Following Major’s 1992 election victory, and in response to what he perceived as having been a fragmentary approach to support for culture, he replaced the OAL with the Department for National Heritage (DNH). Unlike its predecessor departments, the DNH was headed by a Secretary of State with Cabinet status, which brought a greater political influence to bear on its sectors. The new department’s agenda was visibly shaped by the interests of government. In 1996, DNH published Treasures in Trust (DNH 1996a), described as the first major statement of government policy toward museums since the 1930s. It was intended to provide a new framework for museums, which increased emphasis on collection care, public participation, and quality of service. It proposed to help to raise standards in museums and galleries, using the existing Museum Registration Scheme as a basis; underline the importance of museum education, especially as part of lifelong learning; address the opportunities provided by new technologies, especially to make collections more widely accessible; and give museums and galleries access to funding from the National Lottery for a wide range of projects. It also commissioned David Anderson’s report A Common Wealth (1997) which made the case for museums offering much better services to learners of all kinds (and was subsequently republished by Labour).
In the longer term, the most important innovation under Major was undoubtedly the creation of the National Lottery through the National Lottery Act 1993. Heritage was one of the five good causes identified to receive lottery income and museums have benefited enormously over the years since (see case studies below). By 1997, DNH was increasingly guiding its sectors’ strategic direction, which it articulated as being to encourage high quality and diversity; safeguard existing creative achievements and promote understanding of the past; extend opportunities to enjoy and appreciate rewarding leisure opportunities; promote the contribution all our sectors make to the national prosperity and prestige; and carry out these activities with proper stewardship of the resources available (DNH 1996b, 3). It had seemingly embraced the importance of access (Bottomley in DNH 1996b, 8) and had possibly learned from what Labour local authorities had achieved during the years of opposition. The way was perhaps smoothed for the arrival of New Labour and an unprecedented proactive approach to cultural policy.
New Labour, 1997–2010
New Labour won three successive elections: 1997, 2001, and 2005. Over the period within which it was in power, its policies were broadly consistent. Before winning the 1997 election, Labour described the cultural sector as of fundamental importance to its operation as the incoming government, with the capacity “to promote our sense of community and common purpose” and as being “central to the task of re-establishing a sense of community, of identity and of civic pride, the undermining of which has so damaged our society” (Labour Party 1997, 9). New Labour’s establishment of DCMS, and the publication of A New Cultural Framework (DCMS 1998), the most detailed statement of any government’s plans to reform the sector, made explicit the extent to which culture was envisaged as being an instrument of government.
DCMS was committed to “reducing bureaucracy; making sure that money is spent on direct services, and putting a new emphasis on the public rather than the producer.” The reward would be substantial increases in funding. DCMS was also committed to “joined-up government.” It worked, for example, with the Social Exclusion Unit, Home Office, Department of Education, and Department of the Environment, to explore the connections between crime, schooling, poor housing, and culture, an area where museums felt that they had something positive to offer.
DCMS’s policy preoccupations, as reported in its Annual Reports from 1998– 2009, remained largely consistent, even if their emphases shifted and the ways in which they were articulated changed. Little distinguishes its original desire to promote “access for the many not just the few” (a standard Labour mantra of the time); pursue “excellence and innovation”; nurture “educational opportunity”; and foster the creative industries (DCMS 1998) from its final objectives – to encourage more widespread enjoyment of culture, media, and sport; support talent and excellence in culture, media, and sport, and realize the economic benefits of the department’s sectors.
DCMS’s actions were based on New Labour’s belief in the increased effectiveness of greater public expenditure attached to its modernization agenda (Chief Secretary to the Treasury 1998). Having initially adhered to the Conservative’s spending plans, Labour’s expenditure grew at an average of 4.4 percent per annum in real terms, which was significantly more than the Conservatives’ 0.7 percent per annum average between 1979 and 1997. While this largely reflected increases in spending on the National Health Service, education, and transport, increases in culture were far from insignificant. Between 1998 and 2010, support to the cultural sector rose by about 98 percent, and for museums by around 95 percent. That is quite apart from the billions of pounds that came from the National Lottery. Such investments reflected a period of steady public growth in the economy from 37 percent in 1999–2000 to 42 percent by 2007–2008.
New Labour’s primary mechanisms for allocating expenditure, cost control, and performance measurement were the Biennial Spending Reviews (2000, 2002, 2004), which set fixed three-year departmental expenditure limits, and the Comprehensive Spending Reviews (1998, 2007), which represented longer- term and more fundamental reviews of government expenditure. The Spending Reviews defined “the key improvements that the public can expect from these resources” through Public Service Agreements, which marked individual departments’ agreements with Treasury. These agreements played “a vital role in galvanizing public service delivery and driving major improvements in outcomes” (HM Treasury 2010), and were conceived in terms of “evidence-based policy” (Cabinet Office 1999), that is to say the subsequent development of informed public policy on the basis of rigorously established objective evidence.
FIGURE 3.1 Policy, funding, and accountability cascade: a map of central government’s support for the cultural sector.
This unprecedented commitment to deliver necessarily impinged on DCMS’s sponsored bodies (see Figure 3.1). Their Funding Agreements obliged them to deliver on departmental objectives, and meet measurable efficiency and effectiveness targets. The desire to improve management across the sector was closely related to the government’s concern to enhance the integrity of official statistics. By 2007, DCMS was supporting 63 non-departmental public bodies, which accounted for the vast majority of its annual spend. In practice, these were also responsible for the outcomes of the department’s programs and, as such, were subject to unprecedented levels of scrutiny and accountability. Whereas, under the arm’s-length principle, performance measurement was previously considered inappropriate for cultural provision, after 2000 it became the norm, although in Blair’s second government some felt that the DCMS had to be about “going beyond targets” to “best capture the value of culture” (Jowell 2004). This theme was further developed by the McMaster Review of 1998 into concepts of excellence, and although this generated much debate it never materialized into sustained action (McMaster 2008).
From about 2002 New Labour increasingly referred to the notion of public value, borrowed from the standard work, Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value (1995). This focused on what might constitute “public” value – how the working practices of public servants might contribute to particular sorts of benefits found only in public services. This might simply comprise
new public services (extended library opening hours … ); increased trust in public institutions, (“I trust my library service more”) or a contribution to an established public good (“the library is open longer so I can read more books and be better educated“). (Oakley, Naylor, and Lee 2011, 3)
Public
