One of the UK Museum sector's most influential voices discusses business models, the DCMS funding announcement and the Hodge report
Tony Butler OBE is Executive Director of Derby Museums and a leading figure in the UK museums sector. In this wide-ranging interview he shares valuable insights on the topics such as:
A useful and enlightening listen for anyone involved in the sector, particularly those looking to balance purpose and community-delivery with the ever-changing financial context.
TOM DAWSON
Hello and welcome to the arts and culture podcast from the Association for cultural enterprises, the podcast for the cultural sector. I'm Tom Dawson, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Tony Butler OBE, Executive Director of Derby museums, and an influential voice in the UK museum sector. We have a wide ranging and timely conversation about where civic museums are heading next. We talk about current business models, the recent DCMS announcement of one and a half billion pounds for the arts, and how long term planning compares with short term sticking plasters. We also touch on the hard report into Arts Council England and what it could signal for the future of the sector. It's a thoughtful, practical and forward looking discussion about leadership funding and how museums can continue to serve their communities in changing times.
Just don't talk to him about getting on a horse. Let's get started.
TOM DAWSON
I wondered if you could just tell us a bit about yourself. What makes up a museum director like yourself. So what I like to ask people to tell me two truths and a lie about yourself, and I will try and guess the lie Tony,
TONY BUTLER
Okay, I learned to ride a horse in my late 30s. I once enjoyed a very good afternoon with Billy Bragg and bought him a jack of potato with prawns. And I used to play football with a World Cup winner.
TOM DAWSON
My mind immediately goes to why Billy Bragg might want prawns with his jacket potato. But I mean that every man to himself, you know, I'm going to suggest maybe you would really like to have played football with the World Cup winner, so I'm going to guess that's the lie.
TONY BUTLER
That's the truth. I grew up in Portsmouth. Alan Ball was the manager of Portsmouth at the time. He would lead training for youth players in the All Weather pitch that my school used to use. So occasionally after school, he'd come and have a kick about. He was still running around, just as active as he was when he won the World Cup for England in 1966 so which one is not true? The horse. I wouldn't say I learned to ride a horse. I fell off, had a go at riding, but not quite being a proficient rider. So when if I say I can ride a horse. I'm not telling the truth. I used to run a rural life Museum, the Museum of East Anglian life, and we all felt we had to do country style activities, so I tried to learn to ride but failed fairly miserably.
TOM DAWSON
Thank you for that, Tony. Speaking of getting involved in the activities of a museum, you said you were at the Museum of East Anglian life. What's your career been like? How did you enter the sector and become the leader of Derby museums? What was your journey like?
TONY BUTLER
I took a fairly traditional route into museums. So I went to university. I was the first person in my family to go to university and did a degree in history, and then I volunteered for a year in a local museum in Aberystwyth. And then I did a master's in museum studies. This is back in the 1990s got my first job in 1997 29 years this year in museums, and that was in Wakefield. And then I've worked all over the place. Worked in London for a bit, and then on the Isle of Wight, which was a lovely place to work, running three tiny museums there in my early 20s, and then moved to Ipswich to be the deputy head of the museum service there. And then I was there a couple of years for the director's job at the what was then the Museum of East angling life came up in about 2004 and very modest beginnings there. We used to joke that we had more horses than we had computers and we only had three horses. I stayed there for about eight years, eight, nine years, and then I moved up to Derby to become the chief executive of the museum trust here in 2014
TOM DAWSON
For people who haven't been to one of your sites or don't know much about Derby museums, how would you describe it?
TONY BUTLER
We are an independent charity that runs museums on behalf of the City Council. So we're one of those museum organizations that was spun out to trust in the 2000s or in our case, 2013 so very similar to York and the Birmingham and the Sheffield model, the Brighton model, we run three museums in the city, and we look after about 400,000 objects the city council's collections of cultural heritage of the three sites, one of them is a World Heritage Site. It's the derby silk mill, which was transformed into the museum of making back in 2021 we have the largest collection of work by the 18th century. British artist Joseph Wright of Derby. It's designated by Arts Council as a collection of outstanding national significance. It's actually the subject of a major exhibition right now in the National Gallery, with a show called Joseph Wright from the shadows, which examines his candlelight paintings. 17 of the 20 works that are on display in that exhibition are from our collection. The. Museum and Art Gallery is a cultural heritage museum. So we have really eclectic mix of art, decorative art, archaeology, geology, what you'd call a typical kind of civic museum collection. And then we also run a small, quite delightful social history museum called pickford's house, which tells the story of domestic interiors and domestic life in the 18th century. So between the three sites, we encompass the world in the museum and art gallery, the city in the Museum of making and the home at pickford's house. So it's a really lovely mix of sizes and collections.
