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Museums and Galleries

I join the other speakers in congratulating my noble friend Lord Howarth for calling this debate, and on covering the waterfront so well that I have spent a lot of time cutting and slashing my own speech. It was cut and slashed even more after my noble friend Lord Smith got cracking. It will be a bit shorter, noble Lords will be relieved to hear. To start with a digression, the biggest acquisition of British galleries and museums over the past10 years has been the number of visitors. It has been extraordinary, as all who go there know. Despite the bumps and ups and downs, which have been clearly detailed, they pour in, in quite unprecedented numbers, from many classes of our society and many age groups which did not go there before. That has been a magnificent acquisition. Secondly, not as importantly but quite interestingly, instead of being something you have to go to—trailed in navy blue raincoats on wet Wednesday afternoons—museums and galleries have become a place of buzz and style. They have becomea focus for cities—not only London; I think particularly of Newcastle—wherever you go. That has been a great acquisition to our life. I am bending the word a little, but not too much. I speak here both as a Member of this House and as the president of the National Campaign for the Arts, which noble Lords will know is an independent body. It did research in response to the DCMS’s committee inquiry, Caring for Our Collections. Researching right across the country, it came up with some real problems, some of which have been enumerated. I shall rapidly go over them; they came from a big poll that it conducted. All over the place, core funding has not increased with inflation. There are warnings of further cuts, which is detrimental to staffing levels, expertise, maintenance, research and,à nos moutons, to acquisitions. Acquisition budgets have fallen dramatically. The Art Fund survey shows that 96 per cent of museums say that inadequate core funding is a barrier to further collecting, and 60 per cent say that they were unable to allocate any money for acquisitions over the past year. That is a serious problem. I agree with my noble friend Lord Smith that the nub of this debate is that growth and regeneration come through acquisitions. That is the MacGuffin in this story. Further, the NCA report says that the UK lacks adequate tax incentives to promote significant philanthropic donations of artworks to the nation at a higher level. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lee, that many regional museums are finding their funding being cut because of the low priority given to them by their local government. They are in a great deal of trouble. So, what is to be done? On the one hand, we have a party in government which has proved itself—since 1945, if you take the longer term—to be sympathetic to the arts, consistently advancing its funding, not least under the guidance of my noble friend Lord Smith. For the remainder of my few minutes, however, I shall concentrate on the nub of the matter: the great spiralling of costs in the market. We are having a great springtime for collectors and sellers of works of art—or perhaps I should say Christmas every day of the week—not only at the high end of £80 million but all over the place. It is happening right across high art, middle art and domestic art; prices have gone up and up. Art is now seen by some people as a wonderful hedge fund. Perhaps it is a south sea bubble—who knows. What is happening now is not unlike the way in which the Russians and certain persons from the City of London are inflating property prices and affecting property prices throughout the realm. Should the Government chase these prices and in so doing fan the flames and become a player in the great auction or casino that we have at present? Might it not be thought better to let the private sector run riot for a while? After all, it could be argued, most museums and galleries at the moment are pretty well stocked; some of them are bulging. To transfer a quotation from Philip Larkin, ““no one actually starves””. After all, this could be a blip—a real south sea bubble that bursts—and the gamblers will be burnt and the meek and prudent will inherit the works and inherit the earth, and that would be very satisfactory. After all, some private collectors—Peggy Guggenheim comes to mind, but also the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, who is going to donate his collection to the nation—have built up their collections privately to give to the nation for the public to see later. Is that not the building up of private initiatives, and is that not useful? Is it not a way forward? The cry may go up, ““Does the state have to provide all the time and in every case?”” Perhaps it is a good time to let the private sector rip. Our museums and galleries over the centuries have benefited massively from the private sector being let rip and ripping off stuff from all over Europe and many parts of the world, then going straight and turning it in to places where people can view these works freely. The stately homes of England are full of such works, which are of great benefit to us all. The solutions have been proposed well by the noble Lords, Lord Smith and Lord Howarth: clear, effective tax interventions and money given in lieu. But if the Treasury is disinclined to do that and disinclined to join the overheated auction room game, and if it considers that the arts should be made more able to stand alone, those in the arts must prove their case—in detail, as I think has been proved already, and in general terms. Despite the expansion of the arts in the UK in the past decades, despite unchallengeable arguments about the particular and overall benefits for a better life, for internal wealth and the pursuit of happiness, and despite the iconic status of the UK and the art world and its target destination as a tourist centre—and we can just imagine what it will be like when people from China and the rest of Asia begin to target us—we have still not been able fully to convince the powers that be that while all art might be, as Oscar Wilde said, ““quite useless””, the arts have become a necessary and important economic and cultural part of our society. So what can we do? Either we can encourage the Chancellor to have a coup de foudre and meet his muse in the arts or—although it appears uncommonly difficult to do this—those of us in this debate and around the arts can continue to try to persuade the powers that be that the arts contribute more and more to this country. The contribution of the arts has increased, is increasing and will not diminish. The men and women in Whitehall do not necessarily know better than the rest of us.