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Museums and Galleries

rose to ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to improve support for public museums and galleries to enable them to make new acquisitions for their collections. The noble Lord said: Our current collections are facing significant difficulties in making new acquisitions. I am advised by The Art Fund and leading museum directors that, in real terms, the public funding devoted to acquisitions in 2004-05, including lottery funding, was worth only 13 per cent of that available in 1980-81. The Tate’s budget for acquisitions is smaller now in cash terms than it was 20 years ago. The V&A now has £200,000 per year for collecting, whereas its purchase grant in 1992 was £1.78 million. The Art Fund tells us that 70 per cent of the 1,800 registered museums now acquire objects mainly or solely by gift—they are passively acquiring rather than actively collecting—and 60 per cent allocate no funds at all for adding to their collections. Time does not permit me to recite the sad litany of pre-eminent items that have been sold into private hands or abroad—the ones that got away—nor will I recite the notable successes in acquisition; the facts are well known to your Lordships. I will just say that, in case after case of success, The Art Fund—a private charity—has contributed funds, including for the purchase of contemporary items. The Art Fund is to our cultural life as the RNLI is to our maritime life. Why is it so important that our museums and galleries should continue to collect? There are four reasons. The entry of a new item into a collection is like a shot of adrenalin: it stimulates, excites and energises. Curators who collect look with fresheyes and imagination; collecting prompts new interpretation. Public collections reflect our senses of local and national identity and contribute to developing them. They recall to us our history and heritage and they should express the changing nature of our society and the mix of cultural influences, whereby it is renewed. We should be as intensely concerned to promote social cohesion through cultural policy as we are through educational policy. We are one of the world’s leading creative economies. If we are to remain so, students of art and design, and consumers, need to see examples of the best that is being created in Britain and across the world. We desire still to conduct ourselves as a beneficent force in the world. Museum collections that hold a mirror up to the world will help us to understand with due sensitivity the world with which we engage. What is to be done? What should the policy be? I suggest that there are three separate although interrelated issues: regional collecting, the active collecting of contemporary art and the important heritage items. In relation to the current inability of so many local museums to collect, the Heritage Lottery Fund has just now come forward with an important contribution: a new fund of £3 million dedicated to supporting acquisitions. Some of the money is to be used for training to develop among museum staff the skills to collect, and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council will also contribute assistance with this training. This initiative demonstrates the continuing and thoughtful commitment of the Heritage Lottery Fund, amid all the other pressures and expectations placed on it, to support for acquisitions. The limitation inherent in the HLF’s terms of reference is that the fund can only be used to acquire items at least 10 years old. I would therefore propose that the Arts Council lottery fund should step in with an equivalent new scheme. It could indeed revive the excellent scheme that it ran jointly with the Contemporary Art Society. I should like to ask the Government to take the opportunity of the legislation stemming from the new White Paper on local government to create a statutory duty on local authorities to support their museums and galleries and, indeed, the arts and heritage more broadly. As we have seen with libraries, a statutory duty alone does not do the trick, so I would also ask the Government to introduce a cultural component to the revenue support grant system. Without this, it is hard to foresee that the funding will ever be in place to support the proper formation of curatorial staffs with the skills and the margin to develop local collections. There is then the question of how our major regional and national museums are to be able to acquire items that would significantly enhance their collections. These include the items that the reviewing committee judges meet the Waverley criteria. They also include important contemporary or near contemporary items which it is part of the formal remit of some museums—the Science Museum, the V&A and the Tate—to collect. The largest single source of funding for museum acquisitions is the Government’s acceptance in lieu scheme—one among a number of important tax concessions that the Government make available. In the year to March 2006, 38 items with a value of £25.2 million were accepted for the nation in lieu of inheritance tax. In consequence, a great variety of beautiful things went to a great diversity of places. There is one enhancement of the AIL scheme which I particularly hope the Treasury will be willing to consider. Recommendation 27 of the Goodison review is that owners of pre-eminent objects should be able to submit them during their lifetime for acceptance in lieu against tax on their future estate, and that the objects could remain with their ex-owners by agreement with the museum into whose ownership they pass. The other new tax relief I would request—and I sought this when I was Minister—is Goodison’s recommendation 34: that donors should be allowed to offset the gross value of pre-eminent works of art against income tax, as is the case in the United States, Canada, Ireland and Australia. The Labour Party’s manifesto committed the Government to find new ways to encourage philanthropy in the cultural field, so I am hopeful. Assisted by these reforms, museums and galleries would be able to step up yet further their own fundraising. It is perhaps not yet axiomatic on this side of the Atlantic that trustees have a duty to bring in substantial funds. When Ministers appoint trustees, they will of course continue to look for a spread of skills, but among trustees surely there should be some whose main job is, frankly, to fundraise. It