When the Tate’s board of trustees met on 20 March 2024, the one item of discussion was the museum group’s 2024-25 budget. According to the minutes, the chair of the finance and operations committee Jayne-Anne Gadhia emphasised how the proposed budget represented “the first step in a process of change towards a financially sustainable organisation”. The trustees duly examined plans for “tight control of income and expenditure across departments”.
The Tate’s accounts for 2023-24, delayed by the then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s dissolution of parliament on 30 May and the subsequent general election, were finally published on 3 December. The accounting report specifies that the Tate is operating, for 2024-25, on a budget deficit, with permission to dip into its reserves. This is the second year running that a budget deficit has been anticipated and approved. The 2024-25 report states the reason for approving it this time is “to give Tate time to develop a new financially sustainable business model”.
Even without the fine detail (redacted from board meetings minutes), this paints a sobering picture, congruent, as the Tate’s director Maria Balshaw rightly highlighted in that March meeting, with the structural challenges facing the wider museums sector. On 10 December, the UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy acknowledged as much. Giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Parliamentary Select Committee, she said: “We are very aware that there is a lot of fragility in our sectors—in music, in arts, in museums.”
Nandy also warned the committee to expect further budgetary cuts. As part of the comprehensive spending review, which has been pushed back and is now expected to be completed by June 2025, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is cracking down on government inefficiency. All departments will reportedly be asked to find 5% of savings.
Labour has only been in office for six months. It is a little early, some might say, for a report card. Within the arts sector, though, expectations have been riding high for a lot longer.
Back in March, the plan the then-shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire laid out for the UK’s arts, culture and creative industries—well before any campaign pledges were published—was widely hailed as exciting and progressive. Debbonaire demonstrated a good understanding of the country’s cultural infrastructure. She took seriously everything from its contribution to tourism to how tax relief is beneficial to keeping museums and galleries afloat. In other words, that plan was meaty. It held promise.
The question then, is what, if anything, has been done in its wake? For many, the answer is not that much—at least, not yet.
Eleanor Pinfield, who heads up Transport for London’s Art on the Underground programme, and chairs the Auto Italia arts non-profit, says that aside from the government’s focus on arts in the curriculum and higher education—the kind of bread-and-butter idea that everyone wants to see—there have not been any big, eye-catching policies on culture. “Obviously, we’ve just had the budget,” Pinfield says. “So, really, it’s all to play for now in the comprehensive spending review. I will be very interested to see how costs get broken down.”
The first thing to note is that ministerial capacity for dealing with the arts has, in effect, shrunk. Nandy is an energetic advocate for the arts. But, as was obvious in the interviews she gave right after acceding her post, culture is the part of her culture, media and sport brief that she knows the least about.
We’re basically having to teach a new minister about the arts and how valuable it is
Paula Orrell, Contemporary Visual Arts Network England
“We’re basically having to teach a new minister about the arts and how valuable it is,” says Paula Orrell, the national director of the Contemporary Visual Arts Network England. “Yes, she gets regeneration, she gets access and she gets sports. But does she really understand the nuance of the intersection between the commercial and public sectors?”
Further, in place of Stephen Parkinson, who was parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Chris Bryant has become minister of state across both the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the DCMS—a stretched brief, by any measure. Nandy has said that, given the overlap between the two departments, this is a strength. But, to Orrell’s point, divided ministerial attentions will not help a sector stretched to breaking point.
Amid the government’s ongoing push for economic growth, few ministers seem to truly understand or acknowledge the economic value that the arts sector brings. “Before the cultural recovery fund was announced during the pandemic,” Orrell says, “all of the MPs were in the House of Commons fighting for the creative industries. And not one of them mentioned museums and visual arts.”
Unexpected cost increases
The second thing on many people’s minds is the deep uncertainty around long-term funding. In her Autumn Statement, Reeves announced rises in national insurance contributions (NICs) and changes to business rates, to take effect from April 2025. No institution will have known to budget for these changes. And they will directly impact their bottom line.
The De La Warr Pavilion: Arts Council funding has not risen for two decades vince2012
Stewart Drew, the director of the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, highlights that both the local authority and Arts Council England (ACE) funding that the arts centre receives has been at a standstill for around two decades, while costs have gone up.
“We want to be paying people well in the sector. But to keep up with that, you have to generate more revenue. You have to find that money from somewhere,” Drew says.
