The Select Committee’s findings are a missed opportunity, says Christopher Gordon

After an inquiry lasting six months, Parliament published its report on the funding of arts and heritage just before Arts Council England’s funding announcement – conspiracy, coincidence, cock-up or cop out? It is a dismally missed opportunity to make serious impact at a time of fragility for the arts and heritage.

The inquiry’s methodology followed the bumbling British way of conducting political business so far as culture is concerned. It is a typical product of the blinkered London metropolis-parliament-media nexus. The text is heavily reliant on the Committee’s minutes of its own meetings – the unsubstantiated opinions of the loudest and most predictable voices they themselves selected as witnesses. Yet it has largely ignored a mass of good, often much more reliable and perceptive, written evidence that was submitted – 238 documents. Compounding this, only the written evidence of those interviewed gets to be printed with the report (19 papers). The remaining 212 are relegated to an ‘additional’ website. Commons Committee Clerks apart, it seems the MPs wanted nobody to advise or guide them through the rhetoric, prejudice and ideology to which they subjected themselves.

The Committee’s fact-finding took them to Pinewood, Dulwich and to see the Arts Council Collection (all in London), and one brief visit to Manchester. While the beleaguered ACE was managing illogical funding cuts and major restructuring on arbitrarily imposed Ministerial timetables, the Committee failed to take up Ed Vaizey’s opening on who should now be responsible for setting policy (DCMS or arm’s length agencies?). Instead, it devoted disproportionate time to beating ACE up over the its art collection, the ancient London orchestras chestnut and some spectacular grandstanding from the West Bromwich East MP over The Public, which is very stale news from the previous ACE regime. There are times when the tribal cross-Party dynamic in Select Committees resembles a gang of bullies unable to call a halt to their provocations. Forensic questioning it is not.

The MPs were “surprised and disappointed at the ACE’s decision to withdraw all funding from Arts & Business after 2012,” which they think “largely represented good value for money”. Did they conduct any cost benefit assessment to support this belief? No – so their view can only be based on crude ideology, rhetoric and lobbying. There’s regret that more hasn’t been done on philanthropy “at modest levels”, though little by way of concrete suggestions. ACE’s National Portfolio funding programme is welcomed – but the brickbats for its overhasty implementation should be aimed at Ministers and not at the hapless messengers. There is, at least, censure of Jeremy Hunt’s crude butchery of the Film Council, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and Public Lending Right mechanisms, there’s no hint that these ‘reforms’ may be ideologically driven, untested and may not even save a penny in the short- to medium-term.

A justly celebrated 1982 House of Commons Select Committee Report caught the zeitgeist of the Thatcher era and had a significant influence on subsequent developments. This new report is not remotely in the same league. Given the timing, the last word must go to Eeyore: “Pathetic, that’s what it is.”