To be happy the science museum and natural history museum might have an entrance fee soon

[Ironfistfunkymum]

It makes the place unbearably busy, often have to queue to get in and most people don't appreciate it. They are just going as its something "free".

A 15 minute, 4 mile bus ride on a busy bus from my house to the city centre is £3
it must be a profitable route because 4 companies run on it, none of whom accept each others tickets

i assume you know we can't figure out how subsidised the fare is from that information.

You are the only part of the country with integrated public transport.

we have the tax base and density to easily support it.

London gets Arts and Museum subsidies 100 times greater than any other part of the country.

we also generate a significant amount of the tax receipts in London. Far more per capita than anywhere else in the country.

London schools get more funding per pupil than other parts of the country.

indeed. you may have a bone to pick there.

When the museums cost money to go to, I could not afford it after I'd already paid £90 on the train to get to London for myself and my kids.

yes, rail tickets aren't free here.

How about we keep the museums free but check people's income and ban the richer ones? That'll cut down the queues and go some way to redressing the balance of opportunities for their children. Sorted.

The argument that being free gives access for poor people only works for those that live in London. You don't have to be very far away before the train travel gets so prohibitively expensive that if you are poor it is just not accessible. If you can afford the travel you can afford a modest entrance fee, even if you are saving for longer to have it.

If you use off peak fares you can only be there 11-3 ish, which with the queues is just not enough time to be a sensible trip.

The museums are national but the cost of travel means we are all paying for something only people in London/the city the museum is in can access at a reasonable cost.

We have a museum locally, smallish, costs £36 for one family, and that's no gift aid price. Many families can't afford this and a free museum in London is not much use when the train fare is so much.

Also, there has also been lots of people on the thread who say they don't go because of the crowds. The free entry removes access for these people.

If the museums are free they should be paid for by the local residents through their council tax, or have charges.

Paying through council tax doesn't work in places like London where a significant proportion of the visitors are tourists though. People shouldn't be paying council tax to subsidise tourists.

I completely, wholeheartedly disagree, OP. One of the things I feel quite proud of in my home city (Glasgow) is the fact that most of our museums are free. It rains shitloads here and going to the Kelvingrove or Burrell Collection for free are a godsend for lots of parents who don't have much cash to spare. The arts and history should be for everyone who wants them, not just those who can afford them.

I use off peak fares as they are cheaper. I nearly always pop into a museum when I visit London. Often for an hour or two. I stopped doing this when you had to pay to get in. And I earn below the average wage, but I can get a return bus journey to London sometimes for as little as £5 for a 2 hour journey.
Also if you get an off peak fare, you usually travel very early or later, and go back very late. By 8pm fares are cheap.

How about we keep the museums free but check people's income and ban the richer ones? That'll cut down the queues and go some way to redressing the balance of opportunities for their children. Sorted. love this post!

I completely, wholeheartedly disagree, OP. One of the things I feel quite proud of in my home city (Glasgow) is the fact that most of our museums are free. It rains shitloads here and going to the Kelvingrove or Burrell Collection for free are a godsend for lots of parents who don't have much cash to spare. The arts and history should be for everyone who wants them, not just those who can afford them. Absolutely! (Glasgow born here!)

And we couldn't afford as a family to visit Alton Towers. That is a very expensive day out.

The council tax point was that really these things are publicly funded, we can make them free by increasing the proportion of taxation paid by certain people, or we can charge for them, but still be tax payer funded which means most can afford it.

Why should something like this be tax payer funded and then get to charge? It means you pay for it once out of your general tax, but then only get access if your wealthy enough to afford the fee.

Very few of these places would actually work as commercial entities because if for example you charged £75 a family ticket to the NHM/BM etc they wouldn't get the kind of revenue needed to maintain the muesuems and do the work that they do in preservation or research.

Would only charging on rainy days help OP? The poor could go on sunny days and you'd keep out the riff-raff who are just sheltering from the rain.

redstrawberry
i assume you know we can't figure out how subsidised the fare is from that information.
que?
Buses in Southampton are not subsidised.
Rural buses were but city buses are not

Londoners assume that the rest of us get the level of subsidy that you get to allow Oyster cards to work : we do not.

Southampton has 6 bus companies all with different fares for the same routes and none of whom accept each others season tickets
Londoners have no idea how lucky and priviledged they are.

Where I live only essential services such as bus journeys to the hospital are subsidised. The vast majority of bus journeys are at the commercial rate.

The London as a tax base things is a bit of a myth, because included in that figure are all the companies that declare their profits in London. When you consider that Glencore the mining company declared £2.1 billion last year then the £34 billion extra that London puts in to the economy starts to be quite a small number.

Yes it gets a lot in normal taxes too, but it recieves far larger subsidies and spending on infrastructure than other parts of the economy. There are also anomilies in the ways that the tax/spending ratios are calcuated, for example things like museums, government buildings are accounted for as national spending, not spending on London.

Yes it gets a lot in normal taxes too, but it recieves far larger subsidies and spending on infrastructure than other parts of the economy. There are also anomilies in the ways that the tax/spending ratios are calculated, for example things like museums, government buildings are accounted for as national spending, not spending on London.

I don't at all deny that things are tilted towards the capital, and certainly these accounts are complicated. Calculating subsidies are difficult. For example, while our buses may be cheaper, we do actually have the density to support it (mostly), and let's not forget that about 100,000 people use the road in front of my house daily, most of whom live nowhere near me or outside London.

I only brought it up as a retort. we get massive efficiencies here because of density.

I'm a Lononer redstrawb, but when London gets subsidies of around £2,500 per head for public transport, whilst areas like the North East get £5 you can see the there is a bit of unfairness there. TFL only covers 48% of its spending through money from fares etc.

I think anyone visiting the museums should have to fill in a detailed questionnaire in order to determine whether they have the correct attitude and are ready to appreciate what they're going to see.

*I'm a Lononer redstrawb, but when London gets subsidies of around £2,500 per head for public transport, whilst areas like the North East get £5 you can see the there is a bit of unfairness there. TFL only covers 48% of its spending through money from fares etc.[/quote]

As I said, it is hard to do these analyses.

Keep in mind that a subsidy "per head" is misleading because London's population swells daily, and swells enormously on holidays. many many non-Londoners use London's infrastructure.

Thats true, but also of lots of areas, especially cities. I was really making the point that London does vastly well out of public spending and if it didnt get so much investment, then maybe it wouldn't be such a success.