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Arts Council England welcomes the publication of the Mendoza Review by DCMS. We have been providing detailed support to Neil Mendoza and his research team since it was announced in the Culture White Paper (Spring 2016) and thank him for the care with which he has conducted his work.

Our focus as the national development agency for museums has been to provide the Review with access to as much evidence as possible relating to the full range of extraordinary museums that we have in this country and to ensure that differences in size, governance, location and collection type were taken into account during the deliberations of the Review team.

We support the recommendations of the Mendoza Review, particularly in seeking better alignment of investment in museums, and we will continue to work collaboratively with DCMS, Hertiage Lottery Fund (HLF), national museums and the whole museum sector in taking the recommendations forward. We will immediately start work with DCMS and HLF on developing a Museums Action Plan.

We will also put in place an memorandum of understanding with HLF in order to improve clarity for the museums sector on how the two organisations will work together to implement the recommendations of the Review.

The Arts Council has announced significantly increased investment in museums from 1 April 2018. 57 museum NPOs, nine Museum Development Providers and six Sector Support Organisations are joining our National Portfolio for the first time, including collections from dinosaurs to tanks, horse racing to LGBT history, the Pre Raphaelites to insects.  

Over the period 2018 – 2022 we will invest £36.6million per annum in museums which is nine per cent of the total National Portfolio spend. 91% of this funding is outside of London. In addition we have also committed to open up from 1 April 2018 our redesigned Grants for the Arts funding programme to museums, enabling hundreds more museums to apply for Arts Council support for a wide range of projects. 

We also believe that there are significant opportunities for closer working between museums and arts organisations and we will be using our advocacy, development and investment functions going forward to encourage closer collaborative working across the entire arts and cultural footprint.

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