Small and medium-sized public sector museums in smaller towns and cities are in the “gravest danger” of closure, as pressure increases on local authorities to make significant cost savings over the next four years.
Walsall’s New Art Gallery, a £21m venue that opened in 2000, is the latest in a growing line of museums and galleries that could lose all of their local authority funding.
At the end of September, five Lancashire museums, including the Museum of Lancashire and Fleetwood Museum, closed following months of consultation because the county council could no longer afford to run them.
Kirklees Council, meanwhile, has confirmed it is to close Huddersfield’s Tolson Museum, Dewsbury Museum and the Red House Museum in Gomersal, two years after plans were first mooted.
Alistair Brown, the policy officer at the Museums Association (MA), says: “Autumn has been a grim season in terms of announcements on museum and gallery closures. Draft local authority budgets are now going into consultation, and that is when the sector first gets wind of it.”
Bad timing
“In most local authorities, the ‘easy savings’ have already been made,” says Brown.
“So their backs are against the wall and they are making decisions that they don’t want to have to make. Austerity is not over, certainly not at a local authority level. No end is in sight.”
The impact of budget plans has been exacerbated this year, according to Stephen Snoddy, the director of the New Art Gallery, because for the first time councils have been asked by central government to set budgets until 2020, allowing them to plan their saving measures further in advance.
The withdrawal of local authority funding is making it difficult for the New Art Gallery to secure money elsewhere. As the council plans to cut the gallery’s funding completely by the fourth year of its budget, it has also thrown into doubt its forthcoming bid for funding under Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) scheme. In 2014, the gallery received £2.64m from the scheme to match its local authority funding.
“I am working as hard as possible to find alternative sources of funding and partners but I need time to do so – that may take 18 months to achieve,” says Snoddy. “We need a solution that allows us to press the button on a credible NPO bid to ACE.”
ACE concerned
John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at ACE, says the organisation is “concerned” about closures, but he is quick to point out that there has been a “relatively small number” to date.
Orna-Ornstein adds that ACE is “working actively” with local authorities, particularly those considering making closures.
He says: “There is particular pressure on those local authorities with more significant services, but we are having more conversations with councils looking to develop their cultural strategies than those looking to close museums.”
Orna-Ornstein is clear that ACE’s role is not to replace local authority funding but to invest alongside councils in helping museums become better cultural businesses that are enterprising and able to make more money, as well as to better understand their audiences.
ACE’s £30m Museums Resilience Fund, for 2015-2018, is designed to help museums find new revenue streams and models. Alongside the NPO scheme, museums can also apply for Grants for the Arts, which has £87m a year to invest in exhibitions and activities that engage people in the arts.
New models that aim to create sustainable self-sufficient cultural and heritage services are slowly emerging, such as at Lincolnshire County Council. In the past, money made by the county’s attractions went into the corporate pot and the heritage service received a budget. But under new plans, the service will keep everything it makes, and the aim is for it to fund itself by 2018.
Cautionary note
Brown admits there is not a “magical alternative” for museums and he sounds a note of caution that in the long term, too much focus on fundraising may detract from the need to invest in developing collections, expertise and outreach programmes.
The government’s Review of Museums in England and the Museums Association’s Museum Taskforce, which has a UK-wide remit, are among the initiatives looking into how to make the sector more sustainable. Both are due to report findings in 2017.
Walsall’s New Art Gallery, a £21m venue that opened in 2000, is the latest in a growing line of museums and galleries that could lose all of their local authority funding.
At the end of September, five Lancashire museums, including the Museum of Lancashire and Fleetwood Museum, closed following months of consultation because the county council could no longer afford to run them.
Kirklees Council, meanwhile, has confirmed it is to close Huddersfield’s Tolson Museum, Dewsbury Museum and the Red House Museum in Gomersal, two years after plans were first mooted.
Alistair Brown, the policy officer at the Museums Association (MA), says: “Autumn has been a grim season in terms of announcements on museum and gallery closures. Draft local authority budgets are now going into consultation, and that is when the sector first gets wind of it.”
Bad timing
“In most local authorities, the ‘easy savings’ have already been made,” says Brown.
“So their backs are against the wall and they are making decisions that they don’t want to have to make. Austerity is not over, certainly not at a local authority level. No end is in sight.”
The impact of budget plans has been exacerbated this year, according to Stephen Snoddy, the director of the New Art Gallery, because for the first time councils have been asked by central government to set budgets until 2020, allowing them to plan their saving measures further in advance.
The withdrawal of local authority funding is making it difficult for the New Art Gallery to secure money elsewhere. As the council plans to cut the gallery’s funding completely by the fourth year of its budget, it has also thrown into doubt its forthcoming bid for funding under Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) scheme. In 2014, the gallery received £2.64m from the scheme to match its local authority funding.
“I am working as hard as possible to find alternative sources of funding and partners but I need time to do so – that may take 18 months to achieve,” says Snoddy. “We need a solution that allows us to press the button on a credible NPO bid to ACE.”
ACE concerned
John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at ACE, says the organisation is “concerned” about closures, but he is quick to point out that there has been a “relatively small number” to date.
Orna-Ornstein adds that ACE is “working actively” with local authorities, particularly those considering making closures.
He says: “There is particular pressure on those local authorities with more significant services, but we are having more conversations with councils looking to develop their cultural strategies than those looking to close museums.”
Orna-Ornstein is clear that ACE’s role is not to replace local authority funding but to invest alongside councils in helping museums become better cultural businesses that are enterprising and able to make more money, as well as to better understand their audiences.
ACE’s £30m Museums Resilience Fund, for 2015-2018, is designed to help museums find new revenue streams and models. Alongside the NPO scheme, museums can also apply for Grants for the Arts, which has £87m a year to invest in exhibitions and activities that engage people in the arts.
New models that aim to create sustainable self-sufficient cultural and heritage services are slowly emerging, such as at Lincolnshire County Council. In the past, money made by the county’s attractions went into the corporate pot and the heritage service received a budget. But under new plans, the service will keep everything it makes, and the aim is for it to fund itself by 2018.
Cautionary note
Brown admits there is not a “magical alternative” for museums and he sounds a note of caution that in the long term, too much focus on fundraising may detract from the need to invest in developing collections, expertise and outreach programmes.
The government’s Review of Museums in England and the Museums Association’s Museum Taskforce, which has a UK-wide remit, are among the initiatives looking into how to make the sector more sustainable. Both are due to report findings in 2017.