TOM DAWSON
So we've had a slew of quite big news in that sector over kind of recent weeks and months, haven't we? I mean, the time of recording the one and a half billion pounds announcement of DCMS funding is recently fresh in our minds, welcomed by many as a positive signal. There's a lot more to say about that. I mean, from your perspective, from what you know at the moment, how significant Do you think that funding is for civic museums?
TONY BUTLER
First of all, any announcement for funding of culture on this scale has to be recognized and welcomed. It does show the government see culture as a really important part of the Civic fabric. Lisa Nandy talking about a country that's investing in culture is a country that's at ease with itself, and that's a really great sentiment to have, I think, for civic museums, in particular, the last year or so has been positive with the announcement of the museum renewal Fund, which was announced a year ago, and many museums had received funding, which has been the difference, I think, between museums closing or really shrivelling, and expertise and staff being lost. But from this announcement, the key numbers that were around the 140 odd million that was announced for regional museums. Now the vast majority of that is going to be capital funding. It's linked to the Mend Fund, which is the museums and estates Development Fund, which has been going since 2022 and that's been really useful to organizations. It's helped museums deal with a backlog of repairs. You know, most of our museums are in historic buildings, or at least listed buildings, and buildings maintenance has been one of those areas that local councils have really struggled with in the years of austerity. The interesting announcement, and this takes us a little further on from the museum renewal fund, is this 13 point 4 million pounds worth of funding for transformation. Now no one quite knows what that means, and we're all waiting with basic breath to hear from Arts Council as to what that means and how that is defined, because obviously Arts Council will be, you know, administering that fund. On the surface, it is good news, but I think I'm probably a number of my other regional museums colleagues feel that this probably won't really touch the sides. And when you look at the money that's been lost from regional museums over the last decade, I mean, the average reduction is about 33% according to Arts Council figures over the last 13 years. And in some areas, it's been much, much worse. So I've experienced a reduction of management fee, but of 65% so it's gone down a huge amount, which really has put our organization in real financial Jeopardy, and it's been a struggle to break even and to keep going. But we're also finding ways of doing that. It doesn't get anywhere near to matching the loss that austerity is heaped upon local authorities, we're really going to need to see how transformation is defined and how we can respond to it.
TONY BUTLER
As you say, we want to be incredibly grateful for this investment. It's really important that we fix the leaky roofs we have that funding to repair the infrastructure, which, as you say, has been missing because of austerity. That kind of leads on to my next question, which is, are we still in danger of mistaking this as a short term plaster instead of a longer term strategy when it comes to cultural funding, as highlighted by the huge reduction you've seen from local government,
and it's works without a strategy, without a long term strategy. So it is a sticking plaster, and the museum renewal fund was absolutely gratefully received. But it doesn't solve the problems, and we do need a long term strategy, or at least a greater understanding of what an ecology of museums in England looks like. England is the only nation in the UK without a museum strategy. We are sort of going from year to year. I mean, loads of museum directors are using the Mr. Micawber School of Management in that something will turn up. And we're pulling rabbits out of the hat each year and managing to continue. But I think you cannot address these endemic problems without more strategic thinking. And that goes from the largest national museums right down to museums in towns and rural areas that are managing collections on behalf of the public and part of that social infrastructure.
TOM DAWSON
I mean talking about having a strategy. I mean in the recent harsh report on Arts Council England, there was talk of having a dedicated museum strategy, and lots of talk of renewing the Arts Council's focus in this area. I mean, as Derby museums, as a national portfolio organization, what did you think the Hodge report got right about the current system?
