Local Arts and Cultural Services

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for securing this timely debate. I intend to focus my brief remarks on local museums, and I declare an interest as chair of the advisory board for the Modern Record Centre at the University of Warwick, a wonderful archive of trade union and industry history. I am also a supporter of the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

It is clear that times are bleak for a whole range of arts and cultural services, but in the current climate, it is local museums, those directly managed and funded by local authorities, that are the most vulnerable. Others have charted the recent decline in local authority investment in museums. Arts Council England acknowledges that councils understand that investment in cultural services shapes local identity, promotes tourism, stimulates creative industries, and creates happier and healthier communities. Age UK showed that creative activities such as visiting museums improve well-being in later life.

It is sadly inevitable that, given their shrinking budgets, local authorities see their non-statutory funding of museums as a low priority. The museums review announced in last year’s culture White Paper is due to be published this summer. I hope that its state of the nation report will enable us to understand how museums might need to keep changing to survive and thrive. But museums facing the sudden withdrawal of local authority support are sometimes forced to close before any alternatives are considered. In light of this, can the Minister assure us that the review will contain realistic recommendations to prevent closures and sell-offs? Will the review outline steps better to identify early warning signs, which would allow enough time to develop proposals to transfer museums into trusts or community management schemes, for example?

I read that museums are not meant to become monuments to themselves—they can and should relocate collections or develop new partnerships or new directions if that will attract new or more visitors. In my home town of Bradford, a new £1.8 million gallery opened last week in the newly renamed National Science and Media Museum. Tim Peake’s spacecraft will be on display there. New exhibits—and the new name—reflect the museum’s changing focus on the science behind the magic of photography, film and television. It aims to combat a recent history of falling visitor numbers and to keep the museum fresh and relevant in our fast-changing, high-speed world. This is wonderful stuff, not least for the people of Bradford, who are fortunate that the museum is part of the London-based Science Museum group, which receives about £40 million a year from DCMS.

This brings me to one final point: those of us who live in London—the museum capital of the world—know that we have unrivalled riches on our doorsteps. If we look beyond these to our wonderfully varied and quirky local museums, there is much to discover: other speakers have indicated their favourites. They all help to preserve, protect and promote our nation’s history. We use them or we lose them.