National Trust membership numbers are not all they seem

Charles Moore writes in the Spectator,

Uncritically, the media reproduced this week the National Trust’s press release that its 18- to 25-year olds’ member numbers have grown by 26 per cent over the previous year. This is good news, but not surprising when you consider the amount of promotion the NT devotes to rustling up the young, and above all when you compare prices. In 2022, a family NT membership cost £126. Today it costs £176.40. No wonder such membership is now declining. Also in 2022, ordinary adult individual membership cost £76.80. Today, it costs £100.80. For the young, the 2022 comparison looks very different. In 2022, it cost £48; today, £50.40, a real-terms price drop. This is not genuine long-term growth. The media did not cover a significant change in NT self-reporting. Until now, it has always led with the total of members, which fell just short, at the peak (2019-20), of six million. This year, unexplained, the annual report leads with the figure of ‘memberships’, rather than members, a much lower number because family and couples’ memberships contain more than one person. So suddenly the figure is 2.62 million. Why the change of usage? Perhaps because, with the earlier headline measurement, people could see at a glance that member numbers have continuously fallen from the 5.95 million in 2020 to the current figure of 5.29 million, a drop of more than 11 per cent.