Councils told to cut museums red tape which bans them from tweeting too much

Michael Wilkinson, Political Correspondent 17 October 2016 • 5:00pm

Matt Hancock, the culture minister, is encouraging councils to let museums run their own digital presence Credit: Telegraph/Julian Simmonds

Councils should break the shackles placed on local museums and allow them to take control of their digital presence, the Government has warned.

Some local authority museums are saddled with old fashioned websites which are often embedded within council websites or have a poor user interface.

One museum even reported being limited to "three tweets per week" that had to be scheduled around other council tweets. Another reported tweets having to be vetted by a council marketing department.

Matt Hancock, the culture and digital minister, suggested in a speech in Manchester today that local authorities should "follow the lead" of the Government which has "stripped off almost all the rules and regulations" around how museum websites are run.

In the speech he said: "As well as driving excellence, digital can blast open access, one of my passions. That doesn’t mean just setting up a website and a Facebook page. That's just scraping the surface. It's about much more and it’s about each institution doing what works for them.

"A few years ago we stripped off almost all the rules and regulations around how they were run. We trusted the people who'd been put in charge. They now operate as independent businesses, free from central control and able to deliver some real innovations in online marketing and audience engagement.

"I’d say to sponsored institutions, use these freedoms. And I'd encourage local authorities who still keep things centralised to follow that lead."

Alistair Brown, policy officer for the Museums Association, said: "We do hear anecdotally of museums where they are limited by council rules on things like the number of tweets they can send per week. Some councils are very risk averse.

"There are museums who are doing a great job and you have to have a good offer in the first place but giving them more freedom helps them to communicate with their audiences.

"It is not really an area where we need more rules. It is more about changing the way they think. It is about seeing the value of what they have and what can be done with it.

"It is good to see a leadership stance from the Government, as we've seen in Matt's speech, to say they expect museums to really have these freedoms."