Nick Poole, Chief Executive of The Collections Trust, on why the museum sector needs to be taking urgent pre-emptive action in the face of very hard times ahead. He argues that the glory days are gone, and in the absence of the injection of large sums of Central Government money, suddenly the whole infrastructure of UK museums is starting to look decidely shaky...

People talk a lot of rubbish about the Recession. From green shoots to Global deflation, it’s astonishing how many armchair pundits have arisen to take up the gauntlet of speculation and use it to thrust into the public consciousness phrases like ‘double-dip’ and ‘fiscal stimulus’. The reality is that we don’t know - the Treasury doesn’t know, industry doesn’t know and the people in charge of funding museums don’t know.

So what do we know? We know that museums are notoriously tricky to fund, and particularly using the UK model of substantial, if not total, subsidy. That’s why the sector has fought in recent years to show how helpful (instrumental) it can be to the richer areas of public policy. Schools education? Tick. Health? Tick. Social welfare and community cohesion? Tick, tick, tick.

But there remain many who regard museums as an expensive luxury, double-funded through taxpayer money and the Lottery to appeal to a minority of, shudder, middle-class, middle-England, middle-aged people. These people hark back to the days when museums were assembled on the Grand Tour. Never mind that those museums don’t exist anymore, and in their place is a new generation of (mostly) genuinely passionate, dynamic and creative organisations outreaching their hearts out.

The fact that we haven’t totally transformed the public understanding of what museums are for is, frankly, our fault. It’s not like we haven’t had the money - tens of millions of pounds have poured into our sector in an unprecedented showering of wealth under the New Labour project. But instead of spending this money to our collective benefit, we have done what we always do - taken our share back to the cave, guarded it jealously and spent it on promoting the cause of our individual museums.

So what’s my point? My point is that the Glory days are gone, and in the absence of the injection of large sums of Central Government money, suddenly the whole infrastructure is starting to look decidedly shaky.

Consider the evidence:

• A piece of Treasury/DCMS wrangling sees DCMS over-committed by £100m in this financial year. Although it is mostly a loss to large/national capital projects, this is nevertheless going to have repercussions across the broader sector.

• The Tories are starting to seed the idea of the reintroduction of Admission Charging (although in quite a coy ‘yes we will/no we won’t ‘ kind of way) - thereby, even through the simple suggestion, dismantling a decade of hard-won  public opinion forming about the nature of museums.

• Local Authority Councillors line up Museums and Leisure Services in their sights as the prime target for spending cuts following the impending butchery of local budgets.

All of which points to some disturbing trends for museums. Although some quarters are reporting increases in visitors as more people look for more meaningful (and free) days out with the kids, it seems quite likely that the post 2010 Spending Review picture is going to look very different for Museums. So, in the words of Daniel Hannan MEP, what are we doing to caulk our hulls and mend our sails to prepare for stormy times?

The answer is not much, yet. There is a school of thought about emergency preparedness that it is better to have one single cataclysmic disaster than it is to have a gradually encroaching one. When your wall falls down, you know it has happened and you can get on with planning to rebuild it. When individual bricks start to crumble, it is much harder to galvanise and coordinate a response.

So it seems that the political environment around the whole Cultural and Creative Industries is holding its breath, waiting for that one, clear and decisive moment when everything hits the fan, we know how much of it there is and we can start to plan the cleanup. In the meantime, some nasty whispers are echoing down the halls - ‘there are too many museums anyway’ they seem to say, ‘we can probably afford to lose some’. Some others, more distant but more insistent, are muttering ‘Titians, Titians, Titians’.

But the reality is that the wall has already started falling, we just haven’t realised it yet. And the real questions are, how much of it will be left standing at the end, and what can we do to preserve as much as possible of the valuable momentum of the past decade?

And now, right now, is the time for pre-emptive action. It is the time to plan and to prepare and to agree what is most precious to protect over the next 3 years of spending cuts. So here’s my proposal - individual museums have a Disaster Plan for their site and their Collections, so how about a National Contingency Plan, to be used only in cases of dire emergency which addresses:

• Key sites which must be protected/funded at all costs

• Key Collections at risk, which must remain in public trust

• Exit strategies for museums losing grant-in-aid (incl. transferring to Trust status)

• A withdrawal of programme/project funds to be re-deployed into an Emergency Relief Fund

• Best practice examples illustrating alternatives to closure for Councillors (eg. public/private partnership)

• A UK-wide network of advisers able to assist in dispersal of Collections

•  An agreed shutdown/transfer scenario for Local Authorities

• Urgent action on shared storage/infrastructure/resources on a Regional/sub-Regional basis

• Informed action to adjust tolerances for preservation and collections care

 God knows, I hope we don’t get to use it, but by not taking concerted and pre-emptive action now, we run the risk of sleepwalking into a storm.

Nick Poole, Chief Executive, The Collections Trust

http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/