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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Michael Ellis)
Thank you for your chairmanship, Mrs Main. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) for introducing this debate on a subject that is very important to us all. I commend all hon. Members for their valuable contributions. Even greater congratulations are due to my hon. Friend for helping, with his constituents, to save the museum in Stirling.
I was delighted to be appointed Minister for the arts, heritage and tourism earlier this year. It is a great privilege to be the Minister responsible for part of this country’s world-leading museums sector. Local authorities will note that cutting culture, museums and galleries is a false economy. The United Kingdom’s museums are hugely popular: more than half of the nation’s adult population visited a museum in 2016, and three of England’s national museums were in the top 10 most visited attractions in the whole world in 2016.
I congratulate hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber for their enthusiasm and affection for their local museums, including the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum in Ashfield, the wonderful Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regimental Museum in Stirling and many others. In the past few weeks, I have visited the National Railway Museum in York and seen the wonderful work that the Science Museum Group is doing there. My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) mentioned Dumfries House, which is a wonderful example of work that has been done in the national interest and has helped the local community. We are lucky that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has done an enormous amount of work.
Local authorities still spend more than £200 million annually on culture and museums. Her Majesty’s Government have maintained cash levels of funding for the museums sector, and we are introducing new sources of funding, such as tax relief for exhibitions. The local government funding settlement is worth more than £200 billion between 2015 and 2020. Locally elected councils decide how to spend money in their area. I reiterate the message that it is a false economy to cut culture. Local authorities have that responsibility.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) mentioned royalty. I believe that Her Majesty’s yacht Britannia is based in the hon. Lady’s constituency. It brings in hundreds of thousands of visitors to her constituency, so she should be very grateful for that royal connection for that and many other reasons.
I am proud that free entry to museums remains Government policy. There is a wide variety and a huge number of museums in the United Kingdom. There are more than 2,000 museums in England alone. The Government provide more than £800 million through grants from the Arts Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and others, which helps museums to protect their collections and keeps them accessible to as many people as possible. The VAT 33A scheme allows eligible museums to claim back VAT that is incurred when putting on free exhibitions, so that is something to bear in mind.
The Heritage Lottery Fund continues to be a major funder of museums under Sir Peter Luff. My Department will work very closely with it to implement the recommendations in the Mendoza review, which several hon. Members mentioned. In 2018, HLF will invest substantial sums—in the region of £190 million—in arts and heritage in the UK. It will also consult on its future priorities, and it will announce new funding in the autumn of this year. That is something to watch out for.
Museums are a vital part of Britain’s tourism offer: 40% of visitors to all parts of the UK cite culture as the reason for their visit. Furthermore, the high profile of our museums helps to build international relationships. As we all know, culture is a bridge between nations and peoples, and it helps to promote Britain to the world. It helps to put us top in soft power.
The British Museum, as has been alluded to, is already sending around the country items that are linked to different parts of the country. That helps local museums, as we heard, and at a local level museums can play a vital role in their communities, telling the story of a place and its people and helping to shape it. They develop and showcase great British talent, from architecture and design to portraiture and ceramics, and world-class curatorial skills.
Museums are vital to our economy. Research by the Arts Council suggests that museums in England alone generate £2.64 billion in income and £1.45 billion in economic output each year—so they make money for the country—and that funding for the arts brings in up to £4 for every £1 invested. Museums are very good value for money.
As for Scotland, cultural policy is, of course, a devolved matter. I may therefore be unable to comment on questions that relate to the specifics of devolved policy, but I assure all Members that I am a keen admirer of Scotland’s rich cultural heritage, which is astounding in its breadth and depth. It is important to note that there are also some excellent cross-border partnerships between museums. That happens between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as between Scotland and England, and elsewhere. For example, the recent critically acclaimed exhibition of works by British realist painters at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art brought together more than 80 paintings by some 50 artists, loaned from museums throughout the nation.