TONY BUTLER
I think most people who read the Hodge report thought it was really sensible and practical. What struck many leaders was how able she was to listen, and I took part in a number of round tables during the evidence gathering, and she always came across as someone who was listening and taking on board things and didn't really have any sort of preconceived ideas and took a very pragmatic approach. And I think most people that have read that report thinks that it's sensible and practical. I think the issues like reducing bureaucracy and reducing the numbers of things we have to attend to as NPOs is welcome. Longer funding agreements would be welcome. I think in general, nobody really can quibble with anything it said. And we sort of look forward to seeing how the recommendations around strengthening art forms is rolled out, and there's the allusion to a strategy and more strategic thinking across England, again, that's really welcome. We wait to see what that means. Much like transformational funding,
TOM DAWSON
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TOM DAWSON
We've talked on the podcast before with other leaders of civic museums, and one of the things they've said is particularly thinking about museums trust who talked about the challenge, completely understandable challenge, that local government having to struggle with their budgets, as well of them having to do everything a year by year basis, as opposed to planning further ahead again, is that something that you're hoping will come out of both the DCMS funding and the Arts Council Review, that you will be in a position As a recipient of local government funding, that even if the funding is not where you'd like it to be, at least there is some sort of long term picture of stability.
TONY BUTLER
I think what's interesting is how this dovetails into the government's response to local government. So local government are now getting two to three year settlements. So the latest discussions we've had with our council for our management fee is that it will be a three year set amount, which is the first time we've had a more than one year funding agreement since before covid. That's welcome even you know it's not enough, but it helps us plan and think of a strategy going into the future. So there's some alignment now between mchlg and DCMS through Arts Council funding, which is a good foundation to work on. But, you know, the foundations can be built, but you still got to have a strong walls and strong building, and that's where we're still going to struggle. So the foundations are better with certainty about funding, I think there's some really interesting things that were also included in the report, like exploring the issue of free admission to national museums, even if that doesn't change, there is a reference to looking at whether that is a policy that should exist way into the long term. For now, the argument seems to have been settled, but it does raise really interesting issues.
TOM DAWSON
You talking about a three year settlement in terms of local government funding. I mean, there's some thoughts around forthcoming devolution bill and how that might change things. And there's some thoughts about where does culture sit in that is that something that you are particularly concerned about you have on your radar. Or do you think that's not so important?
TONY BUTLER
So I think as all these new arrangements shake down, there is lots of potential for culture to rise up agendas. I mean, that's kind of an obvious thing, but because devolution is happening at different speeds in different places, it means that some new combined authorities will emerge as where culture can be of interest, and others, it's already established. So in places like Manchester and the North East, where you've had long established combined authorities is quite is now quite cemented in their strategic planning. I mean, I'm working in an area that's had an elected mayor for 18 months, and culture is not one of her sort of principal topic areas. The focus is on things like transport and skills, housing, economic growth, and so culture seeps into things like developing the visitor economy, which is okay, because the visitor economy argument is a really important one. What it doesn't do? Mean that right now, in our in the East Midlands, that culture doesn't seep into other aspects of public policy, but it has done elsewhere. So theoretically, in maybe a decade's time, as the new devolution arrangement settle in, culture can be more prominent. But right now, it depends upon where you live, and a lot of the time, a lot of my colleagues talk about it being a bit of a postcode lottery. So apart from devolution and the combined authorities, there are some local authorities that will support culture and others that don't. There are some that traditionally have spent a lot of money on culture or have long established museums or cultural organizations and others that don't. So a lot depends on where you live. And again, this is why more strategic thinking in a national strategy will be really beneficial. So it irons out some of those inequalities. And fundamentally, the combined authorities that are deliveries of strategic capital planning, they're not revenue funders. You know, we're still going to be fighting for revenue funding for local government, for, you know, for that mix of public sector funding for local government, from Arts Council and from other bodies. But really, I think the greatest area of interest from the Combined Authority is going to be capital funding.
TOM DAWSON
Okay, it's really interesting touching on the business model of the museum sector at the moment. There's increasing pressure on the sector to become more entrepreneurial and generate their own income. Last conversation I had on the podcast was with Sarah McLeod from Wentworth Woodhouse, entirely self funded, and she was talking about the real need for museum directors now to be entrepreneurial. Is that something that you have seen a change during your career? How central do you think that is now to your job?