Orrell bemoans a certain inflexibility she perceives in government. No one disagrees that investing in the NHS and social services is crucial, “but there’s a nuance when it comes to the charity sector, which is our sector as well,” she says. “The treasury could open its doors a little to protect these industries. The impact it’s having on higher education is unbelievable.” So too, museums, even those with alternative funding models.
In Bristol, the Spike Island arts centre benefits from having an 80,000 sq. ft building it can, in part, derive income from by renting it out to small businesses. However, those rising NICs and business rates only compound any other losses of income the gallery might incur. Spike Island has benefited since 2021 from membership of the ACE-funded West of England Visual Arts Alliance, a three-year programme, which has funded both programming and actual posts, but which is now closing. Navigating back from that is a massive ask, says Spike Island’s director Nicole Yip. “Planning ahead for next year has been really, really challenging. We’ve had to make some really difficult decisions.”
Diversifying income streams and evolving more sustainable business models, as the Tate is doing now, is, of course, nothing new. But, as Yip points out, doing so is itself an expense: it involves extra staffing and running costs.
Further, even Nandy concurs that the lack of capital funding is a critically overlooked problem. “We’ve got an ageing set of building stock that we’ve got to deal with,” she told the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. She noted that, in the last spending review, her department was able to get “quite significant amounts of funding released for capital expenditure”. However, museums have yet to see those funds.
We are all trying to remain optimistic that there are goodies in there for us… But we haven’t seen those positive things yet. It’s all additional cost and no additional income
Stewart Drew, De La Warr Pavilion
Drew puts it plainly: the autumn budget really hurt. “We are all trying to remain optimistic that there are goodies in there for us. We’re hoping that there might be some capital investment from [the] Arts Council. But we haven’t seen those positive things yet. It’s all additional cost and no additional income.”
Most people who spoke to the The Art Newspaper for this article mention the forthcoming review of ACE, which Nandy had suggested to the select committee might start before the end of 2024. In September the Scottish culture secretary Angus Robertson announced a similar review of Creative Scotland. Clarifying the status of national portfolio organisations in England and regularly funded organisations in Scotland is critical, if only because the De La Warr is far from being the only institution to have seen its funding stand still for decades.
This is in spite of the fact that museums really do deliver on public investment. Spike Island’s ACE funding has not increased from £285,000 in over ten years, whereas the gallery’s annual turnover is now around £1.5m. “ACE gets really good value for money out of Spike,” Yip says. “They’re really investing very little, but we’re delivering a lot.”
Local authorities in crisis
The other critical source of both income and profound anxiety is local authorities. In the Autumn Statement, Reeves set aside what she called a “real-terms funding increase” of £1.3bn to begin to tackle the financial crisis in local government. With as many as one in two councils struggling to make ends meet, this is of course welcome, but, many caution, not sufficient. As the chair of the County Councils Network, Tim Oliver noted immediately after Reeves’s breakdown of the budget in October: “Councils will have little choice but to raise council tax and still will need to take difficult decisions over services to balance their budgets.”
The situation facing Scottish institutions has been particularly dramatic. In October, arts and culture leaders warned the sector was in dire straits due to uncertainties over funding and a breakdown in communication with Creative Scotland.
Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) was told that its funding from Dundee City Council—its partner for over 25 years—stood to be cancelled entirely. The DCA’s director Beth Bate explains that if the gallery does lose that funding (around £234,000) on top of NIC costs (set to rise by £45,000), without a significant uplift in its Creative Scotland grant (which has not risen in ten years), it will simply have to close. “That’s not scaremongering, it’s just maths,” she says.
On 4 December the Scottish government published its draft 2025-26 budget. If passed, it will allocate over £15bn to local authorities—£1bn more than in 2024-25. Arts and culture, meanwhile, will receive an extra £34m. This includes £20m for Creative Scotland to finance its multi-year funding programme for 2025-26. Good news, no doubt. However, here too, pundits have warned that it simply is not enough. Museums Galleries Scotland’s 2024 survey of the nation’s museums and galleries found that 11% of Scottish organisations feared they might have to close within the next 12 months.
In the meantime, many culture leaders are waiting. Bate will only find out next month how much the DCA is to receive from Creative Scotland, for 2025-28—giving her just three months to plan for those three years. “We were really pleased to see an uplift for Creative Scotland… but with over 280 organisations awaiting the results of applications for multi-year funding, we’ll need to wait until the end of January to find out what this means for DCA,” she says.
Directors and curators the country over want to programme efficiently, operate sustainably and pay their people fairly. As Pinfield puts it, there is an “absolute need” for clarity on funding.
