Tales of Museum Doom
Posted in Politics, Presentism on 05. Aug, 2009
Gather around children, I’m going to tell you a story about British politics.
GET BACK HERE.
This is a story about Doom, something British literature has excelled at. Especially warnings of potential Doom. But this story begins a few years ago and encapsulates a lot about British society and ultimately the effect on a certain class of UK museum.
There are two parts to the British elected government system… Ignore the House of Lords… There are MPs representing the interests of their constituents in the House of Commons and there are local councils, which have a variety of systems I won’t go into but are made up of roughly 50-100 people dependent on population. For the past few years, Labour held the most MP seats, Conservative held pretty much all of the councils. When it comes to local politics, councils make the decisions in the rather limited remit.
A lot of these councils, if not all, have a museum under their stewardship. Local authority museums are offices of the council and receive their budgets from them. Nationals, like the British Museum, get their government money directly from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Back in the heady days of a few years ago, economy was (artificially?) doing well and Labour was spouting off about Education. They were releasing white-paper after white-paper, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, about education in those institutes that included museums. Say what you like about it, I still find it social engineering under another name. And they threw money at it. God bless those who have to pick through it and make it work for a living.
At this same time, a lot of the local councils were investing their money in too-good-to-be-true banking schemes. A lot of them in Iceland, it would seem.
Then, well, we got to this point, and you’ll see another amazing facet of British politics: keeping your head below the parapet. The few who can’t do this, namely the front bench, take most of the backlash. Probably the only reason Gordon Brown hasn’t been removed is that nobody wants his job, and he says “global” with a shrug enough times to make it out its not his fault.
Councils do the same, because they’re mostly Conservatives and more than happy for Labour to take the bruises. Yet their investments have also taken a kicking. But councils don’t have a front bench. I doubt a person in any city in the UK could name all their councillors. They could name a few who like to stick their faces in the local paper, but are unlikely to name the full council with their affiliations, doctrines, standpoint or portfolios. It’s quite easy to get your head down.
Here comes the Doom. The Labour government, having or have not messed things up, have only handed the councils a fraction of their usual budgets, say 80-90%. The mostly-Tory councils without any backups are having to stretch things. I can tell you, the one thing punishing councils at the moment are the recycling targets set by the EU. They can’t back out of them, and they have to manage the wastes as to the terms they signed up to. This is less of a problem to those who got it right first time. It is a huge cost and there’s no option for those who faulted. So councils re now turning to all the other offices and demanding belt tightening. They won’t raise council tax, oh no. That puts your neck out. So they restructure.
Some council share Chief Executives, for crying out loud. For those who don’t know, Chief Executives are the top unelected officer of the councils. They enact the councils policy direction. I don’t know how much direction you can get from the top person doing two part-time jobs.
Here’s where I do the hop, skip and Doom-jump into the future. I predict… 18 months. Belt-tightening and restructuring, the officers of the council have to make up the difference or make cuts.
That includes museums.
I’m predicting most local authority museums will suffer it but survive this financial year. What about the next? We saw a few quite small museum face closure, councils unable to find the few thousand to pay the two members of staff. Next year, it’s going to be bigger institutions unable to meet their targets. It’s always “targets”. A wonderful system devised to measure success empirically and without any soul whatsoever.
There isn’t much to cut in a local authority museum. Just staff costs. You know who won’t be first on the block? Those in the education officer’s role. There is no disrespect to you guys, you do a job that brings in money.
This is my prediction of Doom: Local authority museums turn into nothing but extended classrooms with full-time teachers in a part-time school. But I suppose that’s what these white papers wanted in the first place anyway.
Little collections management, next to no conservation and I’ve yet to find a local authority museum that can use it’s temporary exhibition space for British Museum-style blockbusters. The museum would just be another classroom resource, ploughing three classroom a day through it’s doors and meeting that target.
Those museums that get closed? Oh, there will be more sounds and more fury and the council will collective get their one-hundred-plus heads down, the fury will pass over them without anyone to direct it at and they’ll get re-elected again.
This tale, as all good tale do, acts as a warning. I keep reading all this stuff about museums of the future or the future of museums, yet they seem to miss the potential for museums to be brought down to the lowest common denominator. There’s not enough warnings going around. There’s not enough being spoken about the disasters we’re not looking out for. There are many of them. This one, of the political expedience of museums while they try to achieve unattainable targets whilst still delivering the education cash cow, is dependent upon the leadership of the many variables of council officers in a variety of positions. I can’t make that call, I can only point it out and hope people take notice.