TONY BUTLER
Absolutely. I mean being entrepreneurial. So the financial model has probably been the biggest change in museums, especially civic museums, over the last 15 years or so. So there's been lots of sort of cultural trends that we've all kind of absorbed and developed. But really the biggest transformation has been the financial model. So that transition from being overwhelmingly public sector funded to a much more mixed economy. So most people running civic museums have had to think more entrepreneurially and build a more balanced funding regime. And I think it's how you define entrepreneurialism. So I'm operating a museum that has free admission because we really believe that culture should everybody for everybody, and there should be no financial barriers to accessing your culture in the place where you live. So we have had to create a model that enables free admission and enables free access and participation and inclusion at a time when our public sector funding is going through the floor. If you combine the funding I get from Arts Council and from the city council, it's less than 38% my income, and so the rest of my income is coming from trust and foundations. It's coming from donations. It's coming from commercial activity. It's coming from exhibition tax relief. It's coming from all sorts of other areas. So the funding cake has much more variety now than it did 15 years ago, when I started here in 2014 92% of our income came from the public sector, and now, like I said, it's less than 40% so that is a huge change, and that is the most transformational thing that's happened to the industry. And so the skills that be an entrepreneur, it's not just about profit and loss. It's not just about can I eke as much money out of this commercial activity? It's how can I create value in all sorts of ways so that we can generate income through, you know, private giving, through endowment. So we raised an endowment of 2 million pounds from scratch between 2018 and 2022 with some support from the Heritage funds, catalyst funding. But now my our endowment, which is quite small, but it's still it's bringing us in an annual income of about 80,000 pounds a year. So that's that kind of mix of income spreads risk, but it also means that the financial makeup is really, really interdependent. So if you take things from one area, it goes from another. Compare that to someone like National Museums Liverpool, where 65% of their income is coming from the public sector. And it's a great organization. They do amazing stuff. It's a model that enables growth. It enables free admission, it enables participation. And small organizations like mine that have come out of the bowels of a local council are probably the most fragile at the moment.
TOM DAWSON
Yeah, and that's quite an amazing statistic, going from 92% funding. I mean, that's quite incredible. I think it again, puts it in context. Is there any examples of self generated income that you think have been a real success at Derby museums or maybe elsewhere in your career.
TONY BUTLER
So I don't think there's one single success. There's lots of small victories. So it's not one big battle, it's small victories having a variety of income streams. So our income from our endowment things like really matter. Passing out and taking advantage of things like exhibition Tax Relief has been really important, you know. And I would implore organizations that can to get money from exhibition tax relief. There's a good tax relief because it incentivizes growth. So the more exhibitions you do, the more you're going to get back in tax relief. We've developed business clubs. So we have a, you know, exclusive business club that businesses can sign up to, and they get special events for them. We've really put a lot of effort into working with individual donors. So raising money for our endowment was a good focus for that, but maintaining those relationships on into the future has been really important too, within the organization, it's building up our development team. So we've got a development team of three, I would say, as an organization, we've got a very broadly based set of skills that are required to work here. So we've got as many chefs as we've got curators, because our venue hire, we're turning over just under 4 million quid, and our return of our trading company is 1.2 million. So that kind of activity is in terms of the overall business income, is as important as our stock work of maintaining collections and making them available to the public. There's not been one thing that has been a silver bullet. It's lots of small things that have all added up to spreading the risk a bit more. But fundamentally, you can't do any of this if you're not underpinned by core funding. So getting that balance between core public funding to enable you to diversify income from more private sources, if you want to retain free admission, free access and participation, you cannot do one thing without the other.
TOM DAWSON
Are there any examples of other cultural venues, maybe civic museums or not, you'd recommend others to look at who you think are doing really great work.
TONY BUTLER
At the moment, there's loads of great work going on all around the country, and you talked about the words that means has been doing and Sara Wajid have been doing in Birmingham. Aside from getting to go to the numbers and being entrepreneurial, they've also developed the citizens jury, and it's interesting to see how that some national museums have taken the example of what they've been doing, and I think the National Gallery and the Imperial War Museum now have have citizens juries. On the back of the success in Birmingham, there's some really interesting work at Sheffield a couple of years ago called going public, which is about encouraging philanthropists to give or to donate in order to develop the acquisition of contemporary art. And the report of that program is available, and it's a really good object lesson in how you build community through giving, and you build philanthropy, and you encourage donors to see that distinct link with public benefit. There's some interesting thinking, I think that's going on in the bows Museum at the moment with under their director, Hannah Fox, who worked with other museums A while back, she's doing some very long term thinking about planning. She's got 100 year plan for the bows Museum, and she's been leading some interesting work around collections and philanthropy. Clearly, there's a load of really interesting practice going on in terms of community building, in terms of inclusion, in terms of different ways for people to engage with collections. You know, I mean, you could, you can name all the sort of usual suspects, you know, the Manchester museums of this world, etc. The real transformational thinking is going on around the fundamentals of how we create the best value from our assets, how we try and make these organizations sustainable while still providing public benefit. And the more that this thinking goes on, the less prone to magical thinking the sector becomes. I've seen a lot of magical thinking. You can have all these things. You can have free admission, you can have participation. You can have costly programs that absolutely get to the heart of what Museum is working with vulnerable people in the communities, making sure that everyone has a stake in your museum, but not all of them are compatible with commercialism. We need a system that's fairly funded to do work that's fair with our communities, but also isn't just wishful thinking.
