Museums and galleries have been the beneficiaries of several high profile gifts this year. The National Maritime Museum received a £20m donation from shipping magnate Sammy Ofer; the artist David Hockney gifted Bigger Trees Near Warter, reputedly worth several million pounds, to Tate; and the art dealer Anthony d'Offay gave 725 works worth £120m to the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate for the knock down price of £26.5m.
Now the Campaign for Private Giving, a coalition headed by the National Museum Directors' Conference (NMDC), the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and Arts Council England, with support from a wide-ranging group of arts and heritage organisations, has published a paper entitled Private Giving for the Public Good.
At the heart of the paper is a plea for new thinking on philanthropy and it recommends:
- Gift Aid should be made more user friendly.
- Tax relief, which currently covers gifts of cash, stocks and shares, and land, should be extended to include cultural gifts, and should be applicable to philanthropists in their lifetime, rather than only after their death.
The law should be changed to make it possible to place assets in a trust that could be bequeathed to an organisation on the donor's death, allowing the donor to benefit from tax relief and share the profits with the organisation during their lifetime.
The paper also highlights the fact that 69 per cent of the money that is given to culture goes to organisations in London and the south-east. and that the poorest 10 per cent of the population give 3 per cent of their income to charitable causes, while the richest 10 per cent give barely 1 per cent.
Roy Clare, the MLA's chief executive, said the MLA has not pushed philanthropy hard enough in the past and, in a bid to address this, will be funding a pilot scheme to recruit a fundraiser at one of the Renaissance in the Regions hubs later this year.
If successful, he hopes it can then be rolled out across all of the hubs at a later stage. The Art Fund is also addressing philanthropy in the regions with its Enriching Regions scheme (see p17).
The publication coincides with the inauguration of a new unit at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), headed by Keith Nichol, formerly the department's head of museums, and charged with looking at ways of promoting philanthropy across the cultural sector and working with the Treasury to look at proposals on changing taxation policy. Philanthropy, according to a DCMS spokesman, is now a policy priority.
Many reasons have been cited for the sudden interest in philanthropy. Chief among them is the decline in lottery funding - in the past three years the Art Fund has given more than twice as much to museum and gallery acquisitions as the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Other factors include declining acquisitions budgets, the loss of many important works of art overseas (of 20 objects that were export-stopped between 1 May 2006 and 30 April 2007, with a total value of £24.5m, only 12 were saved, worth £7m), and a recognition that levels of government subsidy, at both national and local level, cannot be relied on to remain consistent in the future.
Colin Tweedy, the chief executive of Arts and Business, is not alone when he states that the private sector's role in arts funding is becoming increasingly important, and may even come to challenge public sector funding.
The UK has a more restrictive fiscal attitude towards private giving than neighbours Ireland and France, and countries such as Canada, Australia and the US.
American citizens making a donation to a cultural institution are able to write off the full value of their donation against income tax, while "fractional giving" schemes in the US allow donations to be written off against tax over several years. UK institutions can only dream about such encouragement to donors.
For a detailed look at fundraising, see the summer issue of Museum Practice, which will be out on 1 June
While consensus in the sector is that increased incentives for philanthropists are overdue - the Goodison Review recommended some of the changes put forward in the paper back in January 2004 - there are some who regard the need for this public appeal as being symptomatic of a private failure by the DCMS to get its message over to the Treasury.
Mark Taylor, director of the Museums Association, believes that the campaign for greater encouragement and recognition of philanthropy has come from a realisation that the Treasury is still a long way from providing the tax incentives demanded by Goodison and the Campaign for Private Giving.
