Babbidge reviews the government policy on museums during the last 40 years, and Davies discusses its impact on museums attendance over the past decade, showing that museums are not expanding their audiences or broadening their social appeal.

The various benefits of culture for education, society and economy are at the core of the British public policy and have engendered the current evidence-based approach to arts and culture. Both this instrumentalisation, on the basis of which the public subsidy to the cultural sector is justified, and the difficult measuring of the values of culture have been a topic of discussion in the UK. This number compiles a selection of commentaries on Holden's Capturing cultural value -- how culture has become a tool of government policy; his pamphlet of 2004 for an alternative approach is available, with a short abstract, in the Cultural Policies Collection.

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