Museums

Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury) (Con): We in this great nation can be proud indeed of our great museums and galleries, but I am passionate about our small ones, too. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo) on securing the debate, which provides us with an opportunity—which we do not always have in the House—to air such issues.

I am passionate about museums because at an early age I started collecting for my own. I was encouraged to do so from the age of eight, and in the basement of our house in Salisbury close I assembled an extraordinary and wide variety of coins, arrowheads, documents, feathers, artefacts, oil lamps from Ur of the Chaldees, and goodness knows what else. The pleasure for me was in sorting, classifying, labelling and learning, which so many children love doing and which I was particularly privileged to be able to do. I recall being asked on my 10th birthday what I would like to do for a birthday treat: we had a picnic on top of a barrow beside the Roman road from Salisbury to Dorchester. That was all part on my education.

Just up the road from my home was the famous Salisbury and South Wiltshire museum, whose curator, Hugh Short, used to allow me to stand at his knee and observe what he was doing. Later I became a Minister at the Department of National Heritage—rechristened the Department for Culture, Media and Sport—which was responsible for museums and galleries. There, with enthusiasm and joy, I took a particular interest in that area of Government responsibility.

Although my passion is still for what I did as a child, the functions and objectives of museums have changed; now, access and learning, including interactive learning, are far more important. We in Salisbury are fortunate to have not only the Salisbury and South Wiltshire museum, but the Wilton Town museum and Wilton Carpet Factory museum in a restored part of the old factory, which is a fine example of what a small community and a town council can do to bring together the social and economic history of a community. We also have the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire regimental museum. Regimental museums are part of the rich tapestry of museums in this country, but that museum receives no grant from the Government, let alone from the Ministry of Defence—although the MOD helps to pay for the services to the building, because some civil servants share the offices, the museum receives no formal grants. That is one of the museums that will be badly affected, as the right hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) said, by the Treasury's thoroughly mean-spirited decision to withdraw an option that was offered freely in the gift aid improvements introduced in the 2000 Budget.

Salisbury is a centre of excellence for museums and conservation. In addition to the museums I have described, we have the Wiltshire county council conservation service, which is an integral part of the process, and the Wessex Trust for Archaeology, which is commercially self-supporting and is by far the biggest such trust in the country, undertaking an enormous amount of work. I strongly support the campaign started by the National Museum Directors' Conference, which is to launch its project on 9 March with a manifesto for museums.

The funding position of local museums is grave indeed. My local authorities, Wiltshire county council and Salisbury district council, are to increase their council taxes by about 6 per cent., but they are to cut their grants to museums. I regret that very much, although it is their decision to make, not mine. They are being forced to make severe expenditure cuts, but I hope that next year they will take a political lead and not be driven by management objectives. I hope that the district council will decide that local education, the local economy and the cultural scene are worth a little more than £3.03 per head, or 2.95 per cent. of its budget. The county council is to cut its budget by 5 per cent. this year.

It is not as though my district council is unaware of its responsibilities to our cultural heritage. It is true, but perhaps surprising, that Salisbury district council does not have a legal remit to look after the heritage of Salisbury. However, I well recall the arguments that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea and I had to listen to when we were both Ministers at the Department of the Environment, with responsibility for local government finance. This year, Salisbury district council's expenditure on legal costs as the planning authority for the Stonehenge A303 T improvement scheme—the famous tunnel past Stonehenge—will run to more than £100,000, and it has forked out £100,000 for a totally pointless local government comprehensive performance assessment. A small district council has to spend some £200,000-plus on those responsibilities, which were imposed by central Government, yet its budget for arts and museums for the whole district is only £348,000. Something is out of kilter; the sums simply do not add up.

The right hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury referred to the announcement of the proposed changes to gift aid. The provision is not a loophole: museums were approached by the Inland Revenue and asked whether they were aware that they could use it, and they did so. Its withdrawal will probably reduce the revenue of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire museum by about £4,000—a dire impact. When the cuts from the county council, the district council and gift aid are taken together, they represent the equivalent of the salary of one person per year at that museum. I hope that the Minister will talk to the Treasury seriously about that problem.

Let me briefly mention an issue connected with my role as Chairman of the Select Committee on Information. Parliament established the British Museum, and there has been a development that the House might like to know about. Almost all the House of Commons Library's holdings were acquired after the 1834 fire in the Palace of Westminster, in which most of the stock was lost. During the second half of the 19th century, the spacious shelves of Barry's Library had to be filled, and the Library Committee and successive librarians sought to create something like a country house library while maintaining the essential collection of parliamentary and other official documentation. As part of that process, the Library acquired, through a mixture of purchases, gifts and legacies, a wide range and collection of books, including some that are now of considerable antiquarian or scholarly interest. In the early 1990s, the Library recognised that many pre-20th-century holdings were not relevant to the everyday needs of modern parliamentarians, and looked for a way to make them available to a wider public.

In 1992, the British Library put the Library in touch with Nicholas Barker, a well known antiquarian book specialist. Coincidentally, he had been asked to find suitable books for the King's Library at the British Museum, which was built in the 1820s to house George III's personal collection, which formed the core of what became the British Library. It was due to be vacated with the move of the British Library to St. Pancras, and British Museum officials were already thinking about how the magnificent, 100-yd long room—the finest and largest Greek revival interior in London—might best be used. After a comprehensive review of the Library's older holdings and prolonged negotiations, the House of Commons Commission approved an agreement in 1999 whereby approximately 16,000 books would be sent on permanent loan to the Enlightenment gallery that was, by then, being planned by the British Museum for the restored King's Library.

That agreement marked a renewal of Parliament's long-standing connection with the British Museum that dates back to the museum's 18th-century origins. When the physician, naturalist and collector Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his personal collection to George II for the nation, the King did not show much interest—but Parliament did. Led by Speaker Arthur Onslow, Parliament was persuaded to accept the gift, and an Act of Parliament establishing the British Museum and its trustees—the first time that trustees had ever featured as a way of administering an institution like a museum—received Royal Assent on 7 June 1753. In 1757, King George II donated the old royal library of the sovereigns of England to the museum, and with it the privilege of copyright receipt that was part of the foundation of what is now the British Library.

George IV's gift to the nation of his father's library—the original King's Library—in 1823, provided the catalyst for the construction of what is now the Enlightenment gallery, as well as for the rest of Robert Smirk's quadrangular building. The books were finally moved from the Library in June 2003, when the restoration of the King's Library was completed. There is a wide-ranging selection, including many treasures, such as the complete Blaeu atlas in its original 17th century binding in good condition, and Lord Kingsborough's "Antiquities of Mexico", which unfortunately was rebound in the 1950s but whose original pages are in near-mint condition. The Library has kept any books with parliamentary connections that hon. Members might need at Westminster as part of its normal service, and all the books that have been moved remain in the Library catalogue and can be used at Westminster if required. They also appear in the British Museum's central library catalogue and are available for last resort public use in the museum under supervision. That is a great gain, as there are no facilities for public access in the Library.

That has involved a great deal of work, but the outcome has been satisfactory. The books are in magnificent surroundings and I encourage hon. Members to visit them. Not only do they form an important element of the British Museum's new Enlightenment gallery, but they look extremely handsome in their new surroundings—far happier than they were in the Library's underground store, where most of them had previously been kept. I am grateful for having had the time to put on the record my appreciation for the work that the Library staff have put into that dramatic project, which restates Parliament's long-standing relationship with the world of museums and galleries.