Ten years of free entry, but can it last?

Why the political gain in the United Kingdom outweighs the economic cost
By Javier Pes. Museums, Issue 232, February 2012
Published online: 01 February 2012

Visitors enjoy Tate Modern for free. Beyond is St Pauls Cathedral, which costs 14.50 to visit

LONDON. Maintaining free entry to the UKs national museums, as the secretary of
state for culture Jeremy Hunt blogged in December on the tenth anniversary of its
introduction, doesnt come cheap: it costs around 44m a year to maintain free
admission to national museums that previously charged, or around 354m in total since
1999. And yet he is happy to support it.
Why is the government backing a scheme launched in 2001 by the Labour government
it routinely criticises for free-spending? The coalition is committed to reducing the
countrys budget deficit, which peaked at more than 10% of gross domestic product
before it came to power in 2010. Yet universal free entry, which Scotland and Wales
also introduced in 2001, seems sacrosanct even though cutting the deficit is one of the
coalition governments mantras.
Reasons to stay free
When in opposition, George Osborne, now the chancellor of the exchequer, promised
that a Conservative government would be committed to free entry. His pledge at Tate
Britain in 2009 was repeated in the partys 2010 election manifesto. Thus the

Conservatives avoided picking a fight with a powerful arts lobby, and politically wellconnected national museum directors long-committed to free entry, such as the British
Museums Neil MacGregor, formerly the director of the National Gallery, Nicholas
Serota, the director of the Tate, and Mark Jones, then the director of the Victoria and
Albert (V&A). The latter was delighted to abolish the museums 5 entry charge, and
see visitor numbers leap from 1 million to 2.3 million in its first year.
Free entry looks set to remain now that Osborne and Hunt are in power. They have
little to gain from a u-turn. Backing free entry helped detoxify the Conservative brand,
similar to its commitment to protect overseas aid. These might not win or lose voters
but every little helps when seeking to lose a reputation for being the nasty party, in
the words of Theresa May, now the home secretary. Middle-class voters, particularly in
the south-east of England who are most likely to visit Londons big museums, expect
them to be freeand resent suggestions otherwise. Hunts predecessor Hugo Swire,
who once worked at the National Gallery, blotted his copy book as shadow culture
secretary, after he suggested in 2007 that directors and trustees should be able to
choose whether to charge, a statement that was hastily clarified to stress the partys
commitment to free admission.
Currently museum directors and their trustees are in effect compelled to offer free entry
by the government, not a traditional Tory position. Directors are now left in a bind. They
cannot charge, reluctantly or otherwise, after the government spared them from the
25% to 40% cut in funding many feared. The cut was still considerable at 15%,
announced in the spending review in 2010, which takes them to 2014/15. Something
has to give: after restructuring, 20 posts went at the British Museum last year, 12 at the
V&A, and 28 full and part-time staff across the Tates galleries.
Attendance boom
Supporters of free entry point to its success in terms of increasing attendance. Across
the UK visits have increased by 51% since 2000, statistics collected by the Department
for Culture, Media and Sport reveal. Visitors are predominantly middle-class, and many
in Londons museums are overseas tourists. Some argue these visitors can afford to
pay something, as they do for many temporary exhibitions such as Leonardo at the
National Gallery (16, until 5 February), Lucian Freud opening this month at the
National Portrait Gallery (14) or Gerhard Richter (12.70), which closed last month at
Tate Modern. Free entry has widened access, encouraging people to visit who would
be put off by even a low entry charge. The number of visitors from the most
disadvantaged backgrounds now make up 2.5% of the British Museums visitors and
5% of the V&As.
When museums do charge, visitor figures plummet, as they did in the 1990s.
Introducing a 7 ticket to visit the Royal Observatory led to a 55% fall in attendance
(see p14). Royal Museums Greenwichs flagship, the National Maritime Museum,

remains free.
That said, around 50 million visitors enjoy the 50 free national museums across the UK
a year. A back of the envelope calculation admittedly, but 125m could be raised if half
that number paid 5 per person: useful income for hard-pressed directors struggling to
balance a budget.
Opponents of charging argue that free entry results in greater value for money for
government funding. Much of a museums budget goes on fixed costs. At the British
Museum, for example, when salaries, pension, social security, early retirement and
redundancy costs were added up, the bill came to around 39.3m (2010/11). The
museums grant in aid that year was 43.5m. So halving the number of visitors to any
museum effectively doubles its subsidy per head. Instead of 7 per head at the British
Museum, it would be 14, for example. Mark Jones recalls that admissions used to
provide less than 10% of the V&As total budget. His successor, Martin Roth, also
backs free entry, although in Dresden the museums he ran all charged admission.
Charging is also unlikely to return because there is a consensus supporting free entry
among directors. The picture was different in the 1990s when opinion was divided, with
some directors ideologically in favour of charging. Treating visitors as customers made
institutions more visitor-focused, they argued, and did spur modernisation and
improved marketing.
Another reason why free entry will probably stay is that it took a battle to scrap it,
requiring a change in taxation. While free museums paid value added tax, charging
museums were treated as exempt businesses.
Subsidising tourists
Arguably the visitors who most benefit from free entry are international tourists to
London. Around 18 million overseas visitors enjoyed national museums last year, twice
as many as ten years ago. Last year there were 3.6 million overseas visitors to the
British Museum (60% of its total), 1.2m visitors to the V&A (40%) and 2.5m to the
National Gallery (49%). Some question the value of subsidising tourists who are happy
to pay for Londons other cultural and heritage destinations, be it St Pauls Cathedral
(14.50) or the Tower of London (19.80). The counter argument is that free entry
provides wider economic benefits: free museums contribute to Londons attractiveness
as a destination, and the money saved visiting a non-charging museum will be spent
on something else in the capital. The altruistic argument is that free entry is a sign of
civilised society (emulated last year by China).
The national museums that withstood the political pressure to introduce charges in the
1990s and remained free, notably the British Museum, National Gallery and the Tate
galleries (except its St Ives gallery, which does charge), have during the same period

seen their visitor numbers rise, albeit slightly (see table, p13). This has helped to keep
the British Museum, National Gallery and Tate Modern among the top five most visited
museums in the world, as our annual attendance survey shows (The Art Newspaper,
April 2011, p24). With government funding unlikely to increase any time soon, there are
growing fears that while attendance remains high, the strain on institutions budgets
and their staffwill grow also.