Letters to the Editor

Helicopter Museum

Dear Georgina,

Like many other non national museums up and down the country The Helicopter Museum continually suffers from a shortage of funding. Despite being a registered charity we get no local authority grant,the Chancellor has just changed the Gift Aid rules which were worth £4,000 a year to us, and the Museum and Libraries Association, which is the government authority for national grant aid, is focused on staff training and education, which is of little use if you can't afford to employ the staff in the first place!!

Finally the Heritage Lottery Fund has less and less money as the punters realise A) the chances of winning are slim and B) that the government is creaming off the money to bolster their own ambitions.

We have the ridiculous situation at the moment where we are trying to raise the money to build a new restoration facility, thus giving new opportunities to current and fresh volunteers to learn about restoration and engineering but, because it is the building shell that needs to be funded rather than the equipment, which we already have, the HLF says it isn't educational enough. The same argument applied to our bid to...