, so have those of ABC1s, and at many museums the proportionate mix has not changed much. We know that the national museums cannot sit back and rely on grant in aid. Sponsorship, grant aid from charitable trusts and lottery funds are hard to get, but the vast bulk of the capital investment that goes into the nationals comes from these sources. As a consequence, they deliver tremendous value for money to the taxpayer. There has been a welcome increase in government capital funding in the new funding agreement, but it is starting from a very low base. The vast bulk of this new money—£50 million—is going to the Tate for its expansion. The Tate is a wonderful museum, but it is taking a large share of the total, whereas the share for other national museums is much more limited. For example, the National Museum of Science and Industry has got only £13 million over three years for all purposes—expansion, renewal and building maintenance. There are no funds for anything like an acquisition programme.

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The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, referred in his speech to tourism. I hope that the DCMS will have the vision to appreciate the real potential offered here by the national museums and galleries. The DCMS is good at setting objectives for museums, but I find it strange that while it also has strategic responsibility for tourism in the UK, it does not seem able to join that up with using its power as the owner of heritage attractions to help build the country's tourism business. We know that tourism depends to a very significant degree on our heritage. The department is responsible for a huge portfolio of that heritage, including—particularly relevant to today's debate—national museums. Yet it is difficult to see that there is a national plan for using this resource to help deliver the economic benefits of tourism, particularly tourism from overseas.

My final point is: should there not be some plans for investment in the national museums—other than the Tate, and particularly outside London—to encourage overseas tourism? I should like to see more vision and more joined-up thinking from the department. I should also like to see the department working with the regional development agencies to deliver investments which sustain and enhance our reputation as the home to world-class museums and galleries. We have a huge amount to be proud of in our national museums and art galleries. I just feel that we could be doing more to exploit that potential and achieve more income and more visitors from overseas.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Walpole, has indicated that he wishes to speak in the gap. This is a time-limited debate and I propose that the noble Lord be limited to speaking for four minutes.

5.05 pm

Lord Walpole: My Lords, I do not think that I even need four minutes. I just wish to ask the Government two questions, but I shall declare my interests and say where I am coming from. I am a past chairman of the Area Museums Service for South East England and I was the chairman of Norfolk Museums Service when it was set up. I have been a member of ICOM for 40 years, so I have very rarely paid to go into a national museum anywhere in the world. Now the advertising: I am a director of Fakenham Museum of Gas and Local History, which is the only complete gasworks left in this country.

I congratulate the Government on introducing free entry to national museums—it is absolutely wonderful. I am very much in favour of all museums being free. I was also involved with libraries in Norfolk and I could not understand why anyone could borrow, without paying, any book from any library, with the possible exception of reference books, which could not be taken outside, and yet they had to pay to go into every museum.

Local government museums do not seem to have followed the example of national museums. What are the Government doing to persuade them and local authorities that entrance to all museums should be free?

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When the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, introduced the debate, he said that he did not want cathedrals to charge for entry. My involvement with Norwich Cathedral means that I know why it has to charge. It is because there simply is not enough money to maintain buildings such as that. The cathedrals in this country have major collections, as well as being major architectural gems.

Many of the main collections of art, antiquities and architecture in this country are still in private hands. Have the Government given any thought to asking for free entry for the public to such establishments in return for more generous grants for repairs and maintenance?

5.08 pm

Lord Clement-Jones: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on initiating today’s debate. We have had some extremely informative and expert speeches, and I certainly do not envy the Minister the task of winding up.

We have heard how the decision in 2001 to introduce free admission to the permanent collections of the DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries in England that charged for entry has been a resounding success. It is good that we have the architects of that policy in the House with us today. We on these Benches supported that step very strongly and I applaud it today. I declare an interest as an avid and regular visitor with my son to many of these superb museums.

I was particularly moved by the speech of my noble friend Lord Roberts, who spoke about the personal impact and importance that a visit to a museum can have. We have also heard what has resulted from the free admissions scheme. Figures published by the DCMS last June showed that there were nearly 7 million extra visits to England’s national museums and galleries which had formerly charged compared with the year before entry charges were scrapped. The most impressive increases in London were in the South Kensington museums. In the regions there were huge rises in Liverpool, the Natural History Museum at Tring and the National Railway Museum in York. It was therefore no surprise that the directors of the 22 nationally funded museums all wrote strongly in support of free admission in a letter to the Guardian last June. This was in response to some ill advised speculation by the now Olympic spokesman of the Conservative party referred to earlier, Hugo Swire. Needless to say, he was overruled fairly fast by his leadership and contradicted by the Conservatives’ own arts task force.