TOM DAWSON
Love the mantra of being sustainable and continuing to work for the public good. That's a lovely way of surmising it. Finally, in let's say, 10 years time, what do you think a successful civic museum will be doing differently than what they're doing today?
TONY BUTLER
I mean, the fundamentals of a museum don't change. You display things. People come and look at things. They gather together in groups. They think and talk and socialize in a context of cultural heritage. They talk about the lives. These places have been rallying points for years, and they've been places where people have been able to think about the world differently and or think about their place in the world. And I think the brilliant things about civic museums is that they take global issues and they put them in a local context, and they give people access to the world and the beauty of their surroundings. And you know, nature, culture, art in the place where they live. So I. Hope that that doesn't change too much. I think the model of how that operates might change and we might see fewer museums. I mean, I'm not I want to close museums, but it may be that as a sector will become more effective if there are fewer institutions to run. It may be that there are fewer museum organizations, but there are still a decent amount of museums. You could end up with a system like an academisation of museum organizations. So if I used to be on a multi Academy Trust Board, grew from a couple of schools to 10 schools with an overall chief executive, lot of power and responsibility devolved to those individual schools, but they combined it with things like procurement and strategic thinking, which made the organization bit more efficient, but also getting a bit more buying power that we might see more collaboration and shared services across organizations. That might not necessarily mean mergers, but it could be so. We're talking to Birmingham Museum and perhaps Lee's Museum at the moment about how our enterprises could work more closely together, whether there are economies of scales to work there. But fundamentally, the being of a museum shouldn't change. It's how we mobilize our assets to be more efficient and create more value. And that could be all sorts of different ways and different systems of managing museums.
TOM DAWSON
Lots to think about there. Thank you, Tony. Really interesting stuff. Is anything on the rest of 2026 you would recommend people come along and see at the Museum of the making or one of your sites, what have you got going on?
TONY BUTLER
This year is our year of Wright, which, I mean every year is the year of Joseph Wright in Derby, but especially this year, because we've got three major pieces of work that are happening. So in a month or so, the entire our entire collection, is finally digitized and made available on the digital platform. So that includes about 45 works in oil and about 380 works on paper. So that all becomes digitized and available to the public. We have a reprise of our exhibition right on paper, which is an exhibition of about 65 works that are drawn from our collection of sketches, drawings, Mexicans, prints, letters from the artist, which give you a really interesting sort of introduction to his life. And then from the middle of June, we are hosting Joseph Wright from the shadows, which is the show that's in the National Gallery in London. And that would include both his two masterpieces, the lecture on an Orrery and the bird in the air pump. And it first time that those two pictures are on show together in Derby since about 1948 so it's really significant for our city. It's bringing these pictures back home together, and Wright, as an artist, does resonate with local people. BBC Derby did a survey about a decade ago, they discovered that about the over 50% of the population knew who Joseph Wright was, and knew one of his paintings, which is quite high for an 18th century artist anywhere really. So he has a big resonance to local people and really, people are really proud of him. Excellent.
TOM DAWSON
Well, highly recommend a visit to Derby museums this year. Then Tony. Thank you so much for talking to me. It's been a real pleasure.
TONY BUTLER
Thank you. Great to chat to you.
TOM DAWSON
My thanks to Tony for such a generous and insightful conversation and a big thank you to our sponsors, King & McGaw for supporting the podcast. The Arts and Culture podcast is brought to you by the Association for cultural enterprises, sharing ideas, insight and best practice from across the UK cultural sector. Thanks for listening and take care.