Ooooh, no Missus, tax them over there and give me the money
Taxing - charging - foreigners who go to British museums would be a terrible idea, says someone who runs a British museum. Instead, tax - charge - foreigners for even coming to Britain and then give me the money. A much better idea!
And, well, yes.
Twenty-five years ago, the UK made the bold and generous gesture of making its national museums free to all. Suddenly, anyone from anywhere in the world could gaze at iconic works of art by the greatest artists in history without having to pay a penny. Many incredible artworks were suddenly accessible to everyone: Hepworth, Turner and Hockney at Tate Britain, and Bonnard, Picasso and Bourgeois at Tate Modern (which had both always been free) were now joined by Raphael at the V&A and Kapoor at the Walker Art Gallery, dramatic seascapes at the National Maritime Museum and bustling cityscapes at the Museum of London. And maybe afterwards they would reward the gallery by buying a slice of cake in the cafe or a print of their favourite work in the gift shop.
In the years that followed, this policy proved to be a huge success. It led to a dramatic and sustained increase in audiences. Within the first decade, visits to museums which used to charge rose by 151% – the uplift was 180% at the Natural History Museum and V&A, and 269% at National Museums Liverpool. Is now really the moment to reverse direction by charging international tourists to access our museums and galleries, as ministers are proposing?
Maybe and maybe not. But those arguments about buying slices of cake or a little frippery apply to people entering the country at all too. So any argument against charging for entry to museums would also apply to charging for entering the country. Rather more in fact, as there are those who - there really are the uncultured among Johnny Foreigner after all - might consider visiting Britain without then also visiting a museum.
But despite that obvious logic the proposed solution is:
Why inflict that damage when there is already an alternative on the table? A modest hotel levy – as implemented successfully in Paris, Berlin, New York, Venice, Barcelona and more – could raise around £1bn. If that income were ringfenced for UK museums, it could have a transformative impact on our cultural offer across the country, allowing the doors to our museums to stay open and free to all for generations to come.
Tax them over there and give me the money. Our word, isn’t that a surprising attitude toward taxation and the exercise of state power? We can also imagine a number of inventively Anglo Saxon responses to such effrontery.
There is a useful solution all the same:
Yes, we need to explore new ways of raising money for our cultural institutions and I do appreciate the government looking into various options. For some museums, charging tourists might help, but for a lot of us, it is not the right solution. We have worked through the impact it would have for Tate, and the numbers don’t add up: the lost income from exhibition tickets, shops and cafes would outweigh any gains from charging admission.
So people face those marginal revenue decisions that so bedevil markets. Yes, we know, marginal anything is terribly unfashionable these days as the shouting about gas and electricity markets shows. But this is how the universe actually works. For some charging J Foreign will increase revenues. They should therefore do so if greater revenue is the thing to be aimed for. For others it won’t - expanding the cake shop will be revenue maximising so cake shop expansion it is. Allow the management of each museum to crank through to what they think the correct answer is and then implement it. Some will get it wrong - of course, humans are fallible. But vastly better that we have such mistakes being made piecemeal than the error be imposed upon the entire nation and therefore rather harder to reverse.
We do not find this to be complex logic.
Tim Worstall