would cost the Government nothing to be quickly forthcoming in their recognition, through the honours system, of benefactors of our public collections. I will not call upon the Government in present circumstances to increase grant in aid. As the Minister for the Arts noted with legitimate pride in the Commons debate on 11 October, spending by DCMS on its sponsored museums and galleries has increased in real terms by 16 per cent since 1997. I confine myself to imploring the Government not actually to cut their grant funding to museums and galleries. We are given to understand that bodies funded by DCMS are being advised to plan for 7 per cent cuts. Given the general good health of the economy, given that the culture budget of the DCMS is so tiny within the totality of public expenditure, given the havoc that would be caused by 7 per cent cuts and the uproar that would follow, I hope that the Treasury will spare these budgets. The only request for an uplift in central government spending that I would make is that, over the planning period, the Chancellor should go further in replenishing the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Following the establishment of the National Lottery, even though the Government had promised that lottery funding would be additional to public expenditure, grant in aid to the NHMF was cut from £12 million in 1993 to £2 million in 1998. The Government have already done much to make amends. Grant in aid has been increased to £5 million and the Chancellor has promised to increase it again to £10 million next year. If he would set us on a clear path to raise it to £20 million, that, together with other resources, would enable our public collections to secure the acquisition of a good proportion of the pre-eminent objects that come on the market. To replenish the NHMF would be seemly. This memorial fund was created to honour the memory of those who have died for their country. That should include those who have lost their lives in hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one component of the overall problem that would remain would be that very small number of supreme works of art that from time to time are put up for sale and where there are compelling reasons to ensure they are secured for one of our public collections. A case in point at the moment is the Halifax Titian, ““Portrait of a Man””. This picture may fetch £80 million, and the National Gallery has concluded that it cannot make an offer for it. I would like to propose that a modern version of the Paramount List should be drawn up, with a similar agreement to that which the Treasury first made in 1922. In 1922 the chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery, Lord Lansdowne, wrote to the Treasury to say that the trustees, "““feel very strongly that a certain limited number of works of art, less than a dozen in all, at present in private possession in England, are of such international importance, that they deserve special and separate provision to be made for their retention here…The prices at present paid for such works may appear large to the unthinking, but viewed from the standpoint of History and of National repute they are infinitesimal…their retention, for the Nation which possesses them is not only a duty but an economy. Their retention is also a thoroughly democratic ""measure. Our Galleries and Museums, apart from their international significance, exist for the poorer members of the community…the Trustees…do now definitely ask the Treasury to guarantee them direct financial assistance if and when any of the few works of vital importance come upon the market, so that they may be preserved for the Nation. The total sum required would be infinitesimal compared with those with which the Lords Commissioners have habitually to deal…Also the payment of this amount would presumably be spread over a good many years””." The Treasury considered the case and concluded that, if the sums in question represented the reasonable value of the pictures, this was a proper thing to do. The Chancellor, Sir Robert Horne, announced the Government’s commitment to support, at uncertain dates in the future, the retention in the United Kingdom of the pictures on the list. The agreement held. In 1924, Ramsey MacDonald wrote to the chairman to say that the new government would ““readily”” renew the undertaking. Four out of the seven items on the original list were in due course acquired by the National Gallery. Another on the list, that did not pass into National Gallery ownership but instead came to the National Gallery on long-term loan was the Halifax Titian, now removed from the National Gallery’s walls to be put up for sale. As late as 1972, a special Exchequer grant was given to enable the National Gallery to purchase one of the pictures on the original Paramount List, Titian’s ““The Death of Actaeon””. The history of Exchequer grants goes back to the earliest years of the National Gallery. Since the creation of the NHMF in 1980, however, the Government’s line has been that Exchequer grants would no longer be necessary. This has not been the view of the Scottish Executive, which in recent years has provided grants to make possible the purchase by Scottish institutions of a Botticelli, a Titian and the John Murray Archive. While a replenished NHMF would indeed obviate the need for an Exchequer grant in all but a few cases, a special grant is needed if we are to restore such an item as the Halifax Titian to the walls of the National Gallery. The cost of a picture of this importance is simply beyond the scope of the NHMF, the HLF and all the efforts of which the system is ordinarily capable. However, a sum even of £80 million is, I submit, affordable. Such a figure is within the margin of error of national accounting. We are the world’s fifth largest economy. A modern list of, perhaps, 12 or 15 paramount items in all cultural fields should be drawn up by those best qualified to judge what they should be; realistic valuations, though difficult to determine in the nature of the case, should be made; this Government and Parliament, like their predecessors, should commit themselves to supply these funds as occasion in due course demands. I believe we need to do these things to secure the continuing vitality of our museums and galleries, for our national self-respect and to present ourselves confidently to the world. I would hope that all parties could agree on what is to be done.