Alistair Hardaker | Image: V&A East Museum © Hufton+Crow
Museum sector leaders raised doubts over plans for a tourist entry fee at England’s national museums, citing logistical and ethical concerns.
Museum sector leaders raised doubts over plans for a tourist entry fee at England’s national museums, citing logistical and ethical concerns.
Museum sector leaders have voiced scepticism over plans to charge international visitors for entry to England’s national museums, warning of logistical hurdles and the risk of putting off both overseas and domestic audiences.
Speaking to the London Assembly’s Economy, Culture and Skills Committee, representatives from the V&A, IWM, Art Fund and AIM were among those to set out a range of concerns, from identifying who should pay to the ethics of charging those directly affected by museum content.
Committee member Benali Hamdache asked museum sector representatives about their position on the introduction of a ‘tourist tax’ for national museum visitors from overseas.
Rebecca Pullen, chief of staff at IWM said there would be challenges around the logistics of distinguishing local and tourist visitors. Pullen said free access for anyone directly related to an exhibition’s content should also be considered.
“We make our collections freely available for everyone to come and look at, and that would include, for instance, our Holocaust galleries. Would we be expecting to charge other survivors, or descendants of survivors, or descendants of those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, to come to those galleries? That doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
“There are also more challenges logistically around how we would do that, particularly around balancing out free access for UK visitors. Charging, for sure, is challenging in terms of how you’d go about it, finding the space to do that, and how you would generally do that successfully.
“Our role is to be there for everyone; for everyone to think that IWM is for them. Anything that impedes people being able to access us is something that is difficult for us to think about.”
Art Fund director Jenny Waldman addressed a suggestion within the recent Hodge review of the Arts Council, which had said the government’s planned national ID card system could be help museums distinguish between local and international visitors.
Noting that the national ID card plans had been reportedly scrapped under new PM Andy Burnham, Waldman also pointed to Art Fund polling on the subject. “We did some polling around whether people do indeed carry ID cards, and what we found is that, of those people who describe themselves as “struggling to make ends meet,” only 49% carry any kind of ID on a regular basis.”
Waldman also pointed to the operational challenges of introducing the tourist tax, pointing to the Tate Modern and its nine public entrances. “The infrastructure costs would be quite high to implement, but also the front-of-house staff would have quite a difficult challenge identifying who should and who shouldn’t pay,” Waldman said.
“That’s quite off-putting in any kind of sense, a barrier to people coming in, and we feel it would be detrimental to the ulterior motive, which is to broaden the demographic and the numbers of people who go to, enjoy, love, and support museums.”
Sir Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum said around 50% of visitors across its sites are international.
When asked about the V&A’s view on charging international visitors, Hun said “we are sceptical”.
“We have yet to be convinced of the merits of introducing international charging,” Hunt said, adding, “our fears are that you would markedly reduce numbers coming into the museum. You would put off both national visitors and international visitors, and we would affect our quite carefully calibrated business model.”
Hunt said instead of imposing an entry fee at the door, the V&A’s commercial model relies on generating revenue through exhibitions, shops, and cafes, and memberships.
AIM Chair Rhiannon Goddard said the organisation doesn’t hold a particular position on whether the nationals should charge or not, but said many AIM members are “happy to charge because it gives them their independence”, adding, “it enables rapid feedback about whether they are providing for their audiences.
“We don’t think we could have the same vibrant small museum landscape in the UK that we do with just public funding… You can’t stretch the funding that far. It barely stretches to cover the needs of the nationals.
Goddard said AIM would like to see this discussion of admission fees evolve, covering the “necessary mix that’s required in order to have a vibrant and flourishing museum sector.”
