TAITMAIL Solving the museums crisis by keeping them free
It’s 25 years since Chris Smith introduced free admission to national museums and galleries thanks to a VAT fiddle contrived by the charity Art Fund. So we’re celebrating by calls for a reintroduction of admission charges at national museums and galleries – not so much a silver anniversary as brass tacks.
Free admission brought a massive boost of a dimension no-one cold have guessed at - 67% to 100% increases in attendance, by 2011 up from 7m visitors to 18m nationally, places like the Natural History Museum and the V&A doubling their figures. Millions were rediscovering the resource that had been clutched slefishgly to the breast of the educated middle class; education departments were established, didactics rewritten to be interesting instead of merely instructive, objects displayed as part of a readable narrative instead for their own obscure merits, public activities programmed, links forged between institutions that had hitherto operated in glorious isolation. The system has become “a cornerstone of making culture and information accessible to all” according to the think tank the Cultural Policy Unit (CPU).
But since 2001 and 2011, we’ve had the Covid pandemic. It caused devastation many museums will not survive; some like the River and Rowing Museum at Henley whose design made David Chipperfield’s reputation, have already succumbed. Even the National Gallery, months after opening a recast Sainsbury Wing as part of its director’s mission to“make art accessible to the many rather than just the elite”, finds itself with an £8.2m operating deficit. He, Gabriele Finaldi, is going to have to cut staff and reduce the exhibitions programme limiting accessibility to both the many and the elite. Against a backdrop of 18% cuts in government funding for cultural institutions, the Tate is writhing under a deficit budget and desperate restructuring and redundancies, while staff staged a seven-day strike last year protesting against below-inflation pay rises.. Tate’s director for nine years, Maria Balshaw, is throwing in the towel and leaving.
The Museums Association has done a survey which shows that 61% of respondents are planning service cuts. This week a National Audit Office report tells us that DCMS museums and galleries are facing “the greatest financial risks”. This is despite museums and galleries making themselves more reliant on self-generated income - shops and cafés - and “cost containment” measures. “The museums and galleries are nationally and internationally significant, contributing to the UK’s influence overseas, through international loans from their collections, touring and promoting exhibitions internationally, and research projects” the report published on March 9 proclaims. Since free admission they have enhanced their importance to the public and the economy so that they are indispensable in a way they could not have been with limited admission. The report says that museums and galleries have cut operating costs by a third through savings on security, maintenance and service contracts.
DCMS gave grant-in-aid of £484 million to museums and galleries it funds - the national flagships - in 2024-25. They also got funds from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and tax reliefs, commercial activities and fundraising. In 2024-25, they employed over 6,800 permanent staff, received 42 million visitors, and had a total net asset value of almost £9 billion. It’s not nearly enough, and the £1.5bn culture secretary Lisa Nandy declared in January is for capital repairs largely in the regions, not running costs.
Now the charging dinosaurs, like Mark Jones formerly of the V&A and British Museum, are on the rampage demanding a return to admission fees Nick Merriman, former s. CEO of the National Trust who had previously run two Muasuem of the Year award winners,, is a famous non-charger but was misquoted in the Daily Telegraph as supporting paid admission. He had to write to The Guardian to refute the attribution - “I said in principle that people would be willing to pay; however, I then outlined all the reasons this would not work financially, practically and ethically”.
We tried admission charges in the 90s: they were difficult to set up with turnstiles and security vigilance, extra staff to manage it, costs of administration and dramatically reduced visitor numbers. Smith’s move 25 years ago came as a relief even to those that approved of charging.
But what’s being suggested now is not a charge for all visitors. Just for foreigners. How would that work? Visitors, native and foreign, would presumably be required to present their passports – no passport, no entry. “Operationally it would be fraught with difficulties: front of house staff at museums and galleries are not Border Force” warned Bernard Donoghue, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. Visitor numbers would slump further, takings in the shops and restaurants that have been the saviours of many public institutions since 2021, would plummet again. Needless to say, this operation would be made easier if we had the ID cards that most other nations’ citizens carry, but the watered-down scheme to be introduced this year is voluntary and designed to check immigrants for their right to work.
There is, of course, an equitable way of charging foreign visitors which has been supported in Margaret Hodge’s report on arts funding (to which the government has yet to formally respond): a hotel tax, hypothecated at least partly to support museums and galleries in a new income stream based on a tourist tax of 3-5% a night that could be worth £1bn a year, according to a CPU report last year.
More than 40 countries already have some sort of hotel tax including Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Canada and France. Manchester introduced a “city charge” a couple of years ago through the kind of tax loophole that Smith exploited and other UK cities are planning to follow suit. From the forthcoming financial year Scottish local authorities will be able to introduce a levy and Wales has a similar, plan.
Tristram Hunt of the V&A believes the way to the future lies with the generosity of donors - “philanthropically minded individuals” - encouraged with new tax incentives, but the Blavatniks of the cultural world are not interested in stoking running costs.They want a monument they can stick their names on.
The old systems of public funding of museums and galleries are failing catastrophically, with both central and local government funding crumpled since the pandemic. Philanthropists have come out of the woodwork, but after the Sackler and BP experiences the sector is wary of committing themselves to unproved magi.
We need a new funding system that is fuelled by a new funding stream, and we need it soon.