Museums and Galleries

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am more than grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, for bringing this to our attention and giving us the opportunity to look at this matter—yet again, I have to say. I hope that he will go on bringing it to us until we have a way forward. The debate as I have heard it has not shown me the possibility of that just now.

I have a little experience, although some of it is not direct. The publishers of a book that I wrote some 20 years ago asked me for photographs to illustrate it, but then got cold feet when I produced the photographs, because they would require all kinds of consents and so on. It was a commercial exercise, so this is not a direct illustration, but there were feelings of frustration when, because of money matters, the publisher decided it was too expensive. I am quite sure that, with the illustrations, my book would have been a bestseller. In the end, it was remaindered pretty quickly after I published it. I am really saying that the educational purpose, the widening of information about important subjects, is what is at stake in this debate. It seems to me that that is worth holding in our heads.

With due respect to the noble Viscount, I do not think that cost alone was the ground on which the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, built his argument. I thought that he was talking about all kinds of considerations relating to education, to art education, to scholarly endeavour and to peer review in a global world. I felt rather drawn to that argument and did not for a moment think it was too narrowly focused. He suggested that all we are asking for is what other museums across the world are already doing. Let me confess another thing at this point: I did a lecture on Luther a few months ago, to celebrate his 500th anniversary. My reading in readiness for this debate has made me aware of how I may now be clapped in irons for having got—via the Rijksmuseum—two illustrations from the 14th and 15th centuries, which made the lecture absolutely focused, and illustrated of course, and allowed me to make points that I would have had all kinds of trouble with if I had gone into the theology of Luther merely verbally.

I am therefore more than sympathetic to this business of open access. The noble Viscount said that open access was, to his mind, a rather vague concept—I do not know which of the two words he might have difficulty understanding. I think that open access to the digitised illustrative material in a museum is the same as the open access that takes me through the doors of a museum in the first place.

As for the whole business of recovering costs and the dismal scenario that the noble Viscount presented of all the things that have to happen for something to be held on the record and in the ownership of a museum, we need some factual evidence, do we not? We need to know just what the costs are. Having digitised more than 1 million items for the British Museum—as it says in the briefing papers—what does making them difficult to get hold of add to the case for having them in the first place? Having digitised them, the next step is making use of what one has and making sure that it is spread. Surely, by properly acknowledging the provenance of an illustration in a commercial or non-commercial outlet, one is giving publicity to the institution that holds those pictures in the first place.

I am told that a very popular television programme that seeks to cultivate interest in art has to cut back on the amount of art it shows because of the expense of including it in the programme. I wonder who is winning. A programme about art should show as much art as possible. Then we can say, “Look, it is in the British Museum”, the Victoria and Albert or whatever. I have been a scholar in my time and I know that the world of scholarship asks us to look everywhere for material to illustrate our case and support our points. Yet all the time, a lot of money is charged to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, cited the figure of £114,000, which was the only factual piece of evidence about the item that I heard which, in a budget of more than £20 million, seems such a small proportion to have claimed as a profit—although the noble Viscount does not like the word profit; surplus is a nicer word, perhaps, or a flowering of financial gain. That seems such a small amount that it is hardly worth going to the effort of safeguarding, ring-fencing and putting all sorts of barriers around this material.

Of course, I do not hold the exalted positions of the noble Viscount. I have been responsible for a museum, the Museum of Methodism—there is a pinprick in a great tapestry for you. All that we suggested to anybody who wanted to use our stuff was, “Come in and use it, but tell the world that this is where you got it from. We will make a project out of digitising. We will cover the costs and there are funders who will do that”. We have all our stuff digitised, but once we have it, we want to disseminate it. That seems to me the logical next step. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned balance. This material must be used for education.

I am aware that there are unsettled legal questions. On the train, I got lost reading some rather complicated legal material, and perhaps I shall have a cup of coffee with the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, if he can explain it to me. A long briefing document appeared just last month about this whole question within which exceptions to the copyright and risk of items in museums is specifically mentioned. This paragraph struck my eye:

“An outline of the key exceptions to copyright of most benefit to museums is provided below. However, because many of these exceptions are untested in law, as well as including a ‘fair dealing’ caveat, museums may need a healthy appetite for risk to fully benefit from them”.


It is about time that someone tested the question of copyright of digitised material in court so that, instead of having debates such as this, we could have a pointer from the law as to how best to proceed.

As far as I am concerned, having seen art as an exalted aspect of our educational system from a background of knowing nothing about art, it has opened my mind and touched my spirit enormously, and I want that to happen for everybody. Our rich and unparalleled resources need to be publicised, disseminated and made available to all. I echo the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. We ask the Government—I know that the Minister is a sensible man—whether it is possible for us to have a round table of stakeholders, so that these questions can be thrashed out in a proper way.