In September, the Department for Culture,Media and Sport will start its consultation on the future of the national lottery, which will only continue in its current form until 2009.
After then, it is possible that the existing lottery distributors, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Arts Lottery could be completely shaken up - even disbanded.
The New Opportunities Fund and Community Fund have been merged already to create the Big Lottery Fund, a move that may be more efficient, but which the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has said raises 'grave concerns', particularly over political control.
Last month, the Museums Association (MA) organised a conference in conjunction with the HLF to look at the future of the lottery funding distributor. The event was partly prompted by the fact that the HLF celebrated ten years at the end of last year, and its parent body, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), celebrates its 25th birthday this year.
In those years, museums and galleries have received £1.16bn from the HLF, a third of its total grants. The NHMF has found £220m, mostly to buy objects. The V&A alone has received £14m since 1980 to buy items as diverse as the Dacre Beasts and the Three Graces.
The HLF has supported more than 1,300 projects, refurbishing national, regional, university and independent museums, from the Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre to the Gridshell at Weald and Downland.
It has created 150 education posts and 100 new education spaces. While national museums benefited initially - they had the capacity to get their bids in first - regional and local museums are catching up.
In general, the HLF is respected by the sector, after the initial wobbles over projects such as the Gilbert Collection and the purchase of the Churchill Papers (ironically, now the basis for the brilliantly displayed Churchill Museum).
But despite these successes, there are fears that this bounty may not continue. This is partly because it is hard to ignore the legitimate claims of other cultural bodies, such as libraries, for a bigger share of HLF funding, and partly because all lottery distributors will receive less if the Olympic bid is successful.
But the most crucial issue is the lottery review, especially as one of the sector's political champions - Estelle Morris - is stepping down at the next election, and there are rumours that Tessa Jowell may be moved elsewhere. A whole set of new ministers will have to be convinced of the benefits of the HLF, and the benefits of museums.
Morris, the outgoing minister for the arts, told the conference that she understood that change is always worrying. 'The museum sector has been a huge beneficiary of the lottery and change means that it may not do as well as it has in the past.'
She said that the government was aware of the uncertainty caused by the review, but praised the HLF for its innovations. Morris argued that there has been a cultural shift in Britain: 'People don't believe that museums are for the elite any more.
And thanks to the current education projects, there are no longer generations of children growing up that have never set foot in a museum.'
The trouble is that getting politicians, and influential sections of the media, to share these aspirations is proving difficult. Carole Souter, the director of HLF, said that all the HLF-funded museum projects make a significant difference to the quality of the visitors' experience.
'But despite the fact we have the visitor figures to prove it, it doesn't seem to pack the knock-out punch [at the political level] that we expected. We can do the numbers, but on their own, they don't seem to be making the case for us.'
Maurice Davies, the MA's deputy director, said that part of the problem was down to Britain's political culture. 'I believe that there has been a long-standing antipathy to "heritage" in New Labour as a whole. It meant something in 1997, when they came in and said "we are about the future not the past" - it has an impact on the whole heritage sector.'
Davies credited Chris Smith and his successors for the growing support for museums and galleries but added that the government still doesn't talk about culture in the way governments do in France, Spain and Germany.
Certainly one way of addressing this is to continue to try to produce the evidence that government wants, to demonstrate the social value of museums: in education, urban and rural regeneration, the creative industries and tourism/economic generation.
But the sector is still poor at capturing basic data. This lack of data means that analysis of more complex issues, such as the impact of museums and the lottery on regeneration or education, is easily dismissed by sceptics (such as Treasury officials) as advocacy documents rather than robust descriptions of measured outcomes.
But part of the conference focused on other ways that the sector might discuss the value of museums and the cultural sector at the political level.
In 2003 the thinktank Demos organised a conference called Valuing Culture, and last year Tessa Jowell produced an essay, Government and the Value of Culture, which asked how the value of culture could be captured, going beyond some of the existing targets.
At the conference John Holden, the head of culture at Demos, discussed the values of museums and objects and argued that a new language was needed to make a convincing case of the range of benefits of cultural institutions.
He used the purchase of the Madonna of the Pinks as an example: it has instrumental value; bequest value (a gift from one generation to future generations); historical value; social value (allowing the work to move from the private sphere to publicly accessible space); symbolic value (for example in its depiction of motherhood); spiritual value (a religious work); and aesthetic value - among other things.
While this presentation received a mixed reaction, there is an acknowledgement among many in museums that one of the benefits of the Heritage Lottery Fund is that it is willing to look at museum and heritage projects in these terms as well as the instrumental terms emphasised in government funding schemes.
Museums and galleries must find ways of communicating these broad values to government if they, and organisations such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, are to continue to receive support.
As Nicholas Serota noted after the last funding round announcement, the politicians seem to be lagging behind the public: 'The arts and culture are an important part of many people's lives,' he said. Without the funding from the lottery, which comes initially from the public, there would have been no Tate Modern. And if the Tate doesn't hit the government's instrumental targets, then nothing does.
