Somebody within the UK treasury doesn’t like museums. It should be somebody necessary, as a result of the federal government is shifting to finish one of the crucial profitable cultural insurance policies of recent instances: common free museum entry, a coverage launched by Labour in 2001. They wish to cost abroad guests to enter Britain’s 15 nationwide museums—amongst them the British Museum, the Nationwide Gallery and Tate.
I’m informed that is being pushed by the treasury, not the division for tradition. In a cash-strapped period, charging abroad guests has some superficial benefit. We Brits pay to go to the Louvre, why shouldn’t foreigners pay to go to Tate?
However any consideration of the practicalities reveals the coverage to be a non-starter. Let’s think about we’re visiting Tate as soon as charging comes into impact. First, we discover the queues, as we navigate the brand new ticketing infrastructure (put in at appreciable price). If we’re British, or a British resident, we must show it to get free entry. But we have now no obligatory ID playing cards, and the federal government’s personal plans to introduce digital ones had been quietly dropped months in the past. Charging one group of individuals can not work with out undermining the aim of free entry for the opposite group.
Threshold resistance
In retail there’s a phrase to explain these small however highly effective boundaries that cease clients going into a store; “threshold resistance”. For the informal or first-time museum customer, the brand new coverage can be like digging a moat round our museums. Twenty years of broadening entry—customer numbers went up round 40% within the twenty years after free entry was launched—will probably be misplaced.
Then there are the broader implications. Some museums, just like the Nationwide Gallery, have by no means charged anybody and are rich sufficient to stay free. The consequence can be a two-tier system: wealthy museums free, poorer ones not. And the harm wouldn’t cease on the nationals. Within the areas, free civic museums would discover themselves weak to cash-strapped native authorities solely too glad to comply with central authorities’s lead.
Why not enhance budgets?
Many within the museum sector say the reply is clear: more cash. And why not—the general price range for all our nationwide museums’ grant-in-aid is just below £500m, or 0.037% of complete authorities spending. However there may be one other aspect to the story, and right here we should have a flicker of sympathy with our treasury museum sceptic. When free common entry was launched in 2001 it was primarily paid for by a rise in grant-in-aid of round £60m. Regardless of austerity, Brexit and Covid-19, general grant-in-aid to the nationals has saved tempo with inflation, with a real-terms enhance of round 5% over 20 years. The figures fluctuate throughout particular person establishments, however general the treasury has saved its aspect of the cut price, nearly.
What has not helped is the dramatic enhance within the prices of operating our nationwide museums. Once more, it varies by establishment, however let’s take the Nationwide Gallery for example. Its annual expenditure has risen from £25m in 2005/06 to £65m in 2024/25—a real-terms enhance of over 60%.
Price/earnings imbalance
Museum prices, due to this fact, have risen far past what both customer numbers or authorities funding can justify. The explanations for this are many, from easy inefficiency (for those who’ve ever attended a museum committee assembly, you’ll know what I imply) to a trustee class unable or unwilling to carry administration correctly to account. The awkward reality is that our nationwide museums are the final nice unreformed public service, nonetheless working as their Nineteenth-century founders would recognise.
So earlier than charging folks to get into our museums, the treasury may do higher to ask why it prices a lot to open the doorways. Reply that, and free entry will take care of itself.
