British Museum cash crisis forces gallery closures and redundancies

The British Museum is facing a growing financial crisis that will see an unprecedented programme of compulsory redundancies and gallery closures as it struggles with a £6.5m black hole in its accounts.

Staff fear that irreversible damage will be done to the scholarship and treasures of one of the greatest cultural institutions in the world.

A third of the 76 rooms at the museum in London are already being closed part-time, and managers are considering the permanent closure of some galleries to all but selected scholars or escorted groups paying a fee. This would make a mockery of the museum management's long-running support for free admission to ensure the widest public access to its collection.

The museum's purchasing budget is to be cut by 80 per cent to £100,000 a year, a sum that would buy only the tiniest items in today's art market. Only a decade or so ago, it had £1.4m to spend on acquisitions each year.

Compulsory redundancies are now expected alongside recruitment restrictions, normal staff turnover and voluntary redundancies.

The museum first warned it would have to make cuts in January after a surprise drop in visitor numbers last year from 5.6 million to 4.6 million compounded problems caused by a decade of declining government grants.

However, its own assessment now suggests the deficit could be as high as £6.5m by 2004-05, instead of the £5m originally assumed. The latest estimates predict a deficit of £3.4m for this financial year, worse than the earlier estimate of £3m.

Curators from all 10 of the departments handling the collections will be included in an extensive redundancy programme, dealing a serious blow to the museum's scholarship.

Terry Adams, of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said the Government should face its responsibilities. He said: "A fraction of the money thrown away on the Dome would keep the British Museum going into the next millennium. The future of institutions like the British Museum has come to depend on how many cups of coffee they sell."