A cloudy outlook
Stuart Davies finds the latest National Heritage survey of museum directors shows little optimism.

National Heritage’s most recent survey of museum directors reveals a downbeat view of prospects. The future is definitely cloudy according to many of them, and while they feel that the last decade has been good for museums and galleries, that might not be sustained as new priorities put pressure on the public purse.

We interviewed a sample of those directors who had responded to our large 2004 survey, using a specific set of questions but also allowing some freestyle comments.

Many were positive. Being eligible for lottery funding, for example, has given hundreds of museums a significant boost and our respondents praised the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Many others have benefited from imaginative support from government-sponsored schemes such as the Designation Challenge Fund, and a number of respondents said that they felt the culture department was working hard at delivering support.

Successes, including free admission to the National Museums and most notably the Renaissance in the Regions programme, were all the more impressive because they were being achieved within an environment of intense Treasury scrutiny.

Some expressed a wish that the department would take on a greater implementation role rather than leave that to the national agencies which they saw as still mired in red tape, while an interesting omission from the comments was any recognition of the role of the regional agencies in supporting national initiatives and making them work.

In our 2004 survey we found that respondents stressed that financial considerations dominated at the expense of the real purposes of museums, and that there was constant pressure from stakeholders to perform to their agendas within tight regulatory and financial constraints. This had not changed. As one respondent said this time round, “museum directors are still obsessed and bedevilled by financial issues”.

There is general concern about how sustainable the current way of financing museums (individually and in general) really is, regardless of their governance arrangements. We sense a feeling that museums often think they are running out of options. They have embraced the culture of “efficiency savings” and “entrepreneurial thinking”; they have milked the grant opportunities for all they are worth; they have squeezed as much as they can out of their principal sponsors. But the battle to retain a balanced budget is relentless, unforgiving and, for senior managers, exhausting.

There is concern that museums are not sufficiently entrenched in the national values to be save from economic trends and political fickleness. Cuts, which seem to be endemic in local government, were a favourite among perceived threats. The situation in local authority museums is certainly volatile and requires managers with endless energy to continually negotiate for the best deal they can get, seizing opportunities for growth here or retrenching in good order there.

What appears to be missing from our respondent’s comments are the wider and longer term issues, such as Local Area Agreements, they they need to get to grips with. Nor was there a sense that more fundamental changes in how the public sector works and is funded were sought. Some museums are trying to get out of mainstream local government by investigating the Trust option, and this seems on the agenda for some time to come.

The national museums which formerly charged admission and went free under the DCMS initiative are still worrying that the compensation they were given will not be enough and there continue to be muttered threats about charging again. The Olympics are another worry, both for the short and longer term impact.

The single most prominent internal issue was that of staff and expertise. Many respondents said they had difficulty recruiting good staff with appropriate expertise. Indeed, more than one felt that expertise – especially curatorial and conservation expertise – was draining away at an alarming rate. Training was also considered to be an area of concern, perhaps reflecting that there no longer is a dedicated museums training agency.

Some concerns about how the Museums Libraries and Archives Council were administering Renaissance in the Regions were raised, but the benefits of Renaissance are clearly trickling down throughout the sector, as references to the subject Specialist Networks and the funding of Museum Development Officers demonstrate.

Strategic planning as a concept has some way to go in smaller museums. All museums claim good relations with their local communities. Attitudes to disposal of collections are very diverse – from keep everything at all costs to cost everything and then dispose if not economical to keep.

Many respondents were keen to point out how well they had done over the last decade, but there were anxieties about the next decade. Whether this simply represents the dominant mores of the museum world or whether the threats are real remains to be seen.

Published Museum News issue no 81