National Museums and Galleries

Baroness Sater Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We are committed to supporting our national museums and to ensuring that art and culture are accessible, representative and shared across the country. Our £1.5 billion Arts Everywhere package ensures everyone has access to world-class culture. There are no current plans to reduce grant in aid, although I will say that we cannot prejudge spending reviews. We want to enable new income generation for our national museums, and we are going to be working with the museums to explore ideas for how this income could be used.

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, as the co-chair of the Arts and Heritage All-Party Parliamentary Group, I will say that several institutions have expressed to me their many and varied concerns about how the introduction of the charging of international visitors might negatively affect not just them but the wider tourism and hospitality economy. I ask the Minister, what assessment are the Government going to make—or have they made any assessment—to allay the concerns about the wider economic consequences that this might have?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

We are making sure that we work with the museums on this, not in isolation from them. Last week, for example, officials at DCMS sat down with representatives from all the national museums to talk through how the process might work, in terms of having a working group with the national museums. We are clear that it is a complex matter. It is not, “It’s right to, or it’s wrong to, or we should do this as a point of principle”: we just want to work through the issues with the museums. At the moment, we have been working through the terms of reference for what that working group would be looking at, and we are not planning to come to any conclusions before the autumn.