We’re all in the same hole, so let’s use our resources to get out of it

There is much talk at the moment about making a case for museums, including the Working in Partnership report published last month by the National Museum Directors’ Conference.

While welcoming the report, with its advocacy of excellence, partnership and the requirement for sustained government funding, there is, perhaps typically, a Scouse “but”.

The report is still very much a “what” document. What needs to be done. We now need to move on and focus on the “hows” and the “whys”.

The whys first. Apart from the self-evident truth, that museums contain the clues to our future as much as to our past, they also contain primary research sources for our future knowledge-based economy.

Consider our present current affairs agenda. Fear of terrorism; plague or pandemic; immigration; scientific innovation; religious intolerance; social justice; political oppression; loss of civil liberties and enslavement?

You can find it all in our national collections and especially in National Museums Liverpool (NML), in a city that’s been there, done it and got all the social scars to display.

Even NML’s home is in a building gifted to the city by a banker, William Brown, in 1860, only 13 years after the Bank of England granted a £2m line of credit because Brown controlled almost 50 per cent of the UK’s trade.

The 1837 financial crisis was precipitated by rogue trading in America and the mantra was “If Brown goes down, we all go down”. Sound familiar?

As we shift toward a knowledge-based economy, our museum collections will become more valuable in terms of storylines. Whether Titanic or A British History in 100 Objects, our great collections will remain a primary source for media content research.

Yet there is a greater prize, as Liverpool’s time as European Capital of Culture highlighted the sense of wellbeing our museums can bring to the communities. Evidential data from 2008, shows irrefutably that culture enhances wellbeing, which in turn reduces demand on other social services.

So much so that both major health providers, Mersey Care NHS Trust and the Liverpool PCT, have ringfenced funds for future cultural provision.

The local justice and children’s services departments, as well as Merseytravel and the Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service are all using culture to engage with and change attitudes toward their services and in so doing reduce demand on public expenditure.

Museums and galleries have a great role to play in all this as both custodians and as trusted cultural arbiters and while NML can demonstrate a 6:1 local economic return on its grant-in-aid, this does not include the potential savings from those other public bodies.

We are, therefore, probably one of the most efficient methods for government investment in local public services.

And that leads to the “hows”. How do we achieve it? No one should argue against the idea of a national strategy for museums, but that begs the question: whose national strategy? We have a north-south divide; a metropolitan-provincial divide; an urban-rural divide; a digital divide; and a generational divide.

We should not waste time debating them further but simply, pragmatically, use them to inform any developing strategy. We know we cannot do everything nor be all things to all visitors, so perhaps the model for the UK City of Culture project would be a start, the primary feature of which is no extra cash.

The conversation has been based around the premise that everyone would work and contribute from within existing resources to a known four-year cycle. A similar approach is being taken in Liverpool post-2008 and NML is now working with the North West Federation of Museums to develop a strategy for the region.

We would hope that much of what we do in the North West could form the basis of any developing national strategy and would happily play a role in that but starting with the same premise as UK City of Culture: working collectively, from within our own existing resources.

The term “existing resources” does not just require government to maintain funding at existing levels, but it should also include access to all forms of public funding.

Funding should come not solely from the department for culture but through the BBC, health, education and even the justice and fire services. Working collectively means working with all government departments, as well as private finance.

Just as government has a responsibility to respond to evidential research and protect our existing funding levels, we too have a responsibility to accept the short to mid-term financial pressure and set out a clear national strategy that maximises those existing resources. National Museums Liverpool will play its part.

Phil Redmond is the chairman of National Museums Liverpool