If you have a Tale of Museum Doom, a good old fashioned warning to the museum industry about anything at all, email me pete(at)newcurator.com and I’ll put it up here. You can even be anonymous if you like.
This is an interesting post, but I think your analysis of the status quo is a little simplistic. The idea that all local authorities can be considered comparable in their management of museums is quite simply wrong. Top tier local authorities (county and unitary) have a far greater flexibility in their approach to dealing with budget cuts than any second tier local authority. Top tier authorities often operate museum services. When budgets are cut here, staff and services can become more flexible and shared across sites. Opening hours at individual sites may become reduced but service wide the reductions will be minimal. The assumption that this will lead to a removal of core collections services is, I think, wrong. In these cases curatorial, conservation and collections care tend to be centralised Museum Service provisions which can be less affected opening hours and services at individual sites. The redundancies here will be amongst the staff that deliver directly to the visitors, ie, Education and Visitor Services Staff.
Furthermore, top tier authorities will have a mixture of statutory and discretionary services which can work together to produce economies of cost, but not necessary cuts in the work they do. I can give examples of where library, archive and museum services are working together to achieve this.
Also you make no account for ‘Renaissance in the Regions’. Whilst the scheme is a long way from being perfect (just see the recent review of the scheme), it does pump a great deal of money from central government into local authority museums. Whilst the work on education and outreach grabs Renaissance’s headlines, the money does still support a great deal of collections based work. Without spending time looking into the details I cannot really say how the recession will affect what Renaissance does, but I do recognise that it needs to be considered when looking at the issues you discuss.
The real problem will probably lie with second and third tier local authorities. These local authorities have neither the money nor he flexibility to manage their museums effectively during an economic crisis. Often these museums are already cut to the bone and cannot exist on much less then they are at the moment. These are the museums that are really facing doom. However, their actions may be a bit different to the scenario you suggest. Museums that I have worked with that operate at minimum level tend to favour the retention of Curators and Collections Managers at the cost of teachers. The reason for this is the very reason you say they will stay – that the education offer makes money. Since education is an area where money can be made there is a constant pool of freelancers who can provide educational services at a museum. These bought in services can be charged in full to the school with no cost to the museum, or even a small profit.
What you have missed, however, is not the way the recession will affect the delivery of services, but on the way it will effect collections. Finance Officers in local authorities are too often viewing collections as under exploited financial assets that, in times of hardship, can by simply sold off. Currently the majority of these sales are ethically undertaken (eg, the current happenings in Southampton) but how long will it be before there is a series of unethical sales? This depends on the view of the governing body (ie, the Council) of their museum.
And this really comes to the crux of the matter. The way the museums will deal with a recession depends on how good their governing body is. Councils that have the understanding of what a museum can do and have the will to achieve it will always find a way of keeping their museums going without reducing services. Councils that reach a crisis point will be looking for partnership arrangements or different governance models and then working with the museum to ensure its success – again, I can show many examples of this. The museum that will really face doom are the ones with inadequate governors, and in these cases the museums will face arbitrary and pragmatic cuts, or even closure, rather than any considered removal of curatorial services in order to save education.
I agree that it will be touch for the next two to three years, and that museums will close and objects will be lost from public collections, but I cannot agree with the view that curators will perish in order to keep teachers in jobs.
1. Of course it’s going to be simplistic. This would be a boring post otherwise.
2. They lost that flexibility when their investments shrank. “Flexibility” of staff accross sites just means giving people more work to do, and work they weren’t intending to do when they took the job. A museum will only suffer from that.
3. But it could mean that one curator will be doing the job of three curators. Or collection/curatorial assistant (you know, those entry level position new musuem worker depend upon to get the start) will be cut.
4. Visitor staff, maybe, but nobody’s going to cut the education service. It’s the only thing some musuems can boast to councils.
5. Renaissance in the Regions is just another white paper outcome. A load of money to centralise museum mission statements.
6. Constant freelancers? Yet every musuem job list is full of education officer posts. I also don’t think outsourcing your politically valuable education department will win any points.
7. I missed it the recession’s effect on collections? My Christ, I spent most of March and February looking at it. It became quite dull as the same old deaccessioning story came again and again and I didn’t think my readers needed to hear about it much more.
8. Inadequate governors. Namely, council members. I can offer many examples of this.
9. Maybe not every curator will perish, but as you said, they’ll be given other things, made “flexible” or lose large chunks of their support staff. Education officers would be the last to go.
Unless, of course, something can be done.