The Scottish Museums Council welcomes the ministerial statement on the future delivery of Culture in Scotland presented by Patricia Ferguson, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport.
We welcome the endorsement of the “arms length” approach and look forward to working with Creative Scotland and the Scottish Executive to achieve the vision set out in the report.
The Scottish Museums Council is recognised in the report as “the channel for the Executive’s support for the non-national museums sector”. As the channel for Executive funding to museums and galleries throughout Scotland we welcome the additional new funding of £500,000 towards the development of the Significance Scheme, and the broadening out of the definition of “national” to embrace collections throughout the country. We spent a long time in consultation with our member museums throughout Scotland working up this scheme and in turn would like to thank them for making this possible. The recognition of collections of “national significance” held by Scotland’s non-national museums, including the Industrial museums, and the opportunity for new national funding to support such museums is a big step forward.
The announcement of the expansion to the list of “National Collections” organisations is also much welcomed by SMC. In step with this evolution SMC announced a new “National Collections” membership at its AGM in November 2005, which received the full backing of our non-national museum members. This new category will help cement relationships and unify the sector. We look forward to working even more closely with the National Museums of Scotland, the National Galleries of Scotland and other National Collections organisations to both strengthen and align future remits.
SMC has a pivotal role to play in the future development of the museums and galleries sector in Scotland, SMC therefore embraces the opportunities that this new framework will provide and look forward to working with our membership, the Scottish Executive, the National Collections and Creative Scotland to take up the challenges set out in ‘Scotland’s Culture’.