The CMS Select Committee report in December 2002 on the free admission scheme did conclude—this is where a number of noble Lords who, as well as applauding the original decision, were so wise in their caution about the future—that the compensation package agreed for the department was based on what seemed to be a modest, even conservative estimate in the likely rise in visitors. For example, in the case of the Natural History Museum, compensation was set to reflect a 20 per cent rise in visitor numbers. It therefore did not take sufficient account of an increase in visitor figures. It is also always the danger

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that the Government are compensating for the money lost from admission charges but not providing money to cope with the extra visitors that free admissions have brought.

The cost to the Government in specific grant in aid to the 22 museums increased from £4.2 million in 1999-2000 to £35 million in 2003-04. A separate amount is not paid currently but funding for free admission is taken into account in the allocation of all funds to all DCMS-sponsored museums. It seems that the current figure is £40 million. Certainly that was the figure stated when the Government published the figures last year. That figure surely does not keep pace with inflation. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say.

The DCMS press release last October announcing the result of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review said,

“A generous funding settlement for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which will allow continued investment in the arts and cultural sectors has been announced today by the Government.

It will enable the Department to:

maintain funding for real terms growth for arts, museums and galleries, including maintaining free access to national museums and contributing to the cultural Olympiad”.

On the other hand, the Treasury described it in the Pre-Budget Report for the DCMS as containing,

“funding for the arts and museums and galleries at least in line with inflation. This will ensure continued free access to national museums, maintaining visitor numbers, and enable an even wider range of people to benefit from these high-quality cultural experiences”.

Which is it, real growth or an increase in line with inflation?

I can understand the DCMS euphoria. After all, there were fears that museums faced a cut of 7 per cent. Where they right, however, to be quite so buoyant? The last phrase is also extremely important in the context:

“enable an even wider range of people to benefit from these high-quality cultural experiences”.

We know that in general the free admissions policy has been a success. As I said, we applaud it from these Benches. But there is the question that many noble Lords have raised today of whether the policy has really led to a sufficiently diverse visitor base in these national museums. Although it is widely regarded that free entry has provided additional access—indeed the director’s letter states that an extra 16 million children have visited museums since they were granted free entry in 1998 and the number of visits from people from lower socio-economic groups has risen by 6.5 million in 2004-05—the public sector agreement targets for increasing the take-up by a wider and more diverse range of visitors into museums by 2 per cent are not being met, as was revealed in a recent parliamentary Answer to my honourable friend Don Foster on 4 February. The DCMS’s own Taking Part survey, the results of which were published last December, demonstrates this.

We would far prefer not to have these targets, but given that they exist, what resources from the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review are being used to ensure that they will be met in future?

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Then we come to whether free admissions are sustainable in future. There will always be a danger that the policy’s success in attracting visitors will make the compensation paid by the Government inadequate to cover it. That means that the cost of funding free admissions eats into the budgets available for mounting exhibitions, buying new treasures and targeting those sections of the population yet to embrace museum-going, as my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter said. I hope the new strategy referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and others will address that, and I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say. On these Benches, we do not believe that the enjoyment of culture should be limited to those who can afford to pay for it. Free admission is vital for promoting and allowing access.

Then there is the effect of free entry on other sources of income for museums, since they need to find alternative ways of raising the extra money. With free admission, trading income has increased significantly, and it is good to see that private sector sponsorship has increased significantly. I recently went to a presentation by Colin Tweedie of Arts and Business, who stated that private contributions to the museums sector now amount to £85.55 million per annum, a rise of 37 per cent since the previous year, which is one of the biggest rises in any of the arts sectors. He said that the growth of museums and galleries, which is obviously one of the great successes in the past 20 years, has been the absolute storming of the private sector’s relationship with museums and galleries. That is quite some testimony. However, as my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter said, with the right incentives for giving we could do even better.

I have just a few further issues to raise with the Minister. First, Renaissance in the Regions has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords. Visits to hub museums have increased enormously since 2002-03, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, described. The targets to increase the number of contacts between school-age children and regional museums and to generate additional visits by new users, predominantly from social classes C2, D and E and ethnic minorities, have been exceeded with ease, as the CMS Select Committee said in its Caring for our Collections report in June 2007. As the Select Committee said, I hope that the national museums will continue to build relationships with non-hub local and specialist museums and that, in order to meet their targets, they will take a leaf out of the outreach success of the Renaissance hubs.

