Ministers should be more openly grateful to donors for large gifts to UK arts institutions, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum has said, as he urged Rachel Reeves to do more to bring generous non-doms back.
Sir Tristram Hunt told the FT that a flight of London’s wealthiest after tax changes in the 2024 Budget was “definitely a challenge” for fundraising and that spending pressures meant “being welcoming to . . . philanthropically minded individuals”.
“We need to shift the conversation to one of gratitude, thanks and admiration for those who are giving money they have made and managed,” said Hunt, citing two “game-changing” £150mn donations to the National Gallery last year.
Downing Street and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) “could have been out slightly quicker and more effusive”, he added of the gifts from the charitable foundation of Silicon Valley investor Sir Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, and the Julia Rausing Trust. “They got there in the end but it’s something [they] should be all over.”
Hunt, who quit as a Labour MP in 2017 to run the design-focused V&A, said the chancellor’s decision to cap an unlimited inheritance tax charge in the November Budget had “shifted” some concerns among non-doms.
But with the public finances strained and arts organisations under pressure to generate more of their income, he warned that there was “more work to be done” by Reeves to persuade people who were “committed to London [against] thinking of [giving] elsewhere”.
Asked about vetting of gifts amid recent disputes over private sponsorship of the arts, Hunt said: “Everyone is interested in provenance . . . But I do think people also realise that if you’re going to look after a collection of 2.8mn objects and not be overdependent on the state . . . you are going to have to have donations.”
Hailing the return of European tourists in the wake of Brexit, Hunt predicted visitor numbers of 3.4mn at the V&A’s main site in south Kensington in the year to March 2026, in line with the previous 12 months.
Operating income at the V&A, founded as the Museum of Manufactures in 1852, was £102mn in 2024-25, compared with £110mn the year before.
Just under half of that sum came from DCMS, with other income generated by the museum through exhibitions and from sales in its shops and cafés. Fundraising brought in a total of £30.2mn, up from £21.1mn in 2023-24.
Hunt, a member of the government’s Soft Power Council, welcomed culture secretary Lisa Nandy’s announcement on Wednesday of a £1.5bn boost for arts organisations, which the DCMS said would “open up access to culture for everyone, everywhere”.
The package earmarked £600mn for capital projects at the “national museums” — which include the Tate, the V&A, the National Gallery and the British Museum — and £160mn for local and regional museums during the current parliament.
But he said London, which was “unbelievably good at putting on special exhibitions”, was at risk of being eclipsed as a creative hub by Berlin and New York without more money for upkeep of gallery spaces for permanent collections.
Ministers also needed to ensure long-term access to “wonderful historic collections in Birmingham, Leicester and Bristol” that were lent objects by the national museums but depended on cash-strapped councils for funding, Hunt added.
The government last year said it would allow local mayors to impose a “tourist tax” on overnight stays in England. The measure, now out for consultation, has long been backed by the arts sector and would mimic charges in cities such as Paris and Berlin.
Some hospitality executives have criticised the proposed levy, which would raise more than £1bn a year if set at 3 per cent of the average room rate, according to research by the Cultural Policy Unit, a think-tank.
But Hunt said foreign visitors would “take it in their stride” and called for the bulk of revenues in the capital to be ringfenced for the cultural sector, and for half to go to “free admission” institutions such as the V&A.
London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan “always says, quite rightly, that four out of five visitors to London come for the culture . . . [so] it seems to me that 80 per cent of the hotel levy should be going to culture”, he said.
Hunt added: “Free entry will be under extreme pressure in the next decade without 50 per cent. There are people in the Treasury who are very keen to see it end . . . But [without it] that wonderful civic ability to come in here, see Trajan’s Column and the Raphael Cartoons and walk out again will be lost.”
Despite helping with conservation work on the medieval artefact, the V&A lost out to the British Museum as host of the Bayeux Tapestry in what is set to be a blockbuster show this year.
Asked about the deal between the UK and France, Hunt said the 70-metre fabric depiction of the Norman Conquest was the “special subject” of George Osborne, chair of the British Museum and former Conservative chancellor. “The BM are going to do a great job and it’s wonderful it’s coming,” he added.
The past 12 months have been busy for the V&A’s roughly 1,100-strong team, which handles objects ranging from premodern ceramics to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and 20th-century couture across sites in London, Stoke-on-Trent and Dundee.
Its latest venue, V&A East Storehouse, opened in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford last May and allows visitors to get closer to the collection via an “order an object” service and to explore pop star David Bowie’s archive. V&A East Museum, a sixth site, will open nearby in April.
Hunt, who was knighted in the new year honours, defended launching new spaces in London after a push by Tory and Labour ministers to move more jobs and investment in arts and the creative industries outside the capital.
Storehouse was drawing audiences “who are not coming to south Kensington” and enabling young people to engage with culture “in a manner that is more navigable and familiar”, he said.
“You can have both in a museum: the authoritative voice, built upon expertise and curatorial skill, as well as the element of personal agency . . . a kind of Amazon for artefacts.”