Written evidence submitted by Imperial War Museum
DCMS COMMITTEE INQUIRY ON COVID-19
The DCMS Museum Sponsorship team and wider colleagues have been eager to help and support Imperial War Museums (IWM) as much as possible, and have acted as the intermediary between IWM and the Treasury. We recognise that the schemes of support were quickly designed, with no way for anomalies to be ironed out before their announcement. The only way to gain any financial support as an Arm’s Length Body (ALB) was the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and lack of understanding of our business model in the Treasury created constant delays to our being able to apply for and action the savings, meaning that we can only claim back a small proportion of the losses expected from closure.
DCMS has requested an extensive number of returns from various teams across IWM with little to no comment or feedback received. It is unclear how these returns are used, and there are no shared learnings, which would be a clear benefit to the ALBs if anonymised or top level data could be shared.
The support and provision in response to COVID-19 has highlighted the lack of Government understanding of the complexity of IWM’s business model. Over the last ten years our public funding has been reduced and IWM is now under 40% publicly funded. This meant that when COVID-19 hit we lost 60% of our income overnight. The way we are accounted for within Government assumes that all our money is Government money and this led to the issues over the CJRS. There are two real lessons here; one that a review of how we are accounted for should be held, and two that our management agreements should be specific about where the Grant In Aid (GIA) is applied, making it clear where our status and mutual responsibilities lie, as we currently fall in-between the camps of public sector and private business.
The Museum and Gallery sector has an established network which constantly shares knowledge and experiences, through both formal networks such as the National Museums Directors Council, and informal groups such as the Financial Directors group. It is clear that DCMS are not aware of how effectively the sector works together and shares knowledge.
As mentioned above, the support and provision in response to COVID-19 has highlighted the lack of Government understanding in the complexity of our business model as we fall in-between the camps of public sector and private business. The fact that we have successfully become more commercial has been the very reason we are in difficulty now. We have concentrated on mass participation based on visitor numbers, a model which has proved unsustainable in this outbreak.
The definition of what is needed to ‘protect the national collections’ needs to be considered and levels of support be commensurate with protecting objects and stories which belong to the nation, not to the individual museum. We require joint storage that minimises fixed costs, mass digitisation that enables the public to gain access to our collections without visiting and increased capital infrastructure so we don’t need to have people sitting in buildings to put the buckets out when it rains. In the short term IWM will also need to restructure our business to support a viable future for the museum. In the next 18 months we will need to curtail massive amounts of work across the board to stay solvent. We will need cash flow to do this, but it is also important to recognise that this will increase the risk to the national collections with reduced staff and maintenance to care for them.
It was clear that IWM’s model was unable to cope with the circumstances and we know this was not a unique position. The worst mistake would be to assume that this won’t happen again at some point in the future. We need to get to a more resilient position in our partnership with Government.
The wider tourism sector will require extensive and concerted effort to recover, which will in turn support the recovery of the Museums and Galleries. It is here that DCMS’s help could especially benefit.