Background to the report

The Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) sponsors and directly funds 15 museums and galleries in England. Between 2019 and 2024, the museums and galleries included seven of the top 10 most visited free visitor attractions in England.

Jump to downloads

The museums and galleries are nationally and internationally significant, contributing to the UK’s influence overseas, through international loans from their collections, touring and promoting exhibitions internationally, and research projects.

DCMS gave grant-in-aid of £484 million to these bodies in 2024-25. They also receive funding from other government sources, such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund and tax reliefs, and raise their own income from, for example, commercial activities and fundraising. In 2024-25, they employed over 6,800 permanent staff, received 42 million visitors, and had a total net asset value of almost £9 billion.

Scope of the report

This report reviews how well the 15 DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries and DCMS have managed museums and galleries’ financial challenges after DCMS started to end its extra COVID-19 pandemic funding from its peak in 2021-22.

We have made recommendations for DCMS to support improvements in its oversight of the sector, and recommendations for museums and galleries on how they manage future financial challenges. We have also identified good practice from museums and galleries’ approaches that may be useful to other museums and galleries and other sectors.

The report covers:

  • the finances of the 15 DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries since the pandemic
  • the responses of the museums and galleries to the financial challenges faced since the pandemic
  • DCMS’s oversight of museums and galleries’ financial resilience and achievement of objectives

Video summary

Simon Bittlestone, the report’s director, summarises our findings.

Conclusions

DCMS and the museums and galleries have worked in partnership to oversee museums and galleries’ continued operations as government funding reduced from the exceptional amounts provided during the pandemic. This has required DCMS to provide additional funding to some museums and galleries that it identified faced the greatest financial risks.

Museums and galleries have managed increasing costs and found ways to increase self-generated income through a range of innovative and commercially minded strategies, despite lower overall visitor numbers than before the pandemic.

Museums and galleries are now more reliant on self-generated sources of income that are vulnerable to wider economic factors, and they are using cost-containment measures that can only go so far before they risk the achievement of objectives. Museums and galleries will need to navigate these challenges through good financial management and planning, with DCMS having overarching responsibility for ensuring whether they can care for and provide free access to their collections.

Therefore, DCMS must ensure that it has structures in place to identify early warning signs, should museums and galleries start struggling to manage their financial risks, so it can intervene early – potentially before additional funding is required.

Its work to address gaps in its oversight and monitoring of museums and galleries’ financial resilience is therefore important to ensuring it can fulfil its oversight role most effectively. It also has an opportunity to do more in its convening role to support museums and galleries in dealing with common challenges, such as the threat from cyber-attacks.

Downloads

Publication details

Press release

View press release (9 Mar 2026)

Related work