England’s civic museums call for new £120m-a-year investment

The English Civic Museums Network (ECMN) has outlined its vision for a strategic government investment programme for local and regional museums.

The network is asking the UK Government to commit an additional £120m a year towards creating a “coherent, fair and sustainable support system” for the civic sector, which comprises more than 500 museums in England.

The organisation says this could be distributed via existing funding streams, proposing that £70m a year could be handed out via the Museum Renewal Fund, which launched last year to support struggling civic museums, and £50m a year via the Museum Estate and Development (Mend).

This strategic approach would help to capitalise on the “huge potential of civic museums to contribute to the achievement of government priorities in terms of local growth, tourism development, public health, education and employability”, according to a new vision document published by the ECMN.

The report outlines the stark challenges facing the sector, with local authority museums in England experiencing £100m cuts to their annual budgets since 2011, and accumulating a £400-£600m maintenance backlog.

“In the past 20 or so years local museums have come under unprecedented financial pressure, due in turn to the pressures on local government funding caused by central government budget reductions and the dramatically increased costs of adult social care,” says the report.

“Local authority funding for museums has fallen by over a third since 2011, equating to a real-terms loss of over £100m annually. Decades of innovation and reinvention mean that some are doing well, hundreds are at risk of closure, redundancy, or disrepair. The number of councils declared bankrupt continues to grow.”

The document highlights recent findings that estimate the health and social benefits of museum engagement in England to be around £8bn a year. The most significant museum impacts can be seen in six areas, it says: cultural value; education and learning; civic identity and social capital; the economy; health and wellbeing; and the benefits to disadvantaged groups.

“Research indicates that economically, educationally and otherwise disadvantaged visitors to museums benefit more, proportionately, than better-off, better-educated visitors. Civic museums can therefore play a significant role in levelling up participation in culture,” says the report.

Amid growing societal division, civic museums could also “help develop a new kind of social cohesion that works for 21st century England”, says the report.

This would be aimed at “renewing democracy and countering social fragmentation and divisiveness by combining honest history with celebrations of England’s achievements, and reflecting diversity with finding common ground”.

The document argues that England’s local and regional museums add up to “much more than the sum of their individual contributions”.

“England’s civic museums form a Distributed National Collection: millions of objects, archives, and artworks telling the story of the nation through local places. They constitute an essential part of the national cultural, social and economic infrastructure,” the report states.

The document makes clear that the ECMN is not calling for the reinstatement of lost local authority funding. It states: “We are not asking for a ‘return’ of the c.£243m of LA funding lost in the past 15 years.

“We believe that, with new, strategic investment, totalling £120m a year, we can deliver a dramatic levelling up of cultural and heritage participation, based on increased innovation, productivity, participation and partnerships, which delivers a wide range of societal benefits. New funding may not be available immediately, but we believe that new structures are essential to enable any investment to be spent with maximum efficacy and efficiency.”

The ECMN is proposing a national funding partnership that would support local authority-reliant museums under match funding arrangements with local authorities, with provision made for councils that cannot afford the necessary funding. “Without this, the museums in the local authorities that have suffered the most (usually the most deprived) will continue on a downward spiral,” says the report.

The ongoing reorganisation and devolution of local government in England will create “both risk and opportunity for local museums”, the report states.

“Many civic museum services will be merged or gain a remit for a wider area if they are the sole civic museum in their new unitary authority. This provides an unprecedented opportunity for reimagining the [local authority] museum landscape.”

Sharon Heal, the director of the Museums Association, backed the call for strategic investment.

Heal said: “We fully support this call for new long-term investment for local museums. A museum strategy created with museums across England could guide future funding and support delivery of public benefit. 

“We know that local museums deliver transformational and engaging experiences working with their communities and believe that everyone should have the right to a good quality museum service near to where they live.”

The ECMN’s vision document comes in the wake of several developments with significant implications for local and regional museums in England.

These include the announcement in January of £160m for the civic museum sector, comprising £146.4m for the Mend fund, and a new £13.6m Museum Transformation programme to support organisations to move towards more sustainable business models.

Meanwhile the recent Hodge review of Arts Council England called for the development of a “specific long-term plan” for museums and a “completely new model” for National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) funding.

The ECMN says a national strategic investment programme is needed to realise the potential of civic museums to:

• Maximise the impact of local museums on civic renewal, addressing social fragmentation and polarisation, catalysing the kind of social cohesion required for 21st century England.  
• Support the successful delivery of [Local Government Association] reorganisation and its place-making ambitions.  
• Transform and innovate in order to take a long-term, target driven approach to tourism development and to maximise the economic impact of museums.
• Dramatically expand audiences to drive the levelling up of access to the tangible cultural, educational, civic, and social capital benefits of museum visiting.
• Ensure the demonstrated health benefits of museum visiting are accessed by far greater numbers of those whose health is most at risk.
• Take a long-term sustainable, decarbonised approach to caring for the Distributed National Collection.
• Rationalise existing portfolios and develop new funding streams for a sustainable sector.