I would not dream of ignoring the two artistic usual channels. I should not omit my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. Bowden): Dulwich is synonymous with the arts because of its collections and the eloquence of its hon. Member on their behalf.

Our view of museums is conditioned from childhood. From our early days of sticking our pictures up on walls, we come to appreciate that, if something is good, it is hung up for people to go and see. We gradually learn about the past, and our curiosity causes us to want to discover what the past is all about. We therefore begin to visit museums. However, when I was a child, my local museums were predominantly dull and the national museums were overwhelming, if not forbiding.

I have seen a dramatic change in the outlook, presentation and interest in museums. If we visit what the former Minister for the Arts, my right hon. Friend the Member for Shoreham (Sir R. Luce) described as the mosaic of museums, it is clear how museums have improved, how much more welcoming they are, how much more there is to do in them and how much more understandable are the exhibits. The museums and galleries industry must take great credit for that.

Museums date back many centuries. The first museum opened to the public was the Royal Armouries in the time of Charles II. The British and Scottish museums were opened in the 18th century and there was a great expansion in the number of museums in the last 20 years of the 19th century. There were about 200 local museums by the 1890s. There was a great post-war expansion through the 1970s, totalling 950 museums, and there are more than 2,500 museums today.

There has been a dramatic increase recently in the number of museums. In particular, many independent museums have started up and there has been much innovative work. For example, there is an exhibition of trainers at the science museum sponsored by a well-known sportswear company. It is clear that museum curators and administrators have altered their approach, and that is welcome. It enlivens museums.

When we consider museums, we are not simply considering the most obvious establishments. Galleries and museums in many other areas are connected with the arts. I pay great credit to the south bank, the national theatre and the Barbican for the way in which they and others have contributed gallery space in London.

The Museums Association was 100 years old in 1989; it celebrated with Museums Year, which brought a new awareness to the public of what is available in our museums. There are many types of museum. Some house personal collections such as the Burrell collection and the Greenwich fan museum. Many museums record local history and artistic achievement. Others, like the theatre museum and the museum of the moving image, reflect the performing arts. There are also the national collections, which I would describe as Stanley Gibbons collections, in which the aim is to have one of everything.

The aim of our museums should be to bring together the facts, and often the artefacts, of the past so that we can educate and stimulate the current generation and provide a heritage for future generations. The Government have a good story to tell, and it is because I am confident in the quality of their achievement to date that in this debate I shall press them to go yet further. We have nothing to be ashamed of in our record on funding of the arts. On funding of our national museums and galleries, we have a superb record.

In 1985, we were funding museums to the tune of £81 million. By 1990, that was up to £165 million, with a further £10 million going to the Museums and Galleries Commission. I mention that because when, I served on the Standing Committee on the Education Reform Bill, I and other colleagues spent some time ensuring that the Horniman and Geffrye museums became national museums independent of local authorities. Some of the increase from £3 million to £10 million and to £12 million in a couple of years is to ensure that those museums can flourish. It was a great joy to see them launched with independent status. We wish them well. By 1993, the figure will be up to £193 million, including the £12 million to which I referred.

Our record on funding is good on buildings and pretty adequate on the running costs. I shall come back to the purchase grants, which have been more frozen than progressive. Some 80 per cent. of the running costs of our national museums and galleries are staff-related. Staff are tied to the civil service. The commission has recommended in the past that that should be looked at. I hope that my right hon. Friend is considering whether the automatic tie to civil service grades is in the best interests of the museums, particularly at a time when the staff seem to question that link.

We should seek ways of increasing purchase grants. We have almost said that because purchasing costs have risen so much and so quickly, it is impossible to keep up. We must ensure that we can continue adding to our collections. Of course, there are many ways of doing that. But central Government funding, as well as sponsorship, donations and so on, has a part to play.

I commend the work of our national museums in expanding outside their home cities. Often, the home city is London. There are 45 branches of the national bodies in other locations, 11 of which have been formed in the past 10 years. I cite the two satellites—if that is the right word—of the science museum at York and Bradford. I welcome the improvement fund for exhibition spaces, which has enabled much good work to be done. We have seen the first chunk of that. I hope that we shall hear soon that more money is to come from that fund in the next round of contributions.

