Recommendation 8

In most years, when calculating the grant-in-aid for the museums and galleries for the coming year, the Department applied an equal percentage uplift to their existing baseline allocations to allow for inflation, and subsequently used year-end top-ups to help those it discovered to be in financial trouble. It took a more considered approach when calculating the initial allocations for 2025–26, reviewing measures of museums’ and galleries’ circumstances, such as recent financial performance, and gave higher increases to the museums and galleries most in need. The Department told us it now deems the financial resilience of the museums and galleries to be a lower risk than it had been previously although it would probably still rate it as “yellow flashing”.19 For 2026–27, the Department has reverted to its previous approach of uplifting the previous year’s allocations by an equal percentage to allow for inflation.20