Arts: Government Support

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for introducing this debate. I want to concentrate on museums and their possible role in relation to contemporary practitioners of art and craft. It may be time to have a bit of a policy think about this subject.

As we know, museums are rather arbitrarily divided between national museums and local government or provincial museums. I think that the division has probably got more to do with visitors to this country than anything intrinsic to museums. I want to give one example of funding. There is a small, very good national museum in London which has 120,000 visitors a year. It gets from the DCMS in core funding £1,750,000. In the north-east, in County Durham, is the largest provincial museum in the country, with arguably the finest collections of any provincial museum—the Bowes Museum. It is funded by a small county under great pressure, which has lost its coalmines and steelworks—not an easy place for local government to operate. The museum has £350,000 of core funding, and 120,000 visitors. So the finest provincial museum has the same visitor numbers as a small national museum in London—a very good museum, but I am not going to name it—but that London museum is getting five times the core grant that the Bowes Museum is getting. That does not seem to me easily defensible, with regard to a national policy towards museums. I would be most grateful if the DCMS and my noble friend on the Front Bench could take account of that matter. Perhaps I could suggest that we have a meeting to discuss this issue in more depth and detail, because it is a very serious one.

Another point about museums is that, when funding is tight, it is quite difficult for them to keep up with contemporary art, which is expanding at a rapid pace and in many different directions—digital was mentioned by the noble Earl. For example, if you go to the Ashmolean, a very fine museum, and look at its collection of 20th and early 21st-century studio pottery, you will see some very fine pottery, including pieces by Lucy Rie, a pot by whom sold for £125,000 in Christie’s about a fortnight ago. But it is a very small collection, absolutely nothing like the size of its 18th-century collection or 19th-century ceramics. How are those museums going to keep up? Frankly, with the funding situation and the challenge, I do not think they are.

Another serious policy position is around where museums have got to and where they are going. Will they have closed collections, like the Wallace Collection, never acquiring, lending or disposing anything? Those are big issues, and I think that they should be considered in some depth, which is not happening at the moment.

Museums need to think about life differently. We have started that at the Bowes Museum. We have created a centre for contemporary art, craft and design. Incidentally, it is currently privately funded. Its purpose is to work with practitioners in the north of England to see how we can support them and how they can relate to a museum and the collections we have. It is becoming more difficult to relate today’s generation to museums than it used to be because, again, of the way things have moved on. A minimalist approach to living is prevalent, but there are all sorts of other reasons.

I hope the DCMS will review the situation because it will not get any better. The fact of the matter is, however much we appeal for it, there is no more money available to be distributed. We have to find other ways. Surely they must include a policy approach, self-help and a functioning of the funding system, such as it is, that is more appropriate to the needs of today than the one that exists at present.