A manifesto for museums in Wales

The Museums Association is calling for everyone to have the right to engage with and participate in a good quality museum service near to their homes and communities, and for increased and sustained public investment in museums.

Museums in Wales are at the heart of their local communities. They provide a sense of place – Cynefin – and belonging – Perthyn – and work with their communities on crucial topics such as environmental sustainability and social justice. Museums also attract tourists and deliver economic benefits at a national and local level.

Museums have worked to support and engage their communities and have helped to deliver Welsh Government priorities, most notably in relation to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.

Museums in Wales also play a vital role in the following key areas:

• Driving tourism and the visitor economy  
• Supporting learning and education for all
• Improving health and wellbeing and community cohesion
• Raising public awareness and encouraging action on environmental sustainability
• Supporting the use of the Welsh language in daily life

At a time of increasing polarisation and division, museums can bring people together and help us to make sense of the world around us and provide opportunities to learn, engage and shape our futures together.

Here are just a few examples of the groundbreaking work that museums are doing:

• The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea works with the Your Voice Advocacy group which is led by and for people with learning disabilities. Both organisations have co-designed course content and Easy Read learning resources to create Wales’ first co-designed accessible and accredited course for use in cultural settings. 
• MonLife Museums have prioritised anti-racism and community co-production across all three of their sites, including developing a new migration stories gallery in Chepstow and new space for local communities to curate their own displays in Abergavenny. 
• Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales was in the first cohort of the Museums Association’s Anti-racist Museums Programme, which takes museums on a journey to tackle systemic discrimination and become anti-racist organisations.  
• The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery’s Swansea Stories has brought local people into the gallery to choose and make the art that tells their diverse stories. 

However, museums in Wales face significant challenges:

Funding: Local authority investment in museums continues to decline and with local authorities under pressure to deliver statutory services, museums are vulnerable to further cuts. This could lead to the closure of museums, meaning they are no longer accessible to the people of Wales. Reductions in revenue funding also mean an already low-paid workforce is struggling to keep up in a continuing cost-of-living crisis.  

Buildings: Recent capital investment in museums is welcome, however there are still many in need of investment to refurbish and revitalise their offer to the public. 

Collections: Museums can use their collections to help visitors explore the past, understand the present and plan for the future, but the loss of expertise and lack of investment in collections care puts this work at risk. 

Access for all: The lack of public transport to connect communities across Wales is an issue which prevents some people engaging with museums and can leave them isolated and excluded.  

Our asks for the new Welsh Government

Funding

• Strategic public investment in national and local museums so they can look after collections and buildings, support learning, community engagement and health and wellbeing programmes. Funding for culture should be increased to a per capita level that is comparable with other similar European nations.
• Multi-year funding: to be distributed to the museum sector, giving museums the ability to plan ahead.
• Fair pay and recognition: funding to allow museums to implement the living wage and other recommendations in the MA’s Salary Research and Recommendations.
• Environmental responsibility: dedicated funding for museums to ensure their buildings and collections are sustainable and that they can continue to support communities to take action on climate justice. 

Buildings

• Implement long-term strategic capital investment and make it available to all museums. 

Collections

• National and local collections are critical for telling our nation’s story: invest in expertise and collections care.

Access

• Free entry: the continuation of the current commitment to free entry to national museums and support for local authorities to make the same commitment.
• School visits: support for primary school pupils to visit a museum at least once per year by providing public transport and programming costs to overcome geographical and transport barriers. 
• Diversity, equity and inclusion: continued funding for museums to support the delivery of the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.
• Digital: dedicated funding to support museums to grow their digital capacity and engagement in order to remain accessible, relevant and innovative.

Image: Visitors in the Foundry at Amgueddfa Lechi Cymru – National Slate Museum, which is currently undergoing redevelopment. Courtesy Amgueddfa Cymru

1 October 2025