Heritage group

Nearly 5,000 Prospect members work in the heritage sector. They are concentrated in the UK’s prestigious national museums and galleries – from the British Museum and Library to the Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert, the National Gallery, Tate and Tate Modern. Outside London, Prospect members can be found in the national collections on Merseyside, Wales and Scotland.

Prospect also represents several hundred archaeologists, who work for the Museum of London Archaeology Service and in Trusts and units across the UK – from York to Oxford.

Our members are specialists in conservation and curatorial work and are the acknowledged experts in their field – many with international academic reputations.

Together they collect, conserve, explain and interpret our heritage. Others are engaged in scientific research into natural history or preserving, recording and explaining the built and buried heritage.

Prospect has long argued the case for the heritage sector to be adequately funded by central government. But the reality is somewhat different. Successive governments have squeezed grant-in-aid to museums and galleries so hard that in real terms the sector is £31m – 11 per cent worse off than it was nine years ago.

The financial squeeze has hit staff hard with job cuts across the sector and salaries falling behind their comparators in the civil service and other public bodies. Exhibits have also been affected, with gallery closures and the mothballing of collections.

Graduate entrants in museum curatorial grades can expect a starting salary of around £12,000. By comparison, the starting salary for engineering and IT graduates is in the region of £17,000.

While the campaign for proper funding of the national collections continues – with the aim of achieving the statutory goals of access, education and social inclusion – one key Prospect policy objective has been achieved, the re-introduction of free access to the national collections by the Labour government in 2001.