The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, raised an important question about the future role of the MLA. In the context of the Renaissance in the Regions scheme, it needs to be pointed out that even hub museums that are of major national significance are not as well funded as those directly funded by the DCMS. A good example is the Ashmolean Museum. It is one of four university museums in Oxford that make up the Oxford University museums hub. The Ashmolean is a major draw for tourism in Oxford. It contains the University of Oxford’s collections of art and archaeology, which are the largest and most important in any museum outside London. As they have collections of national significance, such museums cannot help comparing their financial situation with that of museums funded

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by DCMS. It is very clear that they are trying to run equally ambitious enterprises on a fraction of the funding available to national museums which, in some cases, have neither such rich collections nor as many visitors. The comparisons demonstrate that in the funding that a museum such as the Ashmolean receives per visitor compared to many non-London museums. Museums such as the Ashmolean are modestly funded for the comparable job that they do. For them, an ideal long-term solution would be funding from the DIUS to cover the university work that they do—carrying out and supporting teaching and research as well as the conservation of the university’s collections—and funding from the DCMS to help them to realise their plans for access and outreach that would enable them to expand on the opportunities provided by Renaissance funding.

I now turn to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, although I feel that the noble Lords, Lord Renfrew and Lord Howarth, have already dealt with that in considerable detail. There are great concerns, which are shared by my noble friend Lord Redesdale, who has also taken considerable interest in the fate of the PAS. Whether it was an afterthought or whether it was a deliberate cut of 25 per cent in real terms over three years, I hope that Ministers in the DCMS are vigorously looking at the matter. I understand that a review is being carried out and I very much hope that the solution mentioned by noble Lords of the British Museum taking over the scheme will be realised, but it cannot do that without adequate funding. It is a vital scheme. We have heard about the access benefits and the success that it has had in attracting new visitors. We must ensure that that so recently instituted scheme is preserved.

On these Benches, we strongly support free admission and giving the widest access possible to our museums and galleries, but we need to be vigilant in making sure that there are proper resources to make that possible. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

5.21 pm

Lord Luke: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for initiating this interesting debate. It had one or two problems at the start. I would like to say how sad I am that we cannot hear contributions from such distinguished colleagues as the noble Lords, Lord Smith of Finsbury and Lord Lloyd-Webber. However, rules are rules and I understand that this one is strict. Perhaps it should be reviewed elsewhere: it certainly seems to be overharsh.

On 6 June 1683, the private collection of a certain Elias Ashmole was opened to the public. That day marked the beginning of a great civic tradition—that of the public museum. The tradition continues but it is increasingly at risk. At this point I would like to add something about the short speech of the noble Lord, Lord Walpole. He is sadly quite right about the plight of so many cathedrals which, as well as their proper role, are in effect also extremely important museums.

With museums unable to make important acquisitions and arts and heritage funding being siphoned off for

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the Olympics, I have serious concerns about the continuation of this tradition and the future of our great British institutions. I do not need to rehearse the important stature that national museums occupy in public life. These institutions set aside things of public value. They preserve our national heritage and ensure that works of art, artefacts and natural phenomena continue to enrich our understanding of the past, present and future. Access to a rich cultural heritage is a pillar of any civilised society.

At first glance, museums seem to be thriving: 80 million people visited museums last year. Recent research suggests that 43 per cent of people living in England have made at least one visit to a museum. The increased funding by the DCMS has had an obvious impact on museum attendance and is certainly to be welcomed. Yet, on closer inspection, it is not quite as rosy as the Government would have us believe. The DCMS has a direct relationship with only a small number of registered museums in the UK—the national museums and those funded by the Renaissance in the Regions programme. That constitutes only 22 museums throughout the country.

National museums seem to be always centre stage but other categories of museum do not receive direct government funding, and they have been mentioned this afternoon. Local authorities and independent charities fund museums throughout the country. Do the Government map the level of their support? What has been done recently to encourage support for the museums and galleries that do not receive direct funding?

While attendance is up, there is a danger that it might not be for long. Acquiring new pieces for their collections is vital to many museums. In evidence given to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Sir Nicholas Goodison, the former chairman of the National Art Collections Fund, said that a new acquisition generates tremendous excitement and,

“enormously enhances the educational possibilities, the local pride in the collections and so on”.

This was pointed out by my noble friend Lord Renfrew. Yet as important as that is that it is being disregarded by the Government in light of the many resources being diverted away from lottery funding. Many museums see the current funding for acquisitions as reaching a crisis. In 2006, the Art Fund, an independent charity of which my noble friend Lord Renfrew is a most respected trustee, published a detailed survey of the collecting activity of museums. He found that while museums believe that collections must be continually renewed for a museum to survive and prosper, nearly all said that inadequate core funding was currently a barrier to collecting.

The UK’s leading art museums lag behind other world-class museums when it comes to acquiring new pieces and collecting. David Barrie, the director of the Art Fund, characterised the situation as,

“getting worse, and is probably worse than ever”.

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Does the Minister accept that assessment? What is he doing to reverse the diversion of lottery funding away from the arts, which was one of the lottery’s core aims?

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