Ever since the Arts Council England (ACE) demanded the relocation of the English National Opera to Manchester in 2022, confidence in the idea that ACE knew what it was doing has been severely frayed. While the current government, and especially the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, seem to be sleepwalking through their cultural responsibilities, the workings of ACE is one problem they have tried to solve – by commissioning Margaret Hodge to review the organisation. This report was published at the end of last year and the government responded last week by accepting all of Hodge’s recommendations. Much of what Hodge proposes in the report will be music to the ears of hard-pressed artists and the directors of arts institutions across the country – a bonfire of red tape etc. etc. More controversial, however, is the suggestion that international visitors pay to enter national museums.
Museum entry fees have been a hot political potato since the 1980s. While the late Nicholas Baker might be best known for seeking a reprieve for an American Pitt Bull terrier sentenced to death under the Dangerous Dogs Act, the MP suggested the introduction of admission fees to museums and galleries in a parliamentary debate in 1980 – a notion firmly dismissed by Norman St John-Stevas, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s some national museums, such as the V&A, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, began to charge. The British Museum (true to its founding charter) and the National Gallery, remained free.
One of the most helpful aspects of the exchange between Baker and St John-Stevas is that it shows that confusion around the question of museum funding is nothing new. Part of Baker’s argument in favour of entry fees was that they would ‘provide a means by which works of art which might otherwise leave the country can be bought for the British public’. Even in the 1980s, the idea that admission charges could raise the amounts of money necessary for acquisitions, on top of actually running a museum, was pie in the sky.
In today’s climate, when museums are battling to balance their budgets, this is even more unlikely. Even the National Gallery has warned it might reach a deficit of £8.2m over the course of 2026, despite a year in which it unveiled a successful rehang of the permanent collection, celebrated its 200th anniversary with aplomb and announced that ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ in 2024/25 has been its ‘most-visited ticketed exhibition’ in its history. Clearly, if even this kind of success is not enough to break even, more money for the sector needs to be found from somewhere.
It was under the Blair government that free entry for museums became part of the cultural conversation for the first time since the 1980s. For Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith, it became something of a personal crusade. In 2001, after much pressure, campaigning and manoeuvring with the Treasury, he was able to find the money to support free entry. The key reform was to VAT regulations. By being allowed to reclaim VAT on goods and services, museums now had a much-needed source of extra funds. The showier aspect of the policy was the increase in grant-in-aid, by which the DCMS provided direct support to (then) 20 institutions around the country. In the golden age of the early millennium, this was not particularly controversial. Grant-in-aid increased by more £60m year-on-year from 1998, reaching £267m in 2002/03 (and this is to say nothing of the funds for capital projects pouring in from the National Lottery). Today, this support stands at £484m, yet that figure represents a 16 per cent decrease in real funding compared with 2021/22.
At no point, however, has any government provided enough money for an institution to rely entirely on such funding. Instead, the support meant they could just about able to operate without running at a major deficit. National museums work with a model that relies on other income streams, a model that was particularly successful for Tate. While, on the superficial level, free entry encouraged visitors to spend money in the shop or the cafe, it also fundamentally changed how museums thought about themselves. Successful museums had to develop commercial strategies and programmes to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. As visitor numbers have become the main metric by which success is measured, it has meant less room for museums to be judged on the conservation and care of their collections, on behind the scenes cultural work undertaken, or as homes for research.
The difficulty for museums is that costs have kept rising and, to compound the problem, visitor figures have not returned to the pre-pandemic highs. Fewer people equals less revenue from shops and cafes. Suddenly the model looks a little more fragile.
Writing in Apollo in June 2024, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, wrote about the ‘hidden costs’ that came with free admission. He suggested a levy or hotel tax for foreign visitors to London, which would support the sector: ‘British tourists pay both hotel taxes and admission fees for trips to Paris, Venice, New York, Berlin and further afield. So why not allow the Mayor of London (as well as Manchester, Leeds or Oxford) to introduce an open culture levy on hotel and Airbnb rentals, with the funds ring-fenced for supporting free museums and galleries?’ The fact that Hunt was prepared to lead in this area is particularly striking as in 2011 – before he became director of the V&A – he was arguing for the reintroduction of entry fees.
Clearly the idea that foreigners should pay has its attractions – it’s always easier to ask someone else to carry the cost. Yet this also runs the risk of making the national museums’ difficulties around restitution more glaring. These institutions are prohibited by law from deaccessioning works in their collections but to charge people from nations that might have claim to these works is surely to add fat to the fire.
The part of Hodge’s recommendation that bears real scrutiny is what comes next. She proposes charging international visitors ‘once ID cards are the norm’. That’s quite a conditional state of affairs. Labour governments have been obsessed by ID cards since the Blair era. Bringing them in so that museum funding can be sorted out might be to put the horse before the cart.
Hodge points, somewhat surprisingly, to New Zealand and Singapore as examples for the UK. She does this despite the fact that museums there are facing similar, if less acute, challenges to the UK and cater to much smaller audiences. (The annual number of visitors to the National Gallery of Singapore is around 1.7m.)
Curiously, the model that is most obviously a success, in these terms, is the Met in New York. In 1970, the Met introduced a pay-what-you-like policy; this lasted until 2018 when it revised the policy to apply only to residents of New York. The museum had recently faced a deficit of nearly $40m (a prospect it avoided) and a board and new management needed to rethink how to fund the institution. The year after the change, the Met reported more than 7m visitors. As with all museums, even the Met suffered a post-pandemic dip; in 2025, that number was 5.7m. Yet the Met also has an endowment of around $3.5bn – an impossible dream for any museum in the UK – that allows it to think long-term.
Against the background of lower post-pandemic visitor numbers, introducing a new barrier to entry could put off more potential museum-goers. While the big six in England – the British Museum, the National Gallery, the V&A, the Science museum, that Natural History Museum and Tate – will probably be able to cope through their own fundraising efforts, smaller museums and those outside London may find themselves without national support. In a political environment in which the Treasury is looking to cut every penny of spending it can, this is a precarious time to reintroduce the idea of admission fees. The danger is that the Treasury would see each pound raised at the door as one it no longer needs to provide through grant-in-aid. If this is the road the government sets itself upon, the idea that museums in England will remain world class is an idea that will fade a great deal faster than Leonardo’s Burlington House cartoon.