After then, it is possible that the existing lottery distributors, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Arts Lottery could be completely shaken up - even disbanded.
The New Opportunities Fund and Community Fund have been merged already to create the Big Lottery Fund, a move that may be more efficient, but which the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has said raises 'grave concerns', particularly over political control.
Last month, the Museums Association (MA) organised a conference in conjunction with the HLF to look at the future of the lottery funding distributor. The event was partly prompted by the fact that the HLF celebrated ten years at the end of last year, and its parent body, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), celebrates its 25th birthday this year.
In those years, museums and galleries have received £1.16bn from the HLF, a third of its total grants. The NHMF has found £220m, mostly to buy objects. The V&A alone has received £14m since 1980 to buy items as diverse as the Dacre Beasts and the Three Graces.
The HLF has supported more than 1,300 projects, refurbishing national, regional, university and independent museums, from the Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre to the Gridshell at Weald and Downland.
It has created 150 education posts and 100 new education spaces. While national museums benefited initially - they had the capacity to get their bids in first - regional and local museums are catching up.
In general, the HLF is respected by the sector, after the initial wobbles over projects such as the Gilbert Collection and the purchase of the Churchill Papers (ironically, now the basis for the brilliantly displayed Churchill Museum).
But despite these successes, there are fears that this bounty may not continue. This is partly because it is hard to ignore the legitimate claims of other cultural bodies, such as libraries, for a bigger share of HLF funding, and partly because all lottery distributors will receive less if the Olympic bid is successful.
But the most crucial issue is the lottery review, especially as one of the sector's political champions - Estelle Morris - is stepping down at the next election, and there are rumours that Tessa Jowell may be moved elsewhere. A whole set of new ministers will have to be convinced of the benefits of the HLF, and the benefits of museums.
Morris, the outgoing minister for the arts, told the conference that she understood that change is always worrying. 'The museum sector has been a huge beneficiary of the lottery and change means that it may not do as well as it has in the past.'
She said that the government was aware of the uncertainty caused by the review, but praised the HLF for its innovations. Morris argued that there has been a cultural shift in Britain: 'People don't believe that museums are for the elite any more.
And thanks to the current education projects, there are no longer generations of children growing up that have never set foot in a museum.'
The trouble is that getting politicians, and influential sections of the media, to share these aspirations is proving difficult. Carole Souter, the director of HLF, said that all the HLF-funded museum projects make a significant difference to the quality of the visitors' experience.
'But despite the fact we have the visitor figures to prove it, it doesn't seem to pack the knock-out punch [at the political level] that we expected. We can do the numbers, but on their own, they don't seem to be making the case for us.'
Maurice Davies, the MA's deputy director, said that part of the problem was down to Britain's political culture. 'I believe that there has been a long-standing antipathy to "heritage" in New Labour as a whole. It meant something in 1997, when they came in and said "we are about the future not the past" - it has an impact on the whole heritage sector.'
Davies credited Chris Smith and his successors for the growing support for museums and galleries but added that the government still doesn't talk about culture in the way governments do in France, Spain and Germany.
Certainly one way of addressing this is to continue to try to produce the evidence that government wants, to demonstrate the social value of museums: in education, urban and rural regeneration, the creative industries and tourism/economic generation.
But the sector is still poor at capturing basic data. This lack of data means that analysis of more complex issues, such as the impact of museums and the lottery on regeneration or education, is easily dismissed by sceptics (such as Treasury officials) as advocacy documents rather than robust descriptions of measured outcomes.
But part of the conference focused on other ways that the sector might discuss the value of museums and the cultural sector at the political level.
In 2003 the thinktank Demos organised a conference called Valuing Culture, and last year Tessa Jowell produced an essay, Government and the Value of Culture, which asked how the value of culture could be captured, going beyond some of the existing targets.
At the conference John Holden, the head of culture at Demos, discussed the values of museums and objects and argued that a new language was needed to make a convincing case of the range of benefits of cultural institutions.
He used the purchase of the Madonna of the Pinks as an example: it has instrumental value; bequest value (a gift from one generation to future generations); historical value; social value (allowing the work to move from the private sphere to publicly accessible space); symbolic value (for example in its depiction of motherhood); spiritual value (a religious work); and aesthetic value - among other things.
While this presentation received a mixed reaction, there is an acknowledgement among many in museums that one of the benefits of the Heritage Lottery Fund is that it is willing to look at museum and heritage projects in these terms as well as the instrumental terms emphasised in government funding schemes.
Museums and galleries must find ways of communicating these broad values to government if they, and organisations such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, are to continue to receive support.
As Nicholas Serota noted after the last funding round announcement, the politicians seem to be lagging behind the public: 'The arts and culture are an important part of many people's lives,' he said. Without the funding from the lottery, which comes initially from the public, there would have been no Tate Modern. And if the Tate doesn't hit the government's instrumental targets, then nothing does.
