The question as to why the Arts Council took such a large hit in Monday’s cuts – 4% or £19m when everyone else in DCMS only had 3% - has an answer: culture minister Ed Vaizey says it is because of the £18.4m reserves ACE has which it can dip into, and he thinks the hit can be ‘mitigated’ more when more lottery money starts coming on stream from next April. By then, though, the arts will almost certainly have much worse cuts to deal with. Talk is of 5% a year up to 2014 being docked, scorched earth.
ACE has tried several times to get access to the reserves – created by the merger between with the regional arts boards in 2002 and since prudently added to – but has been forbidden to each time by DCMS. That was the old regime, though, and ACE will smart from already havig had this year’s money cut by £4m and having added a further £6.5m from its own savings, but Alan Davey and Forgan will not want to get into a fight with the new DCMS team over that. ‘We have received confirmation from the department that the additional £5 million cut the Arts Council has been asked to make is to be mitigated - if possible - by the freeing up of our blocked historic reserves’ Davey says today. ‘We are now getting on with the task at hand and making sure we do our absolute best to minimise the impact on the art and the frontline organisations who enable it to happen’.
It seems likely that they will be able to manage it, with our without the reserve, with no serious hit on the RFOs. Nor are they going to tackle the red herring of lottery money yet, which will need legislation if it is to be used to plug holes in revenue funding.
But if tapping into reserves to maintain support of ‘front line services’ – Hunt’s phrase - is to be acceptable practice it goes against the very policy the new government is advancing, in calling on arts organisations to create endowment funds. That will undoubtedly be seized on by the opposition as the Conservatives reverting to type, and all the pre-election pro-arts speak perfidious lip service.
And while ACE gets down serious with Vaizey and Hunt there may be other awkwardness. Vaizey was speaking at the Arts & Business launch of its new Big Arts Give project, showing his approval of A&B and its new emphasis on philanthropic giving. But when asked if he would chop A&B, he invoked the arm’s length principle: ‘That up to the Arts Council’. So if ACE does decide it can do without handing over £4m a year to A&B, will DCMS feel obliged to take it over – after all, it was in the DCMS fold until 2001?
National museums, of course, are already directly funded from the department, and the Tate gets a cut this year by £2.1m, the British Museum will lose £1.8m, English Heritage £4.8m and the Science Museum £1.476m. The MLA gets a 3% cut, and Roy Clare, the chief executive, is almost enthusiastic about it, even though much paring has been done already and their regional offices have gone. He gives short shrift to the quangos that give their chairs limos and whose CEOs go first class (not the case at the Arts Council, it has to be said). ‘The game’s up’ he tells me ‘and this round of in-year cuts is a medicine we have to swallow like grown-ups’.
