| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Proposed closure of Wandsworth Museum | |
| Posted by: | Valerie Bott | |
| Date/Time: | 07/02/07 15:25:00 |
| At last night's meetimg, Neil Robson was a star - measured, thoughtful and coping with questions with considerable charm. And the museum staff responded to questions from the councillors with real commitment, revealing the quality of their work in the community. In the end the decision was based upon inadequate and inaccurate information and, as Grimston acknowledged, was being made for political reasons (to cut the overall budget with comparative ease)not for service/community related reasons. I was shocked by the sheer stupidity and complacency of the councillors from the ruling party and surprised and pleased by the efforts of the opposition to find a cross party compromise, but it was to no avail. The idea of a trust was raised in Neil Robson's presentation and also by Cedric in the message above. A small number of Museum trusts have been successful in taking over a museum or gallery from a local authority - the best are in Sheffield (2 of them) and York, where the combination of an agreement with the local council to continue its existing level of funding and a change of culture in the new organisation enabling more effective applications for external funds and improved sponsorship oopportunities have meant that all are flourishing. However, Hounslow's CIP has been an unmitigated disaster for the borough's cultural heritage (I live there and spend a lot of my spare time propping bits of it up). It has had a series of hopeless CEOs, has no culture of expansion and no vision for the future - everything is stagnating. Furthermore, CIP is utterly proud of the savings it has made (it is on the website) but these lie mainly in no longer having to pay 100% business rates and accepting council cuts year on year. Parks are maintained minimally, historic buildings are falling apart, and no-one can attend the meetings of the network of companies that run it so there is no public accountability as there is with a council. All vacant posts are currently frozen (including the museum curator, vacant since Christmas 2005 and two archives posts which have become vacant since Christmas 2006) and 100 redundancies are being announced to horrified staff across CIP this week. A new trust would only work if core funding was provided by Wandsworth, close to the present level of funding, for long enough to enable successful bids for funds from elsewhere to be found. Of course, if Wandsworth Council had wanted the Museum to continue in a different form, to save some of its costs or to relocate, all of this could have been investigated and a sustainable way forward found. But the councillors (and apparently the Director of the department) actively want to close the Museum and reduce the local studies service - and are prepared to lie about how good it will be with minimal resources and only two staff. Now all we need them to do is to decide they do not want the archives and local studies library collections and they'll have destroyed the lot. |