WEDNESDAY 11 JULY 2007

MS LINDA CONLON, MR COLIN BROWN, MR PHIL WINFIELD AND MR ALEC COLES

  Q40  Dr Iddon: Do you pay business rates?

  Mr Brown: We do; we pay 20%.

  Dr Iddon: Business rates is an important point because if you are arguing that you are an educational centre, I would argue back that educational centres, like you are, should not be paying business rates. What do you say about that? Schools do not pay business rates.

  Q41  Chairman: This is called leading a witness!

  Mr Brown: I think that is true and we have approached our council about it. I think what would be useful is if Government were to make some concession available, for example VAT, but that was dependent upon the local authority also making an input in terms of waiving its business rates. I would like to see the VAT and I would like to see a peer group review in order that the Government could be assured that we are pushing forward on the excellent programme and spreading best practice.

  Mr Coles: On that particular point, I think there is definitely some merit in looking at incentives of that kind. We talk a lot about it in the arts field and I think there is no reason why we should not talk about it in the sciences. From the point of view of funding, obviously I come from a particular perspective: I run a museum service which has a substantial amount of local authority funding, but it is very much plurally funded with national government funding as well and, as you will be aware—and I think that the point about the 83 centres is well made—we have the Renaissance in the Regions programme for museums through DCMS and through MLA. The point has already been made not only about revenue support but about renewals and that applies to science centres, discovery centres and museums. That is the thing that maybe they do not forget but which is never built in because there is huge incentive to build new things but never such huge incentive to put things right and, ironically, the more successful they are, the quicker they need putting right because they get such a hammering, as it were. The point I made in my submission was about the museum accreditation programme because you asked the question, what is a science centre, but what is a museum and we have a definition of what a museum is and museums have to meet a certain level of standards or collections care to qualify for designation challenge funds or for Government funding through various sources or indeed heritage lottery funding, so it may be that that is something which needs looking at in terms of definition and then maybe there could be some sort of parallel programme through the Department of Science and Innovation which recognised that.

  Mr Winfield: I like a lot of the elements of the Scottish model in that I think there is still a lot of mileage to get leverage from collaboration of science and discovery centres. A lot of good things happen and, when my education team develop a properties of materials workshop for Hampshire, there is no reason why it would not run in Yorkshire or anywhere else for that matter. So, absolutely, there is a lot of collaboration that can be done and also on some of the functions that we have talked about like marketing and so on, but I do believe that you still need to leave some independence for the science centres because they are all very different: some are themed, some are not and so on and they know their own local needs. I think that collaboration would be high on the agenda for me.

  Chairman: Thank you very much, indeed. With that, I call to end this first session. Thank you very much to Linda Conlon, Colin Brown, Phil Winfield and Alec Coles.