Museums and Galleries

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord has certainly mounted a welcome challenge to the museum and gallery establishment. In commenting, I should just say that I am involved with the British Library through the Eccles Centre for American Studies. I was, as a matter of history, the chairman of the trustees at Kew, where we held over 200,000 botanical drawings. I have also been much involved over many years in the Bowes Museum in County Durham; it is, of course, not a national museum, so it does not come within the scope of this debate.

The key sentence in the noble Lord’s presentation related to the size of the fees charged to reproduce publicly owned artworks. It is a pretty narrow ground on its own but, narrow though it is, it is quite complex. The noble Lord referred to the fact that, on the internet, the resolution is perhaps not very high—high resolution can be quite a challenging matter. We will have all picked up postcards in museums and galleries and been disappointed with the colour and printing of those postcards. Indeed, getting the colour completely right can be pretty difficult. Something that somebody wants to reproduce may be in store or in a frail state; its provenance may be quite uncertain or its attribution not for sure. There may be other images of that work available and so the work that has to be put in to make sure that the job is done professionally can be quite extensive.

Attached to this assertion that fees are too high are criticisms of commercialisation and even of policies restricting access. These need to be seen in a wider context. Let me take the V&A. We have been talking about funding. The V&A gets a grant in aid from the DCMS. In 2010, it got £44 million; in the last full year reported, it got £39 million of grant. The £5 million difference, if adjusted for inflation, amounts to a cut of 28%. That is quite severe by any standards. The £39 million is in fact just over half the total unrestricted expenditure of the V&A, so it needs to raise £34 million to reach its total of £73 million—quite a formidable challenge.

Then there is the question of intervention in this narrow field. Museums are granted day-to-day independence—a Herbert Morrisonian concept reflecting the difference in publicly owned bodies between strategy and day-to-day, which still persists. In my view, that independence, allowing trustees and management to run these institutions as they think fit, is extremely important; indeed, given the variability of the institutions, it is essential. Any form of government intervention will therefore have to be thought about carefully.

The demands on museums, as the noble Lord said, are increasing. Gone are the days of Dr Ashmole when one could say, “You are lucky to see what I have gathered together; you’d never see it if I had not done so. Do come and look, and I’ll tell you what it means”. The world of education, the internet, social media and so on brings a much broader, wider need to be involved in museums. Museums are recognising this with workshops and seminars. Much more engagement is taking place. I am sure that, with the way the world is going, there will need to be a greater response to that engagement and the search for knowledge, as has been mentioned.

In today’s circumstances, museums and galleries have quite a lot to contend with. The people who run them are not natural capitalists. I do not think “profit” is a word they would recognise or ever use. Certainly, I have not heard any senior person in the museums trade talking about making profits. Indeed, each year is a scramble to cover expenditure from income. Look at the V&A; the surplus at the end of its £73 million was tiny—under half a million, or thereabouts. The management of these museums are thinking about recovery of costs and maintaining a high level of service. Of course, this costs money: skilled people doing skilled work incurs costs. It is not just image reproduction one should be thinking about, but the whole raft of advice and dialogue on a much wider front, involving curators, archivists, conservators and management itself.

It seems to me entirely reasonable for museums to seek to recover costs, although not necessarily all costs. Again, I do not think that museum managers tend to think about that balance. It is often said that people do not value the things for which they are not asked to pay. Perhaps that is a bit of a cliché, but there could be reason in it. The question then becomes: what are reasonable costs and are we prepared to pay them? We might want to negotiate; many negotiations do take place. Indeed, as has been mentioned, some institutions are more generous than others. I remember at the Bowes, which is not a national museum, we had a request by Sir Alistair Horne about a photograph of a Napoleonic brass clock. We said: “Go on, take your own pictures and we will not charge you a fee”. Not everybody is charging fees to everybody else all the time. It must depend on the funding position, the flow of demands upon the institution and how institutions respond individually.

I do not see that there is much wrong with the present position. The plea for this rather vague concept of open access is about not much more than saying, “Will you please make these areas free of charge altogether?” That is probably what it comes down to, which does not seem an appropriate response to what is happening to museums and galleries.

These things should be left to find their own level. Each institution should have its own policy and pursue its relationship with the public in the light of its own circumstances, tackling things case by case. If somebody is displeased and wants to appeal against some charge that is being imposed they can always go to the trustees of these institutions, who would no doubt be very willing to hear the case and see what they think. I hope, therefore, that not much more is heard of what seems to me to be a small storm in an academic teacup.