The Heritage Update on the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) is now available.
Heritage Update writes:
The Chancellor invited all Departments to model savings between 25 and 40%. Given the £27bn windfall, the cuts announced on 25 November were less drastic than predicted. However headlines for the heritage sector include:
- DCMS will receive a 5% cut to its funding, which will fall internally.
- Historic England will receive a 10% cut over the next four years.
- The operational freedoms announced for national museums in 2013 will be made permanent and extended to other bodies including Historic England and the Churches Conservation Trust.
- Funding for national museums will remain at the current level until 2019-20 and free admission maintained.
- Arts Council England will receive a small cash increase of £10m a year for the next four years.
- The government will work with museums to explore the case for a new tax relief to support exhibitions
- Stable tourism budgets to 2020 (flat cash), plus a £40 million Discover England fund and increased investment in GREAT campaign
- VisitEngland & VisitBritain will be ‘brought closer together’ as organisations with merger talks.
- There will be deep cuts at the Department for Communities and Local Government which will make 29% savings over four years. Its overall budget will decrease by £6.1bn over the period, from £11.5bn in 2015-16 to £5.4bn in 2019-20.
- There will be slight declines in budget for Wales (1.1%), Scotland and Northern Ireland (both 1.3%)
The Heritage Alliance writes:
The Treasury’s acknowledgement that the UK is ‘brilliant at culture’ is very welcome together with the Chancellor’s illustration of the power of grants to lever in investment. This supports his previous sentence that a cut in the budget of such a small Department like DCMS is a false economy.
DCMS points out that the cut of 20% is in the administration budget while the overall cut to the DCMS resource budget is 5%, a good result in the context of the Spending Review.
Although arts, museums and sport are singled out for additional support, there was, however, little mention of heritage although the new £40 million Discover England Fund to boost tourism across England is a very positive investment together with the £1m for Hull’s UK City of Culture 2017 and to prepare for the next UK City of Culture.
Other welcome points were that Historic England and the Churches Conservation Trust will be given the same operational and financial freedoms as national museums to help these bodies to move towards greater financial self reliance and sustainability. The Government confirms its support to the new English Heritage charity. In DEFRA’s budget, the protection of funding for Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and National Parks is also good news.
Other measures in the Spending Review impinge on the condition of our heritage assets, notably the pressure on Local Authorities to reduce their property portfolios. The Spending Review will allow Local Authorities to retain 100% of receipts from sales to be used for improving local services. If this results in the rapid sale of town halls, libraries and other civic buildings, the Heritage Alliance will be working to ensure that disposal policies take account of the community value of these assets to avoid these buildings, many of them historic landmark buildings on the high street, being simply sold to the highest bidder and ending up empty or on the Heritage at Risk register. If the receipts were ploughed back into under-resourced historic environment services the overall principle would be more acceptable. Similar conditions should apply when central government departments release £4.5 billion worth of surplus land and property assets.
We were surprised that no further measures were made to boost philanthropic giving heritage but further information may lie in the promise of ‘tax reliefs for museums’.
The Heritage Alliance website
