Scotland’s cultural sector will be in the spotlight this month as museum professionals gather in Edinburgh for the Museums Association’s annual conference – and stories are bound to be swapped on how organisations north and south of the border are faring after several years of budget cuts.
The recent publication of Scotland’s draft culture and external affairs budget for 2013-14 – the Scottish National Party’s second since it formed a majority government in 2011 – reinforces the sense that Edinburgh is taking a slower, less radical approach to austerity than Westminster, in spite of deep cuts imposed by the UK government.
At £240.8m, the overall spending portfolio for culture and external affairs will be slightly higher than the previous year because of a one-off doubling of investment in the recently established Young Scots Fund to support youth employment (including a development programme at the National Conservation Centre).
Aside from that, there is salami slicing across the board rather than swingeing reductions. The culture sector’s share of the budget will fall from £149.8m to £148.8m.
That figure encompasses the funding for cultural collections, which has fallen from £73.4m to £72.9m, and money for other arts sectors, which drops from £51.9m to £51.7m (see graph).
Impact of cuts
But Gordon Rintoul, the director of National Museums Scotland, said that because of the impact of inflation on the figures, the budget cut over the course of the spending review would equate to 15% in real terms. He added that this would “undoubtedly” have an impact on the activities and services that museums and galleries would be able to provide in the future.
Similarly, the revenue budget for National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) has dropped by 0.4% to £11.94m. Capital funding for these organisations stands at £3.9m and £0.8m respectively.
Since the publication of Scotland’s national strategy for museums earlier this year, the small amount of funding that the government allocates directly to non-national museums is largely focused on delivering that plan.
Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS), which this year transformed from a membership organisation into a national development body, will divide about £2.3m between implementing the strategy and carrying out its other functions in 2013-14.
Critics, however, have argued that this pot is too small for the strategy to be truly wide reaching. Aside from MGS, a further £0.85m will go to Scotland’s mining, industrial and fisheries museums.
In the run-up to the Year of Creative Scotland and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014, capital investment across the budget portfolio as a whole has risen from £14.9m to £17m. This includes the £1.75m additional funding for the V&A at Dundee project and a £5m grant towards rebuilding the Battle of Bannockburn visitor centre in Stirling.
Creative Scotland, the body set up in 2010 to replace the Scottish Arts Council, received a relatively small 2% cut. Whatever relief this may have brought, however, has been overshadowed by its growing rift with the Scottish arts community, which last month sent a letter with more than 100 signatories accusing the body of having overly commercial values and a lack of transparency.
Some cuts may prove more difficult to absorb. Funding for Historic Scotland, which maintains and promotes more than 345 historic sites and properties, will drop almost 4% in 2013-14 to £43.6m.
Even bigger reductions are in the pipeline for the following year, when the organisation must find another £8m in savings. Historic Scotland says it is working on developing alternative income sources in response to the cut.
In the firing line
The real extent of budget reductions across the sector is difficult to quantify, however, as cuts will also hit museums and galleries that rely on local authority funding. The budget for local government is due to be reduced by 13.5% in 2013-14 and research, such as the Museums Association’s two cuts surveys, shows cultural services are disproportionately in the firing line as local councils look for savings.
One consequence of that can be seen in the 2011-12 annual report published for Scotland’s £150,000 National Fund for Acquisitions (NFA) last month.
The NFA, which helps museums purchase objects and was cut by 25% in 2011, has seen the total value of the acquisitions it funds plummet by more than a half, as institutions scale back on collecting.
Despite the lack of headline-making casualties, there is a sense that the pain has been delayed rather than avoided. As well as the cuts to Historic Scotland, the culture budget is projected to fall to £147.3m in 2014-15, meaning more hardship is on the way.
But with the referendum on Scottish independence not far away, ministers north of the border appear to have taken a deliberate path to distinguish themselves from their austerity-loving southern counterparts, in what will be the penultimate budget before voting day.
Update
20.11.2012
In the original article, we stated that £7,000 of the National Fund for Acquisitions' £150,000 budget went unclaimed in 2011-12.
