Museum may charge unless funding rises

The head of the Natural History Museum warned yesterday that it would reintroduce admission charges if the Government failed to increase its funding. Neil Chalmers, the museum's director, said it would have no choice but to reinstate entry fees if it was not fully compensated by the Government for the loss of income.

Such a move would be a bitter blow to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's policy of free admission to all to the so-called national museums and galleries, which include the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The policy came into effect on 1 December last year after it was accepted by the museums' trustees.

The Natural History Museum, like others that used to charge, was compensated with extra revenue grants from the Department for Culture when it agreed to scrap admission fees. Calculations were based on an estimated 20 per cent increase in visitor numbers on the 1.7 million visitors before last December. But this under-estimated the number of visitors and attendance may now top 2.5 million for 2002-2003.

The need for more staff to ensure safety of visitors and exhibits had added £500,000 a year to budgets which the Government has been asked to fund, the museum said.

The museum has also asked for a 6 per cent increase to its grant-in-aid – the Government grant towards revenue costs – to address a real decrease of 27 per cent in the past 10 years.

Such a figure looks unlikely to be met, if the figures awarded to the larger national museums and galleries in Tuesday's spending announcement are used as a guideline.

But a submission to the Culture Select Committee yesterday made clear that it was the care and management of its collection of 70 million objects that was the trustees' main responsibility. "If grant-in-aid is eroded, the Natural History Museum will introduce admission charges," it said.

Neil MacGregor, who took over the British Museum in August, also gave evidence to MPs and told them it could not do its job properly on current funding.

Part of the reason why the British Museum was facing a potential deficit of £6m was because it had always refused to charge, he said. This had cost it an estimated £80m in lost income and reclaimed VAT in the past decade because of different tax rules for charging and non-charging museums.