.

including its monthly museum visit figures, suggests that many of DCMS-funded museums experienced difficulties in increasing their numbers of adult visitors from socioeconomic group C2DE. This may, however, highlight some of the problems with the department’s methods of data collection and its clarification of the definitions used which produced a number of anomalies. The apparent decline in the percentage of C2DE visits also reflects the fact that prior to 2005/2006, a number of the museums had included under 16-year-old C2DEs in their performance indicators, although these were specifically meant to refer to people of 16 and over. The totals for 2005/2006 have been adjusted to exclude children.

      Strictly speaking, it is impossible to read across the data that the department has collected or to assume consistencies. Given the number of caveats that apply, it could be argued that this data is incapable of demonstrating trends in attendance by target groups to museums and galleries. However, the consistent data generated after the mid-2000s, indicates that the percentage of visits by adults from social groups NS-SEC 5–8 has marginally declined since 2006/2007. This suggests that free admission has not succeeded in attracting the groups for whom it was originally intended, which raises questions about the integrity of the most basic performance indicators; government’s concerns with efficiency and value for money; its seriousness about evidence-based policy; and its commitment to extending access to the many, not just the few.

It is, perhaps, significant that under the Coalition, free admission is now considered central to the position of museums in the UK visitor economy. The UK is home to three of the five most visited art museums in the world, all three of which are free: the British Museum, Tate, and the National Gallery (Art Newspaper 2011, 24), and nearly 60 percent of visitors to the UK visit the free DCMS-sponsored museums. By 2010/2011 there were 17.7 million overseas visits to DCMS-sponsored museums (ONS 2010), accounting for over one-third of all visits.

Conclusions

       Labour bequeathed a public realm that shone. They renovated, restocked and rebuilt schools, hospitals and clinics, arts and sports venues, parks and museums. JK Galbraith once talked about private affluences and public squalor; now there are plenty of the former, despite the recession, but much less of the latter. Public spaces no longer felt second best or the shabby poor relations of commerce. Sober academics talked of a renaissance of England’s northern cities, and you could say the same of Glasgow and Belfast. For years to come, civic buildings will stand as monuments to the Labour era …

      But… the social state we are in now is not much different from 1997. The broad judgment has to be that not enough altered in the fabric of our country, given Labour’s commitments on equality and fairness. The country remains strongly defined by class, regional disparity, inequality and individual and business under-achievement.

      Toynbee and Walker 2010, 297

      Money evidently wasn’t everything. Seen against its objectives, the effectiveness of recent museums policy initiatives is questionable. The plethora of policy directives over the past 20 years may have been as functionally related to the growth of the economy as it was to a belief in the ethos of the public sector. The greater transparency of the terms of government’s engagement in museums policy opened the door to more detailed criticism. In retrospect, museums, and culture in general, were of less importance to New Labour than its rhetoric suggested. The flourish of autobiographies published around the time of the 2010 election devote little space to the subject.

      And how important was New Labour policy to museums, museum professionals, and museum practice? The short answer is that it was of considerable importance if it brought paychecks with it. So for the 60 or so National or Hub museums that received direct funding from DCMS or via MLA, understanding and keeping abreast of policy was essential. But many hundreds of museums were also indirectly touched by government policy. The resources put into Museum Development Officers and Subject Specialist Networks, for example, reached deep into the sector. It also influenced the Heritage Lottery Fund and therefore all those who applied for a grant.

Policy certainly endorsed the actions of those museums – or more specifically, those museum leaders – who sought a wider role in society, through social inclusion and purposefully working with the disadvantaged. But policy-engaged people are not that common in the museums sector. At best even the more able museum managers are primarily and selfishly partisan for their own institutions and see any benefits of government policy as somehow being “accidental windfalls.” Government initiatives encouraging museums to do different things and do things differently are usually regarded as being just another set of criteria to which lip service must be paid if you want the financial benefits. Policy rarely stimulates serious discussion within the sector. But then neither does the DCMS energetically promote such discussions.

      This chapter reveals something of the vacillations of government policy, and the unpredictable durability of particular initiatives. Certain preoccupations remained consistent: museums registration (subsequently, Accreditation Scheme); funding and governance; relationships within the UK and internationally; use of new technologies – although these may not have progressed according to plan. Other concerns proved less predictable. Museum admission charges, for example, are often regarded as the battleground between Conservative versus Labour ideologies (Wilkinson 2003). While different Conservative administrations introduced charges, their reasons for doing so were different. Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Heath, refused to accept the principle that museum access should be free, whereas Thatcher was concerned to make the public sector less dependent on state support. A more meaningful indicator of the consistent evolution of conditions affecting British museums’ operations might therefore be the degree to which the sector delivers, or is expected to deliver, on government objectives.

      Other museum-related enterprises can be seen to have manifestly fallen by the wayside. These include the watchdog, QUEST, which may have part of a ruse by DCMS’s first Secretary of State to increase funding to the sector from the Treasury (Smith 2003). It was abolished by New Labour’s second Secretary of State on taking up office. Other matters were clouded by political argument. After the think-tank, Demos, first raised the specter of cultural value as a reprieve from instrumentalist value in 2003, DCMS responded by describing culture as synonymous with “transformative power,” a greater sense of well-being, connectedness, confidence, and aspiration, and giving a greater sense of personal meaning. But it still associated culture with the development of more aspirant individuals and better communities, in short, the production of a more thriving economy. The debate has now become the subject of academic research partnerships (O’Brien 2010), as interrogation of subjective well-being has taken over from economic and social impact, represented for example, in MLA’s attempt to promote SORI (Social Return on Investment), following the Cabinet Office’s lead.

Elsewhere the persistence, if not the transience, of policy reflected broader trends within government. Evidence on the development of evidence-based policy is slight. The vast amount of evidence collected on museums either proved insufficient for the generation of evidence-based policy, or it may have simply proved surplus to the requirements of policy-making (as with free admission). But DCMS’s declining emphasis on targets reflects a withdrawal from a target-driven culture across government more generally. However, when it came to it DCMS exerted no scrutiny over MLA, which never produced annual reports or accounts – not even on Renaissance, its most substantial museums program for over 150 years.

      This sort of laxity should be unacceptable to museum professionals and should provoke outrage. But to earn the respect of government and be treated more seriously, they must engage more critically with government policy. There is often a resignation about museums – worldwide, not just in the UK – and their relationship with almost everything that ought to matter to them. It is David and Goliath, but worse odds. Museums have a support base in society. They need to work harder to have a place in policy-making so that they have just a little more say in what happens to them rather than rolling over and becoming hapless victims.

Notes

      1 1 Those that are recognized