Should Museums Have a Duty of Candour?

As he assumes the office of Prime Minister today, Andy Burnham has pledged to make the implementation of the long-awaited Hillsborough Law one of the first priorities of his government.

The legislation’s adoption was one of Keir Starmer’s final acts before leaving office, handing Burnham one of the first major reforms of his premiership to oversee. In some of his first comments as an elected member of parliament, Burnham told the House of Commons that the bill ensures “justice for ordinary people going forward”.

A Liverpool-born politician, Burnham has spent years campaigning alongside the families of the 97 Liverpool supporters unlawfully killed in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

Inspired by that decades-long campaign, the legislation seeks to ensure public authorities act with candour, transparency and honesty when tragedy strikes. The idea behind the law is to counteract institutional defensiveness by enforcing a legal duty to tell the truth.

At its heart is a proposed statutory duty of candour, requiring public bodies and public officials to cooperate fully with official investigations and inquiries, proactively disclose relevant information and avoid misleading the public or withholding evidence. While the Bill emerged from the campaign that followed the Hillsborough disaster, it has increasingly come to be seen as a response to a broader pattern of institutional failure, including the infected blood scandal, the Post Office Horizon scandal and the Grenfell Tower fire. In each case, victims and bereaved families have accused public authorities of concealment, delay and a basic failure to tell the truth. 

Taken together, these scandals exposed a recurring pattern of institutions protecting their own reputations ahead of the public interest. The proposed legislation seeks to reverse that culture by shifting the burden onto public authorities, requiring them to cooperate fully rather than leaving it to victims to uncover wrongdoing themselves.

That raises questions for Britain’s national museums and galleries. Although the precise legal implications will depend on an institution’s governance and statutory status, museums that receive public funding or exercise public responsibilities may increasingly be expected to embrace the same culture of openness. Even where the law does not apply directly, its underlying principles are likely to shape expectations around accountability, governance and institutional transparency.

Hillsborough Disaster 20th anniversary banner, 2009. Photo: Linksfuss via Wikimedia Commons

Sustained scrutiny for Britain’s museums

In recent years, some of Britain’s best-known museums have found themselves under sustained scrutiny over the transparency of their decision-making. The British Museum theft scandal offered a particularly stark example. In 2023, the museum revealed that around 2,000 objects, including gold jewellery, gems and pieces of ancient glass, were believed to have been removed from its storerooms over a number of years. Questions quickly shifted from the thefts themselves to the institution’s response: an art dealer had reportedly alerted senior staff to suspected wrongdoing in 2021, but was initially assured that an internal investigation had found no evidence of theft. The ensuing crisis led to the resignation of the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, and prompted an independent review which identified significant weaknesses in collection security. While the museum accepted the review’s recommendations, the full report was not published because of the ongoing police investigation. Critics argued that the museum’s failures of disclosure and responsiveness compounded the original wrongdoing.

Similar questions have emerged elsewhere across the sector. The Science Museum has repeatedly faced criticism over its sponsorship partnerships with fossil fuel companies, most recently Adani Green Energy, part of the Indian conglomerate founded by billionaire Gautam Adani, which has faced sustained allegations of corporate misconduct. The museum has resisted calls to publish the full terms of some sponsorship agreements.

Questions of openness have also arisen over curatorial decision-making. In 2022, the Wellcome Collection altered its exhibition Medicine Man and removed references to Israel and Palestine from a separate exhibit during its development. The Whitworth gallery in Manchester faced similar criticism after withdrawing Cloud Studies, an exhibition by the research agency Forensic Architecture, following complaints from UK Lawyers for Israel over material relating to Gaza. 

None of these controversies are directly comparable, nor do they necessarily point to wrongdoing. But they illustrate a broader shift in public expectations. Increasingly, scrutiny falls not only on the decisions museums make but on the openness, consistency and candour with which they explain them. For institutions whose authority depends on public trust, the process has become almost as important as the outcome.

Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, 2021 (installation view, The Whitworth, Manchester). Courtesy the artists

Transparency builds trust

For Chris Garrard, co-director of the campaign group Culture Unstained, the Hillsborough Law reflects a broader change in what the public expects from institutions exercising public responsibilities.

“At the top of the British Museum and Science Museum, there’s a culture of silence rather than candour,” he says. “Whether they are pushing through sponsorship deals with major polluters or defending the removal of references to Palestine, processes deserving of scrutiny are too often clouded in conflicting comments, redacted documents and unexplained delays to the publication of board minutes.”

Garrard believes institutions exercising public responsibilities should welcome greater openness.

“The directors of these museums already have responsibilities to act openly, honestly and accountably, but this Bill places those principles on a much firmer statutory footing,” he says. “Sponsorship deals are commercial transactions involving publicly accountable institutions, and we should now rightly expect greater candour around these agreements and how they are reached.”

Others argue that many of these principles already exist within the museum sector. One of the core principles of the Museums Association’s recently updated Code of Ethics states that museums, and everyone working within them, should be “transparent and accountable”.

