Great white hope

Government is thinking hard about the arts and there’s much positive talk in the air. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is on the record in his support for the economic importance of the arts and creative industries. The Prime Minister says he believes passionately in publicly funded arts and culture and their part in enhancing every person’s life opportunities. The Culture Minister has challenged the cultural sectors and their partners and allies to contribute to the White Paper, due to be published this year.

With all this high-level political support, and a relatively benign autumn settlement for DCMS and all who are funded by it, it might be tempting to think that a warmly drafted White Paper is all we need to keep the country’s arts and culture in a steady state. How wrong that would be.

The fundamental funding challenges to local government risk causing substantial damage to the foundations of our cultural life in local communities

Step change

For good reason the recent Select Committee inquiry into the work of Arts Council England argued the need for a new national cultural policy framework to provide overall guidance on national public funding settlements and ensure that the right institutional support and delivery structures are put in place.

England needs that policy framework and those structures to carry us fairly, effectively and democratically through the next decades into the mid part of the twenty-first century. But there is little to suggest that those in a position nationally to address these issues are planning to do so.

If we want an holistic and balanced national cultural policy and funding settlement, designed to deliver both excellence in cultural production, presentation and training, and equity in access to opportunities for participation and learning locally, then we have to fight for it – and the time to do that is now.

Our new paper, A Policy for the Arts and Culture in England: The Next Steps?, proposes a principle-led approach to addressing the twin challenges of excellence and equity. It is based on the clear separation of the roles of Treasury and Lottery funding, and counterintuitively perhaps, for proposals for a national policy framework, our focus is on local government.

Shaky foundations

Fifty years ago, Jennie Lee’s White Paper (A Policy for the Arts – The First Steps, February 1965) kick-started a process of growth for the arts outside London that would have delighted her. Her chosen partners in local government rose to a series of challenges presented by successive reorganisations to plan for and invest in new facilities – national, regional and local – and the regional arts structures she championed joined with them in a potent partnership in most parts of England.

Twenty years ago, the extraordinary level of new resources for the arts and culture provided through John Major’s National Lottery could build on these foundations across a country transformed and made richer by its diversity of cultures and the power of digital technologies, but confronted by the new challenges of climate change and an ageing population.

Regrettably (which would probably not have surprised Baroness Lee) during this same period the aggrandising interests of metropolitan London’s cultural elites that she and Harold Wilson largely contained 50 years ago have re-asserted themselves to ever greater effect. London has drawn further and further ahead of the rest of England in its dominance of cultural life and in its ‘percentage take’ from national funds for culture, both private and public.

Now, the fundamental funding challenges to local government risk causing substantial damage to the foundations of our cultural life in local communities. The facilities, expertise and the small grants that nurture the diversity and richness of local cultural life and provide the seedbeds from which new talent emerges are disappearing. The impact of these changes does not only affect the voluntary sector. It risks suppressing the wellsprings that nurture new generations of creative talent – as relevant to the economic health of our creative industries as to the need for new generations of artists to re-invigorate and challenge our cultures. As Lee Hall has written: “It is the local youth theatre, arts centre, dance class or back room of a pub which provides the incubator for every actor, writer, dancer or musician who later takes on the world.”

Twin ambitions

The White Paper on Culture therefore must address two principal challenges if it is to chart a credible route forward over the coming decade and be worthy of comparison with its celebrated predecessor.

1. An ambition and a ‘route map’ to excellence in cultural production, presentation and training nationwide: There should be a straightforward commitment from central government to giving England’s great regional centres the resources within their own portfolio of cultural organisations to work with their international and metropolitan peers as equal partners. As the economy comes into balance – the funding required for new activity outside London should be found from taxation just as it currently is for activity in the capital. Armed with such a commitment, local authorities (alone and in combination), the private sector, higher education and the cultural sector itself (from the largest institutions to individual artists) will rise to the partnership and planning challenge.
2. An ambition and a ‘route map’ to equity in access to opportunities for participation and learning locally nationwide: There should be an equally straightforward commitment to enabling the arts and culture to play a leading role in supporting and enhancing individual and community wellbeing in the local ‘places’ where we live our daily lives. This policy must emphasise the deployment of funds to those communities and individuals facing the greatest challenges. Here the resources to achieve change can properly be found from the Lottery and the power to design programmes and take decisions within them should be located below the national level. Local authorities (alone and in combination), health authorities, the voluntary sector, trusts and foundations, schools, further and higher education, providers of apprenticeships, larger cultural organisations and community based artists and trainers will rise to the partnership challenge.

Starting point

Five commitments are all that are needed to establish the key underpinning principles for a new policy and guide the design of any new structures required to achieve this more equitable settlement across England:

• Subsidiarity – taking decisions on the distribution of public funding at the right level
• Sustainability and diversity – economic, environmental, social and cultural
• Intrinsic and instrumental – recognising these complementary, not competing purposes for public funding of arts and culture
• Transparency – clear and accountable data on the sources of Lottery income and on visitors to and audience for major publicly funded cultural institutions
• The distinctiveness of National Lottery funding – ethically different, distinct from, and not to be used as a substitute for, Treasury funding.

The Treasury/Lottery issue

The last of these commitments will be pivotal. 702 organisations are currently in receipt of guaranteed revenue funding of over £775m from the Treasury, whether via the DCMS directly or indirectly through Arts Council England. Over two-thirds of these taxpayers’ funds go to London-based organisations.

The Chancellor’s Comprehensive Spending Review last November showed a willingness to invest in selected new cultural projects outside (as well as inside) London. As national government’s capacity to address its contribution to the nation’s quality of life grows, this approach could be applied more systematically.

For the Lottery – under the terms of existing Lottery Directions and in alignment with Arts Council England’s ‘holistic case for culture’ – the design of funding programmes and funding decisions should move from national to more local bases over the next three years.

Setting the bar high

Jennie Lee’s White paper addressed the challenges she faced with clear eyes but with an equally clear determination to make a beginning and to make a difference: “There is no short-term solution for what by its very nature is a long-term problem. This is a field in which, even in the most favourable circumstances, it will never be possible to do as much as we want to do as quickly as we want to do it. But that is no excuse for not doing as much as we can and more than has hitherto been attempted.”

It need not be another fifty years until the next White Paper on Culture but this is our opportunity to set the bar high for this one in the particular circumstances of 2016, to challenge it to embed some tough and enduring principles into its new policy framework for England’s arts and culture, and to make some substantial structural interventions to change the status quo for the better.

Christopher Gordon, David Powell and Peter Stark publish under the imprint GPS Culture.
www.gpsculture.co.uk

Click to read the full report ‘A Policy for the Arts and Culture in England: The Next Steps?’