Member News
By Lord Howarth of Newport - 5th January 2010
Lord Howarth of Newport writes for ePolitix.com, ahead of his oral question on public funding for university museums and galleries.
The University Museums and Galleries (UMGs) matter very much for research, the creative economy and the cultural life of the nation. Until now they have received £10m pa of dedicated public funding (the Museums, Galleries and Collections Fund), but – even before Lord Mandelson's pre-Christmas announcement of reduced funding for universities – the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) initiated a review of this funding.
The worry is that ring-fenced funding will end and UMGs will become heavily dependent on funding from their parent universities at a time when the HE budget is under extreme pressure. In my supplementary question I shall press HEFCE, through the government, to maintain this dedicated funding. If that isn't to happen and the funding for the UMGs is to go into the maw of a reduced block grant to the universities, I shall urge that accounting procedures or other means should be put in place to ensure that public funding for these museums, which we should treasure as national assets, is not reduced and remains clearly visible.
Why is this important? We are talking of some of the greatest collections in the country: the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, the Courtauld, the Whitworth, the Barber Institute, the Sainsbury Centre. UMGs hold no less than 30 per cent of the collections that have been designated as being of outstanding national and international importance.
There are 100 university museums which are regularly accessible to the public. They are very diverse, from the Women's Library at London Metropolitan University to the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, from the British Cartoon Archive in Kent to the Crafts Study Centre in Surrey and the Oriental Museum in Durham, and from the Royal Academy of Music Museum in London to the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of Egyptology at UCL.
HEFCE has provided core funding for 28 of the publicly accessible museums. In the five years from 2003-08, HEFCE funding helped university museums to increase public visits by 35 per cent to 2.3 million a year; total educational visits by 45 per cent to 243,000 a year; and further education visits by 159 per cent to 45,300 a year.
The £10m of dedicated funding provides around 50 per cent of the funds of many UMGs. It represents a modest amount in terms of HEFCE's budget, but provides indispensable core funding to many university museums, and the base for their other fundraising efforts.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd