Debate on the value of Museums

Lord Faulkner of Worcester:

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Viscount and to congratulate him on securing this debate and for giving such an excellent speech in describing in relatively few words the profound effect for good that museums have on our society. Indeed, they contribute so much and in so many different ways, that it is not possible to cover all of the ground in a single speech this afternoon.

I hope, therefore, that your Lordships will forgive me if I concentrate mainly on two museums that I know particularly well—the National Railway Museum in York and its newly-opened branch at Shildon in south-west Durham known as Locomotion. Many of the examples that I shall quote about those museums are representative of the excellent work going on across the museum world. In doing so, I declare an unpaid interest, as chairman of the Railway Heritage Committee.

I plan to cover four main areas: education, social regeneration, heritage preservation, and sustainability. I shall start with education. The traditional educational benefits of museums are well-known, but few people realise how comprehensively museum education now links into the national educational agenda at all levels, from nursery to postgraduate work. For example, in York over the past three years, the education programme has included working in partnership with the Sure Start initiative, York's Learning City early education programme, the Learning and Skills Council and York Family Learning.

In 2004 the National Railway Museum opened the Yorkshire Rail Academy, a new educational institution for rail-related studies for the rail industry and for students in the 16–19 education bracket—and the first rail centre of vocational excellence in Britain. This work is in addition to the well-established Institute of Railway Studies and Transport History, which offers undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the history of transport.

Current projects at York include Creative Minds, which aims to promote science, maths and technology in schools and the Initial Teacher Training project, a research project to investigate the possibilities for museums, libraries and archives to have trainee teachers spending some of their placements at MLAs. Speaking of the MLAs, I commend their council's Renaissance project, which seeks to raise standards at over 40 regional museums, encouraging good practice, reaching new users, particularly among groups that have not traditionally visited museums—40 per cent of new users came from priority audiences in the scheme's first year—and improving and unlocking collections. If I had more time, I should have liked to say more about their good work.

I turn now to social regeneration. Perhaps the best example of that is the opening of Locomotion, at Shildon in September last year. It represents the first ever joint management partnership between a national museum and a local authority. It was mainly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the European Regional Development Fund and the regional development agency, One North East.

What I believe attracted these funding bodies was the prospect that Locomotion would not only appeal to a huge range of visitors, but that it would also add to the north-east's appeal as a tourist destination. Thus, the region's economy would benefit and there would be greater awareness of the north-east's heritage and history. Since its opening, the new museum has welcomed over 130,000 visitors, has won two national awards and has been short listed for four more.

Against that background, the partnership set out to create a new museum with a real sense of community, as well as national and international status. It tapped into a rich local history through oral history recording and worked with schools and adult community arts projects. A community archive project, called Time Tracks, used special computer software at selected public venues to engage local people by recording and sharing personal reminiscence through scanned photographs and documents.

What I like about Locomotion—and this is true of so many new and modernised museums these days—is how it appeals to all members of the family. There are loads of interactive displays, which are both fun and inspirational. The days of dusty old displays in sealed cabinets with large "don't touch" signs are, happily, over.

I do not much care for the word "experience", as applied to museum days out—it seems to be applied to almost every visit anywhere—but it does describe well what parents and children can enjoy at Shildon in terms of special family events, a railway-themed children's playground, picnic areas, shops and a café. As Locomotion is part of the National Railway Museum, admission to it is free. The removal of national museum and gallery admission charges has widened access to a staggering degree. In the last year that the NRM had a full charging policy, 1998–99, 434,566 people visited the museum. Last year—the year up to March this year—the number was 885,366. That is more than twice as many as six years previously. One can imagine all multiplier benefits for the local economy that came from that increase in visitors in terms of shops, cafés, restaurants, and hotels in the region. I hope that my noble friend will be able to confirm that there is no possibility that the Government will abandon the free admissions policy.

Access is part of the third area that I wish to cover, along with heritage. In relation to that, there is a particular project for which I seek my noble friend's support. He will recall that on 9 March, during the later stages of the Railways Bill in the last Parliament, I moved an amendment which sought to require the Secretary of State to come to an agreement with the trustees of the Science Museum to ensure the provision of a place of deposit for records generated within the railway industry.

The amendment was necessary, because while the national archives at Kew house a record of Britain's railways from their inception to the mid-1990s, the records of the industry since railway privatisation have had no place of deposit because they are not public records. I said in that debate that the Railway Heritage Committee strongly supported the setting up of a railway industry national archive and wanted to see it based at the NRM in York. The NRM is keen to oblige and is ready to provide the space necessary as part of a broader project that greatly enhances public access for its existing archive and library collections.

I acknowledge with thanks the support of the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, from whom we shall have the pleasure of hearing later in this debate. He wrote a most helpful letter, which I put on record in Committee on that Bill.

The National Railway Museum is currently seeking funding for a project known as Search Engine to improve the storage of and access to the museum's extensive library, archive and image collections. Funding has already been secured from the Higher Education Funding Council, DCMS and internal fundraising, and the final element of the cost is being requested from the Heritage Lottery Fund to provide the appropriate improvements to public access. Currently, there is a funding gap of some £1.5 million for the development of the repository. I hope that we may obtain from my noble friend more encouragement than he was able to provide on 9 March.

Finally, I shall briefly mention two aspects of railway museum life that your Lordships may find surprising. The first is the Africa initiative. The NRM has helped establish the first railway museum in Sierra Leone, which is that country's second national museum, by giving museum training to young volunteers from Freetown. That is proving to be of huge benefit to a country which is only just recovering from civil war—and is an example of the outreach approach that our museums can offer.

Secondly, there is a commitment to sustainable development. I am pleased that the noble Viscount referred to that, too. One of the guiding principles at the new Locomotion museum has been environmental sustainability. The museum is built on a former brownfield site and is designed to have a reduced impact on the environment through a host of innovative sustainable features such as storage of rainwater for use in locomotive boilers, a wind turbine to provide electricity that pumps water from the underground store, many recycled materials such as rail sleepers and tracks, on-site transport by a green fuel bus, and—I cannot resist this one—provision of a special habitat to encourage the endangered Dingy Skipper butterfly.

I hope that I have succeeded in demonstrating not only the intrinsic value of our museums, but also the fact that museums such as the National Railway Museum and its parent organisation, the National Museums of Science and Industry, succeed brilliantly in spanning the worlds of arts and science, particularly in terms of government interests such as the DTI science and innovation strategy through to regeneration, sustainable transport and overseas initiatives.

It is a record of which they, and we as a nation, can feel justly proud. I hope that makes us all the more determined to ensure that the resources remain available to them to do in future what they already do so well today.

© Lords Hansard 9 June 2005