Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) spending review rounds always work like this: officials choose three figures of increasing severity and ask those they fund to model what would happen should their funding be cut by the corresponding amounts. The organisations duly devote considerable resources to trying to work out what they could cut or stop doing entirely, worrying staff and donors and driving speculation in the press. Then the culture secretary of the day proudly announces that he or she has fought culture’s corner and we all now only have to cut by the lower figure. Cue grateful thanks in public, and private pain as the agreed changes are made.
This is no doubt the same across Whitehall, but in culture and the arts it seems a particularly merry dance. Last week, the Culture Secretary Maria Miller secured cuts of ‘only’ 7 per cent to the overall DCMS budget in 2015/16, and ‘only’ 5 per cent to national museums and galleries. This perhaps seems reasonable — low even, when compared with cuts of almost 10 per cent to the Work and Pensions and Transport budgets. But the 5 per cent cut comes on top of years of slicing: in real terms, grants to institutions such as the British Museum, Science Museum and National Gallery have already been cut by a quarter since 2010. In fact, in real terms, funding is back to the level it was at before government boosted museum grant-in-aid to enable free admission in 2001.
But while the elite group of DCMS-funded national museums will survive, only bruised by the latest round, most of the smaller, local authority museums will be more severely wounded, and some may not survive at all in the long run.
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