“This means we should be open and transparent in all our activities and museum workers should take responsibility for their decisions and actions,” says the association’s director, Sharon Heal. “We encourage museums to have freedom of expression and complaints policies that are readily available to the public and to ensure that decision making is open and delivers public benefit.”

The question, then, is not simply whether transparency is valued, but whether voluntary professional standards are sufficient to ensure it when institutions come under pressure.

Professor David Lewis, one of the UK’s leading experts on whistleblowing law and organisational culture, argues that legislation can help establish expectations, but that lasting change depends on whether organisations genuinely encourage people to speak up.

“The biggest barriers to people speaking up are the belief that nothing will happen and the fear of victimisation,” he says. “Legislation has an important role to play, but organisational culture is even more important. Unless people are actively encouraged to raise concerns–and see that those concerns are acted upon–they’re unlikely to come forward.”

Lewis says organisations that genuinely encourage people to raise concerns are ultimately stronger, not weaker.

“Too many organisations still have a tendency to shoot the messenger rather than address the problem,” he says. “Leadership has to come from the top. If you want a culture of openness, you have to demonstrate that speaking up is welcomed, valued and leads to action.”

Drawing on experience across sectors including healthcare and financial services, Lewis argues that openness is not simply an ethical aspiration but an effective form of organisational risk management.

“It’s a no-brainer for any organisation to have a healthy internal procedure for dealing with concerns,” he says. “Not only does it help identify problems earlier, it can actually protect the organisation’s reputation. Transparency builds trust over the long term.”

He believes museums should also think beyond internal whistleblowing procedures. “Museums and galleries shouldn’t just encourage staff to raise concerns–they should also make it easy for members of the public to do the same,” he says. “Organisations that develop a reputation for openness and transparency are ultimately much stronger than those that try to suppress criticism.”

Lewis’s observations point to an important distinction. A statutory duty of candour is not simply about requiring organisations to disclose information after something has gone wrong. It also seeks to create institutional cultures in which concerns are raised early, mistakes are acknowledged and corrected and accountability becomes an ordinary part of governance rather than something imposed by public inquiries or media scrutiny. For museums, whose legitimacy rests on public trust, those cultural shifts may ultimately prove as significant as any new legal obligations.

British Museum, 2011. Photo: Harry_nl via Flickr

Openness is cultural as much as legal

Not everyone believes the Hillsborough Law will affect museums in the same way. Professor Gareth Morgan, Emeritus Professor of Charity Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, notes that its legal application will depend on whether an institution falls within the scope of the legislation as a public authority or public office holder. Many museums operate as charities, arm’s-length bodies or independent trusts, meaning the legal position is likely to vary. Nevertheless, he argues, the broader principles remain highly relevant.

“All organisations could learn from these principles,” he says. “One of the key roles of charity trustees is to maintain public trust in the work of their charities. Very few charities can advance their objects for public benefit in the absence of public trust.”

Morgan also cautions that transparency is not an absolute principle. Trustees have legal obligations around confidentiality, employment matters, commercial negotiations and data protection that cannot simply be overridden by a general expectation of openness. The challenge, he suggests, lies in distinguishing between information that must legitimately remain confidential and decisions or processes that ought to be open to public scrutiny.

There are, of course, practical limits to absolute transparency. Museums routinely deal with commercially sensitive sponsorship negotiations, personnel matters, donor confidentiality, restitution claims, security procedures and ongoing legal disputes that cannot always be disclosed publicly. A statutory duty of candour would not remove those obligations. Rather, it seeks to ensure that where institutions exercise public responsibilities, they do not mislead, conceal relevant information or frustrate legitimate public scrutiny. The emphasis is less on publishing everything than on acting honestly, cooperating fully when questions arise and avoiding the defensive institutional behaviours that have characterised so many recent public scandals.

Whether the Hillsborough Law ultimately applies directly to every museum is therefore almost beside the point. Its significance lies in what it signals about the changing relationship between public institutions and the people they serve. Increasingly, the expectation is that publicly funded organisations will not simply make decisions in the public interest, but will also be prepared to explain, justify and evidence those decisions openly.

For museums, that expectation reaches beyond crisis management. Questions about sponsorship, deaccessioning, repatriation, board appointments, executive pay, exhibition programming and institutional partnerships all increasingly attract public scrutiny. The duty of candour raises the possibility that transparency itself may become a defining measure of institutional credibility.

Ultimately, the Hillsborough Law is likely to be judged by whether it changes the behaviour of public authorities. Yet its wider significance may prove cultural as much as legal. At a time when audiences increasingly expect museums to explain not only what they do but why they do it, openness is becoming more than a matter of good governance. It is increasingly becoming part of the licence to operate.

Whether prompted by legislation, professional ethics or evolving public expectations, a genuine culture of candour could become one of the defining expectations placed upon Britain’s publicly accountable cultural institutions.