Coalition Cuts 2: Museums

Abstract

In late 2010 the coalition government set out its plan to reduce Britain’s deficit in the form of the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). In that same year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) had received only 0.8 per cent of the national budget, but was nonetheless targeted for a budget reduction of twenty-four per cent, with severe implications for the UK’s museums sector. The Department’s commitment to free admission at national museums was maintained, but these institutions nevertheless received a fifteen per-cent budget cut, to be implemented across four years. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was abolished and responsibility for museums was handed over to Arts Council England, which itself received a cut of thirty per cent. Funding for regional museums was cut by fifteen per cent, and all other DCMS funding for non-national museums has since been withdrawn. Local-authority museums across the UK are also facing their own funding difficulties; local authorities were asked to make savings of twenty-eight per cent across four years, and the museums that they support (as non-statutory services) are easy targets for cost reduction. In the wake of the CSR, a wealth of anecdotal evidence pointed to a dramatic reduction in the quality of cultural provision in the UK. Our report for the Museums Association, The Impact of Cuts on UK Museums (July 2011), 1 while prompted by specific reports of such sector damage, was commissioned to provide, in so far as was possible, an objective and nationally representative picture of conditions across the sector. Identifying national patterns of change (impossible to discern on the basis of individual, localized case studies), the report offers a new, clear perspective on the present circumstances of museums, and simultaneously gives an indication of how future cuts may manifest themselves. The report was produced on the basis of data collected from a sample of 140 UK museums services, encompassing 200 separate sites, and weighted to