Councils of despair

“What don’t they get about this stuff?” was the rhetorical question spat in exasperation by a colleague as we set the world to rights last week – ‘they’ being local councillors and ‘this stuff’, funding for arts and culture.

The local government annual budget cycle has triggered an uptick in announcements of scrapped culture funding this year. As well as fighting today’s battles, we need to look ahead and ask what we can do to revert these decisions and prevent next year’s list of cuts being longer still.

Is the case for local funding of the arts losing its potency? What is it they don’t get? It’s illuminating to look at this through the eyes of the local authority.

Return on investment

The Local Government Association (LGA) recently undertook research which found for every £1 invested in the arts there is a £4 return for the local economy. In recent years – at the insistence of local authorities – arts organisations have used this, or locally-generated figures, to demonstrate their economic impact.

Councillors are used to such calculations. They’re also told by the LGA that they’ll see a similar return for investment in sports and leisure. Likewise their £1, if spent on transport, will make £4.50. Invest instead in adapting homes for disabled people and that £1 will bring a (very specific) £7.23. Each pound spent on a Business and IP Centre will generate £6.95 – with the added benefit that such centres support the ongoing use of libraries.

Seen in the broader context, the claim of £4 Gross Value Added (GVA) to the local economy for every £1 invested may not be the compelling case for funding that it first appears. Critically, for councils, £4 generated for the local economy is not the same as £4 generated for their own budget.

A thriving concert hall might mean a busier restaurant employing more people, but the council itself sees no increase in business rates or council tax and doesn’t benefit from the increased VAT take. It’s only if a new business opens, or a new home is built, that the council’s coffers directly benefit. Were councils empowered to add a small levy on to each ticket, they’d be more inclined to sit up.

Is economic impact getting more important?

It’s tempting to say the return on investment for council funding is really in benefit to the community – particularly when responsibility for driving economic growth has moved over time to organisations such as Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) or Mayors. LEPs are far more amenable to an economic argument for investment but are generally uninterested in providing regular funding, preferring one-off skills programmes, new buildings or facilities.

Importantly though, there is a growing consensus in local government that LEPs should be disbanded, and their functions returned to local councils. So this is not the time to give up on the economic return argument altogether. If councils get their way, economic impact will matter even more in future.

Happier, healthier communities?

Councillors often hear that arts organisations bring health and wellbeing benefits. Case studies may tweak at heartstrings – and that’s good. Powerful case studies can be more influential than robust data, but it tends to be the data that drives budgetary decisions.

Arts and culture organisations are generally ill-equipped to undertake the longitudinal studies at population scale which persuasively evidence the health and wellbeing benefits of their work. Instead, most have to rely on national research commissioned by ACE among others.

It’s a similar story when trying to prove the contribution of the arts to placemaking. Most organisations will have data showing they attract ticket-buyers from surrounding areas. But outside of Cities of Culture, data proving the arts power a sense of place is patchy. Data collection is dominated by the priorities of national funders.

Can arts organisations break down their audience data by how long people have lived in a local community for example? Most can’t. We need to look again at national data collection and the purposes it serves.

Community hubs?

In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, teacher Mrs Lintott reflects on what became of her pupils in later life – headmasters, magistrates, “pillars of a community that no longer has much use for pillars”.

As services retreat from our high streets, we’re losing pillars quite often before the community truly has no more need of them. There are excellent individual examples but, overall, there is still potential for arts buildings to transform into civic spaces, to anchor a town or city centre. Many existing buildings, particularly newer ones, are well-placed to be daytime civic centres: the local theatre can also be the local health centre, the local bank, court or housing office.

There is open scepticism about the value of funding arts buildings, but we should be careful not to write off such powerful assets. Tying our buildings to public service delivery is not a panacea but it does strengthen the case for funding at local level. Threatening the viability of a museum is one thing, but risking the library, bank and council service desk hosted within it? A whole other matter.

Elephants everywhere

But there is an elephant in the room, multiple elephants, in fact. Some so big they could crush us underfoot, others more easily tamed if we are able to adapt. Possibly the biggest is the way local government funding settlements work. Compared with many other countries, the UK’s local government collects much less tax. And when councils have less money, so too do place-based arts organisations.

The second elephant is that the Labour Party is probably not coming to the rescue with national funding. When Shadow Culture Secretary Thangham Debbonaire talks about “getting the widest approach to where we get investment” for the arts, she probably means the private sector. Labour has signed up to Conservative departmental spending plans, which means sizeable cuts ahead for DCMS.

The third elephant is that, as well as limiting the amount of money local government can raise, central government has slashed local authority funding over the last decade. The list of councils in financial distress is only going to grow. Unlike social care, planning, environmental services, housing, highways or public health, funding the arts is a political choice.

The fourth elephant: de-funding the arts is also a political choice, and one that councils (so far) seem to be able to get away with. The political consequences for those that have made cuts to the arts have been negligible. The more councils that make such cuts, the more cuts there will be.

It all comes down to politics

Fox hunters. Fathers. Farage. Our recent political history is dotted with examples of organised, well-funded campaigners wielding disproportionate influence to make some policy areas just too hot to handle for the political classes.

The arts have all the ingredients to be a formidable, national, grassroots lobby and yet right now we seem more concerned with documenting the growing crisis than fighting it. Councils are not feeling the full force of a noisy, organised, national campaign. Being polite, determined, constructive and evidence-based may only get us so far.

As the recent ITV drama Mister Bates vs the Post Office has so compellingly shown, powerful stories which rile voters can be more effective at changing the political weather than any data. The data is still essential, but if the arts can’t tell our own story in a co-ordinated, national campaign which invites audiences to mobilise, who can? There’s no industry better placed. We can and we must.

Robin Cantrill-Fenwick is Chief Executive Officer at Baker Richards.
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