and non-excludable, such as defense or street lighting, which are in the public interest or in the public domain. This has, in particular, informed its attitude to local government reform.
The Local Government Act 1999 introduced the best value service delivery regime and scrapped the widely disliked compulsory competitive tendering. Best value was designed to ensure continuous improvement in local government services by creating a series of performance indicators and associated targets, which could both, measure the progress of an individual service and compare it with others across the country. It is the bedrock of a commitment to making services transparently accountable to local people. The Local Government Act 2000 was the controversial piece of legislation that introduced mayors and cabinets alongside a new legal framework that allows councils to do anything that will contribute to the social, environmental, or economic well-being of their communities, which might of course include supporting museums or museum initiatives.
New Labour was the party of regionalism. It reintroduced regional development agencies and generally claimed that it wished to devolve powers to the English regions and the nations. There was, however, never complete agreement upon how regionalism and the need for strong central government to drive New Labour election-winning policies could be successfully reconciled. The issue focused around the distinction between “regional government” and “government in the regions.” Regional Development Agencies were launched in eight English regions in 1999; the ninth in London in 2000, following the establishment of the Greater London Authority. They were intended to coordinate regional economic development and competitiveness. A number of other regional bodies advised them or looked to them for funding – including government regional offices, English Partnerships, and the Rural Development Commission. For museums with ambitious capital projects they were to be key sources of funding.
A New Cultural Framework introduced regional Cultural Consortiums in 1999 – non-executive advisory bodies for each of the English regions, except London where the function sat with the Cultural Strategy Group, established by the mayor. The consortiums included representation from all cultural activities including museums. Each was charged with producing cross-cutting strategies for each region, which were expected to inform the Regional Development Agencies. Regional support structures were highly important to the museums sector, where the majority of local museums were small and often had no paid professional staff. Area Museum Councils, collaborative bodies sustained by subscriptions and a small grant from MLA’s predecessor, the Museums and Galleries Commission, were very influential. But from 2001 they were replaced by cross-cutting MLA’s regional agencies, intended to reflect and be more controllable by MLA itself.
Regional government reached its high-water mark in 2004 when a referendum about the creation of a Regional Assembly was held in the Northeast. The rejection of the offer of devolved power in one of the most partisan of all the English regions effectively killed off regional government as a policy objective and left its organs vulnerable to retrenchment or changes in central government. After New Labour lost power in 2010, virtually all the English regional bodies were disbanded, though the devolved Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly survived.
New Labour had high expectations of museums and galleries, given that a sizeable percentage of DCMS’s operational spend and activity was dedicated to museums. Most of the policy initiatives were either applied to museums or they were indirectly deeply affected by them (as in local government, for example). Specific initiatives identified in A New Cultural Framework (DCMS 1998) included the creation of a new strategic agency for museums, archives, and libraries (Resource, subsequently MLA), the imposition of public service agreements, and the establishment of a watchdog, QUEST (the Quality, Efficiency and Standards Team). But it was two other initiatives, discussed below, that headlined: the introduction of free admission to all national museums and galleries and the unprecedented funding of regional museums following the Renaissance in the Regions report (RMTF 2001).
The Coalition Government, 2010–
Previous sections have highlighted the evolution of museum policy, the sector’s regulatory frameworks and the impact of legislation over the past 30 or so years. Many of the changes introduced appeared to have been driven by ideological differences. Access-for-all policies (as manifest in free admission) have been promoted by planning for a better society, while an absence of policy reflects a belief in allowing the market to determine what happens. However, the increasing centrism of British politics means differences between the Left and Right are now much less stark than they once were – something that is perhaps reflected in the current Coalition’s cultural policies and the case studies that follow.
One year into its first term of office, the absolute priority of Britain’s Coalition Government, the first for over 50 years, remains the national debt. At the end of December 2010 general government debt was £1105.8 billion, equivalent to 76.1 percent of GDP – the largest budget deficit in the UK’s post-war history. In practice, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat partnership’s recovery strategy has significantly accelerated the previous government’s plans to reduce the budget deficit. Its main instruments are the cutting of all government departments’ spending (with the exceptions of health and overseas aid), and the introduction of savings and reforms to welfare, tax, environmental levies, and public service pensions.
Museums anticipated serious reductions in public funding following the 2010 Spending Review. In the event, the sector has been subject to cuts of around 15 percent stemming from decreases in DCMS’s own budget and local authorities’ funding.2 They are also affected by declining support from charitable foundations and corporate sponsorship, which had been falling since 2007/2008. The government’s response was to call upon museums to be more entrepreneurial, though the barriers are easy enough to identify:
We expect museums to operate like businesses and yet we are handicapped by our funding structures and regimes. In Local Authorities the restricted ability to trade, the central recharging, the lack of ability in some to even control catering contracts plus over bureaucratic systems of pay, recruitment and procurement make it impossible to change in any reasonable time frame. Finance controls on end of year flexibility, use of reserves, cost of employment etc., have all created organisations with ever increasing fixed costs and ever decreasing public service despite huge fundraising efforts. (Lees 2009, unpaginated)
The sector’s default position has been, as ever, to do the best it can with the hand it is dealt. Museums are trimming and shrinking their operations. In July 2011 it was claimed that one-fifth of museums had suffered cuts of over 25 percent (Newman and Toule 2011). But there is also a greater sense of crisis. More local authorities are not just talking about converting their museum services to trusts, running services jointly with neighbors, mothballing whole museums, or introducing admission charges – they are actually doing it. Birmingham, Carlisle, Derby, and Bournemouth are all local authorities where these measures are occurring. Whether such moves will escalate into a longer-term sectoral change remains to be seen.
In contrast to New Labour, the Coalition’s announcements on cultural policy have been few and far between. To date (July 2011), DCMS’s major preoccupation has been with funding, the abolition of several of its quangos, including MLA, and its plans to boost philanthropy and increase Lottery funding available to the good causes. The Coalition’s “programme for government” (HM Government 2010, 14), and subsequent DCMS Structural Reform Plan (DCMS 2010) placed an emphasis on philanthropic and corporate investment. “Support to the sector is regarded as a way to ‘redress the balance’ where the market fails to deliver, and as contributing to conditions for growth in the cultural economy” (DCMS 2011, 1). More specifically, DCMS has undertaken to preserve museum collections and continue free entry to national museums and galleries (see case studies below). Other priorities recall those of previous Conservative administrations: cutting
