Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to increase co-operation between Scottish museums and museums elsewhere in the UK.

The Government welcomes cooperation between Scottish museums and museums across the UK. While culture is a devolved matter, and sponsored museums are arms-length bodies which are operationally independent, the Government provides significant support to museums, including grant-in-aid funding, exhibitions tax relief, and the VAT refund scheme.

In line with a recommendation from the 2017 Mendoza Review of museums, DCMS and the National Museum Directors' Council worked together to devise a Museums’ Partnership Framework, which was published in October 2018. National Museums Scotland are fully involved in this project. DCMS is currently analysing the responses to a survey on the amount of collaboration that currently occurs, and will publish a report later this year.

Examples of recent cooperation involving Scottish museums include V&A Dundee, recently nominated for the Art Fund Museum of the Year award, which is a spectacular partnership showcasing hundreds of V&A objects highlighting Scotland's rich design heritage; joint acquisitions and exhibitions such as the Artist Rooms collaboration between Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland; loans such as those from Scottsh museums and organisations to enable the Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and the Natural History Museum’s Dippy the dinosaur which is touring the UK and was recently exhibited in Glasgow.