While it is true that, at 31 March 2012, 72 payments totalling £142,720 had been made, the remaining balance had been committed but had not been paid.
The recent publication of Scotland’s draft culture and external affairs budget for 2013-14 – the Scottish National Party’s second since it formed a majority government in 2011 – reinforces the sense that Edinburgh is taking a slower, less radical approach to austerity than Westminster, in spite of deep cuts imposed by the UK government.
At £240.8m, the overall spending portfolio for culture and external affairs will be slightly higher than the previous year because of a one-off doubling of investment in the recently established Young Scots Fund to support youth employment (including a development programme at the National Conservation Centre).
Aside from that, there is salami slicing across the board rather than swingeing reductions. The culture sector’s share of the budget will fall from £149.8m to £148.8m.
That figure encompasses the funding for cultural collections, which has fallen from £73.4m to £72.9m, and money for other arts sectors, which drops from £51.9m to £51.7m (see graph).
Impact of cuts
But Gordon Rintoul, the director of National Museums Scotland, said that because of the impact of inflation on the figures, the budget cut over the course of the spending review would equate to 15% in real terms. He added that this would “undoubtedly” have an impact on the activities and services that museums and galleries would be able to provide in the future.
Similarly, the revenue budget for National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) has dropped by 0.4% to £11.94m. Capital funding for these organisations stands at £3.9m and £0.8m respectively.
Since the publication of Scotland’s national strategy for museums earlier this year, the small amount of funding that the government allocates directly to non-national museums is largely focused on delivering that plan.
Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS), which this year transformed from a membership organisation into a national development body, will divide about £2.3m between implementing the strategy and carrying out its other functions in 2013-14.
Critics, however, have argued that this pot is too small for the strategy to be truly wide reaching. Aside from MGS, a further £0.85m will go to Scotland’s mining, industrial and fisheries museums.
In the run-up to the Year of Creative Scotland and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014, capital investment across the budget portfolio as a whole has risen from £14.9m to £17m. This includes the £1.75m additional funding for the V&A at Dundee project and a £5m grant towards rebuilding the Battle of Bannockburn visitor centre in Stirling.
Creative Scotland, the body set up in 2010 to replace the Scottish Arts Council, received a relatively small 2% cut. Whatever relief this may have brought, however, has been overshadowed by its growing rift with the Scottish arts community, which last month sent a letter with more than 100 signatories accusing the body of having overly commercial values and a lack of transparency.
Some cuts may prove more difficult to absorb. Funding for Historic Scotland, which maintains and promotes more than 345 historic sites and properties, will drop almost 4% in 2013-14 to £43.6m.
Even bigger reductions are in the pipeline for the following year, when the organisation must find another £8m in savings. Historic Scotland says it is working on developing alternative income sources in response to the cut.
In the firing line
The real extent of budget reductions across the sector is difficult to quantify, however, as cuts will also hit museums and galleries that rely on local authority funding. The budget for local government is due to be reduced by 13.5% in 2013-14 and research, such as the Museums Association’s two cuts surveys, shows cultural services are disproportionately in the firing line as local councils look for savings.
One consequence of that can be seen in the 2011-12 annual report published for Scotland’s £150,000 National Fund for Acquisitions (NFA) last month.
The NFA, which helps museums purchase objects and was cut by 25% in 2011, has seen the total value of the acquisitions it funds plummet by more than a half, as institutions scale back on collecting.
Despite the lack of headline-making casualties, there is a sense that the pain has been delayed rather than avoided. As well as the cuts to Historic Scotland, the culture budget is projected to fall to £147.3m in 2014-15, meaning more hardship is on the way.
But with the referendum on Scottish independence not far away, ministers north of the border appear to have taken a deliberate path to distinguish themselves from their austerity-loving southern counterparts, in what will be the penultimate budget before voting day.
Update
20.11.2012
In the original article, we stated that £7,000 of the National Fund for Acquisitions' £150,000 budget went unclaimed in 2011-12.
While it is true that, at 31 March 2012, 72 payments totalling £142,720 had been made, the remaining balance had been committed but had not been paid.
