UK national museums are set to receive a 5% funding boost and regional museums at risk of closure will get financial support as part of a new £270m funding package announced today by the UK government. Aimed at supporting “financial resilience” and keeping arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage buildings across England “up and running”, the Arts Everywhere Fund will benefit organisations in “urgent need of financial support”.
The announcement follows calls from across the culture sector for more money and a clearer vision from the recently elected Labour government.
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told BBC Breakfast that the new package will “shore up our local museums” via “practical help”. She went on to criticise the previous Conservative government’s austerity policies, which she said “erased our heritage, history and culture”.
Between 2010 and 2023, grant-in-aid funding for UK arts and cultural organisations fell by 18%, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). A DCMS spokesperson confirmed that this latest round of funding is new for 2025/26, but clarified that “some of it is going towards brand new programmes, and some of it is continued investment for programmes that have had previous rounds”.
Nandy will formally announce the new measures later today in a speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, marking 60 years since the publication of the first arts-focused government white paper, which promised “arts for everyone, everywhere”.
Which organisations will receive funding?
National museums such as the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum will receive a 5% increase in their annual grants, which amounts to more than £15m extra, according to the BBC. Meanwhile a new £85 million Creative Foundations Fund will support urgent capital works to keep venues across the country “up and running”.
Arts education will also receive a boost, with £3.2m in funding earmarked for four cultural education programmes across the next financial year. The Museums and Schools Programme, the Heritage Schools Programme, the Art & Design National Saturday Club and the BFI Film Academy will receive support to preserve increased access to arts for children and young people.
Alison Cole, the former editor of The Art Newspaper and director of the new independent think tank, the Cultural Policy Unit, said: “The highlighting of cultural education and access, with funding for children’s and young people’s programmes, is very welcome as a prelude to what we hope will be a decisive move to embed arts and creativity in a reformed school curriculum.
“This is one of the best routes to nurturing and ‘growing’ our children, in terms of both quality of life and the amazing contributions they can make.”
Other new initiatives announced today include a £20m Museum Renewal Fund to “help keep cherished civic museums open and engaging”, says the DCMS. Jenny Waldman, the director of the charity Art Fund, described this as “a welcome response to the severe financial pressures museums are facing, particularly those reliant on local authority funding”.
Another new strand is the £4.85m Heritage Revival Fund, which is designed to enable community organisations to own and restore neglected heritage buildings. Meanwhile, the fifth round of the Museum Estate and Development Fund will provide £25m for local museums across the UK which need to upgrade their buildings, including Hartlepool Art Gallery and The Lightbox in Woking, Surrey.
Enough to change minds?
Paula Orrell, the national director of Contemporary Visual Arts Network England (CVAN), told The Art Newspaper that while the organisation welcomes today’s announcement, “greater cross-investment in artists and the broader infrastructure is essential”.
"Galleries and the broader visual arts ecosystem have been integral to the history and development of museums,” she continued. “Without grassroots artist led initiatives, studios and regional galleries, we risk undermining the very foundations of our internationally renowned cultural sector.”
Nandy’s intervention comes in the wake of a blistering takedown of Labour’s position on arts and culture by The Guardian’s chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins. On 1 February, Higgins wrote: “All I hear is disappointment and desperation… There is a void where policy and action should be.”
She continued: “The problem is that all kinds of bits of this at the moment are not working…in the state education sector, a longstanding obsession with Stem subjects has elbowed out music and art, and endless cuts have depleted extracurricular music and theatre.”
Earlier this week the UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government announced that ten culture venues across the UK will receive a total of £67m. These include the National Railway Museum in York and Temple Works, a Victorian mill in Leeds, which is due to be turned into a northern outpost of the British Library.