I am also really excited about V&A Dundee—recently, by the way, I met the leader of Dundee City Council, who was very impressive—which is due to open in September this year, in a stunning new building on Dundee’s waterfront that will provide a venue to share the V&A’s collection and exhibitions more widely across the UK; it has an extraordinary collection. The museum will also showcase Scotland’s exceptional and creative heritage as its first museum dedicated to design.
Hon. Members have alluded to the Mendoza review of museums in England, which was published a few months ago in November. The review looked at how museums operate today, what the public want from them, and how Government can best support them. It makes a number of recommendations to Government and government agencies, asking us to work closely together to help our museums flourish. I commend Neil Mendoza’s review, which is very good.
The review’s focus is restricted to the museums sector in England, but many of the themes that emerge from the report are relevant to institutions across the entire country. In the course of the review, Neil Mendoza and his team visited museums the length and breadth of the country. I am pleased to say that he found a thriving sector, supported by more than £800 million of public funding from a variety of sources each year.
There have been challenges for the sector in recent years. It is true that some smaller museums have had to change the way in which they work in order to adapt to reductions in local authority funding. Many museums, however, have successfully adapted to that new climate. I should point out that the review team found numerous examples of museums taking a more commercial approach and thinking imaginatively about how to care for their collections in such a way as to continue to allow as many people as possible to experience them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stirling and other colleagues asked about the availability of funding, particularly from philanthropic sources, for smaller museums. Philanthropic giving, alongside public funding and—equally important—commercial revenue generation is a key source of income for museums. The Mendoza review found that museums tend to raise less through philanthropy than do other parts of the cultural sector, such as the visual arts, and that museums outside Greater London appear to be particularly affected. However, there is some evidence that parts of the sector are growing in confidence when asking for and receiving donations from visitors. I encourage that; philanthropic giving is very important, as other parts of the sector know well.
One of the priorities to emerge from the review is adapting to today’s funding environment. As my Department works with key agencies and the wider sector to implement the review’s recommendations, we expect that larger and national museums will share learning—they have learned a great deal about this—and good practice to support others to access philanthropic sources of funding.
My hon. Friend also raised the issue of loans from the national collections to smaller museums—I have touched on that, as other colleagues did, with the British Museum—and some of the barriers, such as indemnity, insurance, and security, that may occasionally frustrate efforts to lend valuable items to local venues. I cannot comment on the Scottish national museums, but those sponsored by my Department have a strong track record on loans: in 2016-17 the national collection was lent out to more than 1,300 venues throughout the United Kingdom, from long-term loans and partnership galleries to multi-object exhibitions and one-off, so-called “star” or special loans.
Through loans and partnerships the national museums have extensive UK and international reach, but the museums review found that such work could be better joined up. Therefore, my Department will collaborate with the museums and the wider sector on a partnership framework, working to simplify regional programmes and loans, formalise skills and knowledge exchanges, and share best practice in a more consistent and sustained manner. I am pleased to confirm that the partnership framework will also encompass cultural collaboration with museums in the devolved Administrations. In addition, to help to encourage loans, Arts Council England has provided £3.6 million to regional museums to help them to improve their galleries to protect and display borrowed objects through the “Ready to Borrow” scheme, and the Museums Association has published “Smarter Loans”, a helpful good practice guide.
The Government indemnity scheme, which is administered by the Arts Council for museums in England, has been very successful. It is estimated to save museums at least £15 million annually on insurance premiums. As recommended in the Mendoza review, Arts Council England and my Department will continue to work closely together on the Government indemnity scheme, to promote it internationally and to clarify and simplify the process for applying for commercial insurance where required.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stirling raised further questions about the Scottish treasure trove rules with my Department and the provisions relating to collections of national significance and the museums in his constituency. He will appreciate that I am not responsible for matters that fall within devolved competence, but I am sure that officials from the Scottish Government and the Scotland Office will be happy to discuss those points with him in further detail.
I am delighted to have had the opportunity to champion museums in my first debate as arts Minister in this Chamber. The breadth and depth of the contributions to this afternoon’s sitting demonstrates just how valuable, treasured and beloved our museums are. I look forward to working with everyone in this important role.