Of course, there has also been a great increase in sponsorship. It has been a success story. One could list the Clore and Sainsbury galleries, as well as the Tsui gallery—if that is how it is Pronounced—the Chinese gallery at the Victoria and Albert museum. I bow to any experts on Chinese pronunciation. There are other sponsorships of buildings and galleries which are less well known by name. Exhibitions are also sponsored. When I was on my Parliament and Industry Trust with Esso, it was sponsoring some exhibitions of how paintings came to be made—both Italian paintings and Impressionist paintings. Both exhibitions were held at the national gallery. It is great news that such companies contribute to our arts heritage in that way.

We must always remind ourselves of the role of Government in funding and of the need for it. We do not have our resident anti-funder in this debate. However, this is a moment to remind ourselves of one or two areas in which funding is right and should be adhered to. I think especially of the role of funding in enabling our racial minorities to see their ethnic background, history and culture described and laid out in exhibition form. It is good for them to be able to see and understand their culture, and it is good for the nation as a whole to understand the cultures of people living in our midst. We are a multi-ethnic society, so it is helpful for the cohesion of our society if we see and understand the backgrounds of our component parts.

Another reason for the Government role in funding is the need to understand the aesthetics of our environment. If we can educate our young people in the aesthetics of the environment, we shall have a society that begins to put the right pressures on our architects and planners. We might then be able to move away from the too frequent power of the believers in utilitarianism and social collectivism, and return to the priority of a more aesthetic environment. That requires education and the ability to have aesthetic matters set out in visible form in our galleries and museums. We should keep referring to the fact that the arts need the involvement of the Government as nurturer, encourager and promoter of high standards and popular involvement, but not as the piper-payer who calls the tune, and not in such a way that the arts become a wholly owned subsidiary of Government.

We should encourage the arts to lobby. That may seem an odd thing to say, but I believe that this place is woefully lacking in understanding of the arts, which is partly the fault of the arts. The more that we can persuade people involved in the arts to ensure that they keep close to Members of Parliament, the more Members of Parliament will understand the needs of the arts and place them appropriately in their list of priorities for public funding.

This week, of all weeks, we can remind the Treasury of the income that comes from the arts, from overseas earnings and from areas that the Treasury does not recall as being part of the benefits from the arts. Tax comes from the taxi fares and from the restaurants that cater for people who come to this country and attend arts events. They spend not only in the theatre, the gallery or the museum, but outside. Much consequential revenue comes in to the Inland Revenue, which is part of the benefit of the arts to the Exchequer. The Chancellor recognises arts as an ally and a friend. If he wants to repay that confidence, he should examine the subject of taxes on the arts. If taxes were removed from the arts, there might be slightly less need to go to the Treasury for yet more funding. One can fund the arts by removing burdens as well as by positive funding.

One of the many controversies is the question of admission charges to our national galleries and museums. I do not take a strong line either way on that. The Government are right to say that there is and will be no compulsion. There are dangers in charges if they risk deterring people, especially young people, from going regularly to galleries and museums.

On the other hand, the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Brado all benefit from charges. Statistics for the museum of the moving image show that charges do not deter, whereas at the natural history museum they may. Where there has been an impact, it is often a short-term dip from which the museum recovers, as happened at the national maritime museum. The figures are inconclusive. All I say is that we should consider the matter carefully. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister will confirm that, where charges are made, they should not be taken into account in the Government's allocation of funding. That can be shown if one continues with three-year funding, because that is a sufficient period for it to be obvious if there is a change as a result of particularly successful fund raising.

Having said that, I hope that we will persuade our museums and galleries to look for ways of making people open their purses once they are in, whether or not they have been charged an entrance fee. I also hope that we can persuade our museums and galleries to open when the public wish to visit them, particularly families with children, which is on bank holidays and at weekends, just when the museum may be under pressure from unions not to open. They must be told that they have to open, because that is part of their duty to the public.

I hope that we can go on pressing our museums and galleries to make themselves available to people with disabilities. There have already been great achievements in that area, but we still need to ensure that doors are wide enough and that there are ramps and lifts and so on. Then we need to make sure that wherever possible exhibits are made available to people such as the partially sighted by allowing them to touch them and by providing Braille notices. People with disabilities should have exactly the same opportunities as the rest of us within their own personal limits to benefit from our great collections.

