to improve and extend their services, as part of a program called Renaissance. Renaissance is the most significant development in English non-national museums since the Museums Act 1845, which empowered cities to set up Free Museums. It builds on the achievements of the HLF and the Designation Challenge Fund, which identified the most significant collections built up by non-national museums over the past 150 years.
Intentions
Renaissance was designed to respond to the state of England’s regional museums. By the 1990s many of the country’s largest regional museums were suffering from ongoing funding cuts, leaving them unable to meet the expectations of their users. In 2000, Chris Smith, then Secretary of State for Culture, convened a Regional Museums Task Force to look into the problems facing regional museums, and to propose solutions for their future development. Their report, Renaissance in the Regions: A New Vision for England’s Museums (2001), proposed that regional museums could be:
an important resource and champion for learning and education;
promote access and inclusion encouraging social inclusion and cultural diversity, acting as focal points for their local communities, and providing public spaces for dialogue and discussion about issues of contemporary significance;
contribute to economic regeneration in the regions;
collect, care for and interpret (on a foundation of research and scholarship) the material culture of the UK and use it to encourage inspiration and creativity;
ensure excellence and quality in the delivery of their core services.
(RMTF 2001, 21)
In order to achieve that the Task Force proposed an innovative structure, with a “hub” for each of the nine English regions, made up of a group of the largest and most significant museums. Each museum remained the responsibility of its existing governing body but the structure created a channel for significant funding contributions from central government, something which had been recommended in various reports since the 1920s but which was now to be achieved for the first time.5 The report not only highlighted funding difficulties but also demonstrated how relatively small sums of government investment could create a real improvement in the number of people who could be reached by better services. Furthermore, the hubs would be working together to improve museums across the whole region.
Administrative and delivery mechanisms
In the 2002 Spending Review, the gover nment allocated £70 million to the Renaissance program, about one-third of that recommended by the report. In order to demonstrate what the impact of full funding could be, the Task Force recommended that it should be implemented in phases. The government agreed and tasked Resource (subsequently MLA) with the management and delivery of Renaissance.
In the first phase, three hubs (North East, South West, and West Midlands) were given the majority of the money they needed to implement the Renaissance vision and the other six received small sums of money for development and planning. The government allocated further funding for Renaissance in the Spending Review of 2004. Although this was again less than the sum requested (only 60 percent of what was needed), it did mean that significant funding could be allocated in a second phase to the other six hubs.
The regional museum hubs have developed business plans according to MLA guidelines. All have an obligation to increase visits, particularly from non- traditional museum users and to extend their work with schools. In other respects, the hubs pursued priorities they had identified for their region. In particular this allowed them to develop areas other than simple audience increases, including strategic reviews to identify how museums can be sustained in the future, as well as collections management and workforce development.
Regional museum hubs are the main strand of Renaissance but the program has many other elements. For example, more funding has been made available for museum development officers to support smaller museums, enabling more officers to be employed and boosting the budgets of existing services. Renaissance has also provided funding for the Museum Association’s Diversify program (encouraging minorities into museum careers) and its Effective Collections initiative; and for Subject Specialist Networks, one of the ideas in the Renaissance in the Regions report. Indeed, Renaissance has worked in partnership with virtually every museum sector initiative since 2002 and has been, with the HLF, the mainstay of museum development for nearly 10 years.
Legislation, amendments, and effects
It was inevitable that the implementation of Renaissance would depart from the Task Force’s proposals. There was no formal, forward plan for it, and Renaissance was subject to a number of factors – most importantly, the amount of funding available, government priorities, and choices made by MLA. The Renaissance Review, written seven years after the publication of the 2001 Regional Museums Task Force Report, and in anticipation of nearly £300 million having been spent on the program by 2011, tracked the program’s achievements. Regional museums had come a long way since 2001: they had a political profile; were more capable of levering in other funding, and their capacity to contribute to regional regeneration agendas was better understood and recognized. Regional museums were noticeably more confident in the management and presentation of their collections than previously. Research and evaluation had become an increasingly standard part of their work; they were increasingly modernized; have introduced greater cultural diversity; and were reaching more audiences through learning projects with children, young people, and adults. Volunteering has not only added to the value of museums, it has also enabled hubs to engage more effectively with members of the local community, as well as helping volunteers to develop their own skills and self-confidence. Beyond the hubs, the Museum Development Officer structure was regarded as achieving “real change” (RRAG 2009, 11). The Review also made recommendations for the future priorities, management, and delivery of the Renaissance.
With the abolition of MLA, Arts Council England assumed a number of MLA’s functions for museums. Following a review as to how its strategic goals could best reflect the museums and libraries sectors alongside the arts (Morris 2011), it published A Review of Research and Literature on Museums and Libraries (ACE 2011b) and a 10-year strategic framework for the sector (ACE 2011a). ACE’s principal museum responsibilities include the Renaissance in the Regions program; the regional museums’ improvement and development agenda, including the Accreditation Standard and Designation Scheme; the protection of cultural objects; export controls; tax incentives and projects relating to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In January 2012 it announced its funding decisions for the Renaissance major grants program, valued at £20 million a year.
Case study 3: Free admission
Free admission had been a manifesto pledge and most strongly represented New Labour’s commitment to access-for-all to culture, especially in the national museums.
Intentions
New Labour assumed that museums were “an essential platform for learning for all and lifelong learning” (HoC 2002, summary 1). Consequently, free admission, promised in both New Labour’s pre-1997 election manifesto (Labour Party 1997) and its A New Cultural Framework (DCMS 1998) was intended to broaden access by “the many not just the few” and to encourage visits by people from “hard to reach” social groups in particular.
Administrative and delivery mechanisms
New Labour’s strategy
