Should UK museums charge international tourists?

A recent review has suggested charging international tourists to save Britain’s struggling museums. We hear the case for and against in this week’s Debate

YES: Free museum entry for all is great until you can’t keep the lights on

My business, Let Me Show You London, hosts thousands of visitors at London’s museums and galleries every year. So why would I want them to pay more? Because the free entry model isn’t working; the National Gallery is predicting an £8.2m deficit in 2026. 

Britain’s free entry for all is the outlier. Both the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York charge non-residents. The concept of visitors paying to access museums and fund their upkeep is widely accepted.

The idea of free entry for all is great until you can’t keep the lights on. Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, supports a visitor levy. The painful truth is that the funding from the grant-in-aid has not kept pace with the costs museums face. I would rather we adopt a practice already accepted elsewhere than see these institutions decline. 

My wife and business partner is from the Czech Republic; she’s lived in the UK for 15 years, pays tax and runs a successful business here. But how would she prove she’s not an international tourist? What about a British expat visiting from Sydney, or a French citizen studying at UCL. Between the need to keep queues moving and our obsession with not upsetting anyone, trying to prove someone’s requirement to pay on entry is nigh on impossible.

The answer is a modest tourist tax, collected at booking, ringfenced for the sector, with transparent accounting and signposted at every improvement it pays for. Paris and Amsterdam already do this. Combining a tourist tax with existing funding, we can keep free entry, and these institutions can keep the lights on.

Mark Brown is the co-founder of LetMeShowYouLondon.com

NO: Shouldn’t tourists have the right to see their own things free of charge?

Free access to our national museums and galleries has been a huge success, implemented by a Labour Government 25 years ago this year. Charging overseas visitors seems like an attractive idea for a cash-strapped Treasury, but it’s flawed.

The UK is one of most taxed visitor destinations in the world with VAT at 20 per cent, costly Air Passenger Duty, a proposed overnight visitor levy or bed tax and, crucially, no tax-free shopping for overseas visitors. One of the things that make us a must visit destination, despite all these disincentives, is free access to our national museums and galleries; if we charge for them, we will lose even more visitors and our competitiveness.

Some of the artefacts and collections in our museums and galleries have been funded, bought or lent specifically on the promise that the museums should not charge to see them. But more importantly, when you limit access to culture to only those who can afford it, whether from here or abroad, everyone loses. 

Access to culture is a right, not a privilege. And shouldn’t the people of the world have the right to see their own things free of charge? 

Our collections are of global significance and come from around the globe. There are good economic and logistical reasons not to charge to see them (will we require you to bring a passport when you visit a gallery?). But there are really strong moral ones too. Our cultural assets are a gift to the world.

Bernard Donoghue OBE is the director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions 

THE VERDICT

That the arts sector is struggling is a tale as old as time. So efforts to turn it around – as outlined in an independent review of Arts Council England – are welcome. However, some of the report’s recommendations have rightly proven controversial, not least the suggestion to start charging international tourists to access permanent museum collections. While charging anyone-who-isn’t-us is a naturally tempting lever to pull on, it’s ultimately misguided, not to mention impractical.

As both our debaters acknowedge, such a policy would come with big logistical issues and indeed even Labour peer Margaret Hodge, who authored the review, has since clarified that the proposal would be contingent on the introduction of a universal ID card system, which is quite the caveat. Moreover, that our national museums are free is one of the most wonderful things about London and, as Mr Donoghue raises, a key reason why we are lent many artefacts anyway. And that’s before we even get to the can of worms of charging the Greeks to see the Elgin Marbles…