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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he will take to ensure the adequate funding of regional museums.

DCMS supports museums across the country through Arts Council England, whose core investment in museums has increased, with 72 museums and museum support organisations sharing over £36 million of taxpayer funding per annum in 2018-22 – a significant increase compared to the 2015-18 major partner museums programme.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the UK-wide National Lottery distributor for heritage projects. Most funding is for capital projects, with some other sector support. Since 1994 the National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded over £2.2 billion to more than 5,600 museum, library, archive and collection-based projects across the UK.

Historic England also provides funding for historic buildings at risk, to help them repair and conserve their historic sites. Several museums have benefited from such funding, and continue to do so.

Final allocations for these arm’s-length bodies for the next three-year Spending Review period will be confirmed in the New Year following DCMS’s internal business planning process.

The VAT33A Refund Scheme for Museums and Galleries allows accredited museums across the UK to claim back VAT incurred on most goods and services purchased in order to grant free rights of admission to their collections.

The Government also confirmed a variety of measures to support regional museums at Budget 2021 including:

• an extension of the Museums and Galleries Exhibition Tax Relief (MGETR) for a further two years until 31 March 2024;

• a temporary increase in the headline rates of relief for MGETR, for exhibitions commencing their production stage after 27 October 2021;

• confirmation of the £153 million Cultural Investment Fund for cultural infrastructure projects, which includes support for the Museum Estate and Development Fund to tackle urgent maintenance backlogs in accredited regional museums in England; and

• confirmation that the National Railway Museum in York will continue to receive funding towards the Vision 2025 transformation project.