Our museums are struggling to scrape by – but is charging admission really the answer? Eliot Wilson weighs up the arguments

Neil MacGregor celebrated his 80th birthday this week. The Glasgow-born art historian, considered by Sir Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute the most brilliant pupil he ever taught, has exercised an enormous influence on Britain’s cultural sector. He was director of the National Gallery from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015.

When he took over the British Museum, founded in 1753 from a bequest of Sir Hans Sloane, it had a deficit of £5m. MacGregor transformed its finances, its visitor numbers and its place on the international stage, as well as proving an adept media performer and brilliant ambassador for the institution. In his last year at the helm, the British Museum had an overall income of £118m and spent £104.6m. And he achieved that without any revenue from admission charges.

The UK’s 14 national museums made admission to their permanent collections free to all in December 2001, including the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Galleries and the Victoria and Albert.

It had been “a bit of a personal crusade” for Lord Smith of Finsbury, who had been Culture, Media and Sport secretary until June that year and declared it “very good news indeed”.

Could foreign visitors pay to keep museums free for Londoners?

We may be at the end of that era. Following the publication of an independent review of Arts Council England by Baroness Hodge of Barking, former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the government admitted in March it is considering a levy on foreign visitors to the national museums to generate revenue.

Read more: The Debate: Should the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles to Greece?

A hotel levy is also on the table. It was also rumoured that HM Treasury had sought to abolish free admission in the November 2025 Budget but had been forced to reconsider by fierce resistance from ministers at DCMS.

The government and we as a society need to examine the basis of funding for museums and galleries, and its purpose. Some have argued that it is a nonsense to prevent institutions from deriving revenue from the most obvious and direct source, their visitors.

Certainly we are the outliers. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art charges $30, the Louvre in Paris €32 for non-EEA citizens and €22 for EEA citizens, Madrid’s Prado Museum €15 and the Royal Ontario Museum C$30. That in itself is not a clinching argument but it is a consideration.

In The Times in March, Oliver Kamm described free admission as having a “benevolent” aim – widening access to culture – but an irrational method.
“Tickets for the London Symphony Orchestra or the Royal Shakespeare Company aren’t free, and if you want the best seats you will pay more.”

True enough; but the RSC is facing its own funding crisis and has been heavily reliant for the last 15 years on the income from Matilda the Musical, not one of the Bard of Avon’s better known works. In April, its artistic director, Daniel Evans, warned that “the frequent theatre-goer – the person for whom theatre is a life habit rather than an occasional destination – is becoming rarer”. So it does not provide all the answers.

Read more: Make foreign tourists pay to keep museums free for Londoners

Kamm noted that “suppressing the price mechanism doesn’t mean a product or service becomes free: it means someone else pays”. That is true of schooling, healthcare and bus passes. We are talking about making something free at the point of use.

In public policy, there are two ways to achieve something: pay for it through public expenditure, or persuade or compel someone to pay for it on a different basis. In the case of museums and galleries, that could be through museum entry fees, corporate sponsorship or charitable donations. The fundamental questions are: what do we want, how much are we prepared to pay for it, and how?

I am certain that more people going to museums and galleries is an unquestioned good, individually and societally. Free admission achieved that: the national museums went from 28.5m visitors in 2001 to 170m before the pandemic. It is hardly surprising. It also does not seem unreasonable to suggest that reintroducing admission charges will cause visitor numbers to fall, perhaps dramatically.

I don’t have a straightforward answer. Invocation of the word “subsidy” like a taboo does not dissuade me: some forms of culture will have to be subsidised because they will never be commercially sustainable. But I don’t doubt that exposing people to culture makes us a better society in ways which do not yield to cold metrics.

We should reflect on MacGregor’s tenure at the British Museum. In the absence of admission charges, visitor numbers rose from 4.4m in 2002 to 6.8m in 2015 when he stepped down. The museum was also financially sustainable, its reputation was immense and it attracted substantial investment through donations.

Britain’s museums and galleries are among the best in the world, with astounding collections tracing humanity’s journey and forms of expression. At a time when we are anxious about our national identity, a common set of values and the integration of incomers, it seems hasty to marginalise the cultural sector.

Our collections, with their sweep of history, tell us a great deal about who we are: the copies of Magna Carta in the British Library; the Wilton Diptych of Richard II; the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I; Thomason’s collection of tracts by the Levellers, Diggers and other radical groups; Hayter’s depiction of the first reformed House of Commons in 1833; the Museum of London’s suffragette banners; Karsh’s portrait photograph of Churchill. These objects need to be seen.

In 1953, the future French premier Pierre Mendès France warned the National Assembly of a basic but uncomfortable truth of politics. “Gouverner, c’est choisir, si difficiles que soient les choix.” To govern is to choose, however difficult the choices are.

It is no less true of arts funding than anything else. If creating a more stable financial settlement causes access to reduce and visitor numbers to fall, we have missed the point. We will need to be more creative.

Eliot is a senior fellow for National Security, Coalition for Global Prosperity; contributing editor, Defence on the Brink.