I hope that we can persuade our galleries and museums to look into their cellars and to bring out items which do not often see the light of a display case and, where appropriate and possible, to send exhibits on tour and out on loan. In that context, I welcome the national indemnity scheme. It now covers some 15,000 items a year, saving museums some £5 million a year in insurance premiums. That is good, and I hope that it can be extended, because part of their duty should be to take their treasures, the lesser-known ones as well, out and about. I hope that we will encourage shops and other commercial possibilities inside museums. Trading income has quadrupled in the past four years or so.

The Royal Air Force museum at Hendon is a national museum, which, as my right hon. Friend will know, the Ministry of Defence controls. I hope that he will ask the Ministry of Defence to bring that museum into line with the rest of the museum world in three ways. First, the museum should have the right to spend its earned income. Secondly, it should have a purchase grant rather than having—as it does at the moment unlike almost every other museum—to put forward items that it wants to purchase before it gets a grant. Thirdly, it is high time the Ministry of Defence handed over the museum and vested it in trustees. All those recommendations have been made by the Museums and Galleries Commission, but nothing seems to have happened yet. It is not my right hon. Friend's responsibility, but I hope that he will put pressure on the Ministry of Defence to bring that about.

Earlier tonight, we debated lotteries. I shall not repeat what has already been said. I simply ask my right hon. Friend to, join my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Mr. Hargreaves) in supporting a lottery and take the case, no doubt privately, to the Treasury and suggest that that would be a good way of attracting additional voluntary contributions for the arts from the members of the public in lieu of taxation. That would be a signal benefit.

The vision of Derbyshire county council comes to mind when I think of disposal. I hope that it is ashamed of its appalling policy of selling its assets and collections purely to make a political point. I do not believe that the hon. Members for Stoke-on-Trent, Central or for Ashfield will support that. No sane person who believes in the worth of our great collections would support what that council is doing, and I suggest that the law needs tightening. Our fairly tight Laws on selling national collections should surely apply locally.

I hope that we shall encourage our museums to get together, where appropriate, to prevent duplication. The science museum, the imperial war museum and the Royal Air Force museum all collect aircraft, whereas sensible arrangements are made between the Victoria and Albert museum and the Tate gallery: the V and A limits its sculpture collection to pre-1920 and the Tate covers the period thereafter. That is a sensible way of ensuring that collections do not compete unnecessarily.

One of the targets of my right hon. Friend the Minister is to get buildings in good order for the millenium. Ove Arup is conducting a survey into the fabric of our national museum buildings. I do not know whether my right hon. Friend can say when we might expect some results from that.

If we can get buildings in good order, I hope we shall consider endowment funding so that we can give a generous capital sum, equivalent and more to the present rate of annual funding, to some of our institutions, which would allow them to plan ahead. It would give them the Wandsworth factor—a spending assessment allocated for a period of years to come on which it, with good management, could make efficiency savings and spend the extra money on other things.

The Museum Training Institute of the Museums Association operates an excellent training scheme, and I hope that it will report on its achievements. I also hope that it will consider increasing training for regional museum staff from national museum resources.

I have urged my right hon. Friend for more and have given him much credit for what he has done, but I make three final pleas. The first is that we consider specific grant funding for the arts, down to local government. I know that that is not a matter for my right hon. Friend, but it is a message for him to pass on. Secondly, the BBC, ITV and the satellite companies—one thinks of the Sunday arts programmes on the old BSB Marcopolo channel—are good at portraying the arts, but they have not done museums and galleries proud, and they could do more to popularise those splendid national institutions.

Architecture does not yet have a national museum. The Royal Institute of British Architects has a gallery, but there is no national museum of architecture. I must declare an interest, in that my daughter is a student of architecture. Perhaps her work will one day qualify for inclusion in such a museum. Battersea power station in my Constituency might be an appropriate building to house that museum. I hope that my right hon. Friend will pursue with vigour the idea of a museum of architecture.

The Museums and Galleries Commission said in its report: The national museums are a magnificent inheritance, held in trust for the future; they are a national and international asset of unrivalled quality and also a significant economic asset. That is right. It is also right that Members of Parliament are the trustees of those assets on behalf of our children and our children's children. We have a duty to ensure that they flourish. We also have a duty to ensure that our national museums fulfil their duty, set down by the Museums and Galleries Commission, to promote public understanding and enjoyment. If we combine those two purposes, the galleries and museums will be doing their job, and we shall be doing ours.