MLA gives cash back to redeploy before year end

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council has underspent the £50m Renaissance budget for this year by £4.8m, and has already handed the money back to DCMS.

But the underspend is a deliberate ploy to free up money caught in the Hub system, said MLA chief executive Roy Clare. Rather than depriving museums of much needed cash, he said the returned money was the result of an intentional policy change, “a pragmatic and responsible reallocation of public funds”.

The money is intended for the 47 museums within the nine hubs of the Renaissance in the Regions scheme in England. “We distributed the funds via the hubs last year and found at the end of the fiscal year that there was an underspend which was lost. We then made a new spending agreement with the funds being paid in retrospect rather than advance, and directly to the museums so the MLA had better control.

“The money was not going to be spent in the Hubs and we have taken the decision to give the money back to DCMS so that some of it has already been reallocated to other projects that badly needed it” he said. “If we had not done that, the money would have been returned to the Treasury and lost to the cultural sector”.

Since the money was returned to the government, DCMS has pledged an extra £100,000 to the Jewish Museum, which reopens in Camden next month. The Art Fund winning Wedgwood Museum has also been given an extra £200,000. DCMS said that it would not be known where the money had gone until the department’s summer statement.

Previously, MLA had been allowed to carry underspends over from one financial year to the next, but a tightening of the rules covering what is known in Whitehall as “EYF” – end year flexibility – by the Treasury because of the recession had stopped the practice.