Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to support UK museums that are not in receipt of grant-in-aid funding; and whether he has made a recent estimate of the number of those museums that are not in receipt of such funding.

DCMS directly supports 15 museums and galleries, comprising 37 sites across the country, with grant-in-aid funding. The Ministry of Defence supports three service museums with grant-in-aid. In addition to this, there are around 2500 museums in England, 1,322 of which are accredited, which do not receive grant-in-aid but are supported by government by at least one of 16 different sources of public funding worth over £800 million per year, as outlined in the Mendoza Review: an independent review of museums in England published in November 2017. This includes the Arts Council England, an arm’s-length body of the department, which is the development agency for museums in England and supports museums in several ways including through its National Portfolio programme. Around half of the Accredited sector in England is independent museums with varied sources of income.