The fabric of museums, acquisition funds and staff costs all present the Government and the country with a problem. Unfilled posts affect the services that museums can provide—in scholarship, in skills and in the management of their collections. It is because these elements of our great museums are under such pressure due to inadequate core funding that morale in many of them—I instance the natural history museum—is at such a low ebb.

The Minister's challenge is to put all this right. He will not have many weeks or months in which to do so, but he can at least make a start by putting right the financial neglect that is the legacy of his predecessors in office. The real problem has been—I hope that the Minister will discuss this—the fact that the Government have not had a museums policy. Rather, they have a hands-off financial policy that restricts public expenditure wherever possible, and passes on responsibility to others.

The Government claim that it is up to the trustees whether they charge for admission. The hon. Member for Battersea fell into that trap, when he said that there was no compulsion to charge, as though museums were looking for opportunities to charge. I challenge him to find a single director of a national museum who says that charging improves the quality of his museums, and that, no matter how well the Government fund it, he wants to charge for admission because it enriches its cultural, educational and scholastic skills. Both the hon. Gentleman and the Minister know that that is not so. Trustees of museums such as the science museum and the natural history museum have had to charge because they have had no other option. Inadequate Government funding is an implicit compulsion, and it is disingenuous to suggest anything else.

It is not good enough for the Government to pass on responsibility to the trustees and say that they have nothing to do with what goes on. They should accept responsibility for the core funding of our national museums, and not leave it all to sponsors. There are some good sponsors. For example, British Petroleum has done magnificent work in helping with the re-hang of the Tate. Nor is it good enough to leave it to earning income through shops. That does not address the scale of the capital and revenue needs of the national museums.

The Government's problem is that they have not formed a coherent view, because they do not appear to have a cultural view and valuation of museums or an educational view and valuation of museums. If they do have one, it is at odds with that of the Department of Education and Science. The hon. Member for Battersea will remember, because he served on the Committee that examined the Bill, that the Education Reform Act 1988 put a squeeze on school visits, and that has damaged museums.

The science museum does excellent work. Its education department has a superb and imaginative programme and 7,000 schools visit every year, but organised museum visits by schools are in decline because of the Government's education policies. I fear that the local management of schools will make that more rather than less acute. If the Government do not understand how crucial are museums for the educational future of our children and our country, they are misunderstanding the role of museums.

It is curious that the Government—who, to their credit, are saying through the GCSE syllabus and the national curriculum that children should have hands-on experience in science, history and the social sciences and go to prime resources to see the objects about which they are learning—are also perversely initiating policies that reduce the number of school visits and are so reducing the finances of national museums that they cannot expand their education departments to take the opportunities that those education policies are opening up.

What is most perverse is not that the Government do not have a cultural or educational perspective of museums but that they do not have an economic policy for them. One would have thought that this Government—the great proponents of the free market—would at least understand the economic impact of museums. The Policy Studies Institute and others have done plenty of work in this sector. Cities such as Bradford demonstrated in a condensed and clear form what an enormous contribution—not just through tourism but generally—the museums of this country make to economic life and employment.

One would have thought that that would commend itself to the Government and the Minister, and allow him to make a positive case for expansion in investment in museums, but that does not seem to be the case. The Government do not understand their own free market economic case. That may not be anything like as important as the cultural case, but it is still a potent argument, and one that the Minister's predecessors have not deployed sufficiently or effectively, because investment in museums has not increased as it should.

I ask the Minister to examine the opportunities that have opened up for the Government and for whomever is in government in the 1990s. He could make a start. I am sure that he has visited Glasgow, a city which has invested substantially in museums, including the Burrell, Kelvingrove and the People's Palace. The city has a coherent cultural, educational and economic view. It has deemed it worth while to put a large proportion of ratepayers' money into its museums and has changed the image and reputation of the city as a result, or substantially so. If the Government had had the same positive and imaginative approach towards the national museums that Glasgow has had to its city museums, the cultural reputation of the United Kingdom would be very different, and much higher.

Perhaps the Minister should travel a little, and not only to Glasgow. He should visit Paris, for example. I am sure that he would enjoy the visit enormously. The French Government have grasped the opportunities that were available in the 1980s for national museums. They have opened up the old Gare d'Orsay into the Musée d'Orsay. They have opened a huge new science museum at La Villette, which involved vast investment. They have created the Pompidou centre, which is visited by 7·5 million a year. To take up the remarks of the hon. Member for Battersea about architecture, they have opened in the Asenal a huge centre that is effectively a forum arid museum for study and for focusing debate on architecture.

They have contributed considerably to greater interest and enthusiasm in public architecture, and in its quality too. The private sector is included, as well as the public sector.

The Minister would enjoy visiting the museums and centres to which I have referred. I believe that he would return inspired. If he takes a trip to Paris, he should extend his journey by travelling to Frankfurt. There he would see the most spectacular example of a city where the commitment to expanding its cultural sector and its museums is reflected in almost every street. Frankfurt has an extremely good architectural museum. It has commissioned new architects such as Richard Meier to create new museums such as the kunstandwerk museum and the museum of ethnology, which will open in 1992. There is Hans Hollem's museum of modern art and Unger's ikonmuseum. The Rothschild mansion has been converted into the Judisches museum. There is the museum of antique sculpture and Josef Kleihner's museum of pre and early history. If the Minister visited Frankfurt, he would see a city that has a pride in its past and a confidence in its future. It has invested in museums and is reaping the benefit in the number of visitors that it is attracting. The museum sector is making an important contribution to the identity and cohesion of the city.

We have a much stronger starting base in our national museums. If only we had a Government with the confidence to invest, we could grasp the opportunities that are available to us. When we compare what has happened in Paris over the past 10 years and what is happening in Frankfurt with the national museums in London, we see that our record is a bleak one. The only two substantial museums that have opened in the past few years in London have been the design museum and the museum of the moving image. Neither has received a penny from public funding.

The design museum is preparing plans and an argument—this is, if it is to develop and fulfil its enormously exciting potential—for public investment. I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic. Sir Terence Conlan and the other trustees who have set up the museum have created something in which we as a society should invest. They have given us the opportunity, and we should grasp it. Similarly, if we are ever to revive our film industry, the museum of the moving image must be recognised as worthy of public support.

There is something for the Minister to go at as well. He has a superb base to start with, but he also has a great deal of work to do to recover the lost ground which has been allowed to slide away in the last 12 years in buildings, in the frozen nature of acquisitions and in the crisis in staffing.

The Minister has probably only a few weeks left in office. Perhaps he could start on that agenda now and enjoy himself by going to Paris and Frankfurt. He could come back inspired to make a better stab at it in future.