TaitMail Is this the big arts funding rethink we’ve been screaming for?
The arts don’t often qualify for words like “bombshell” when they get headlines, but Lisa Nandy’s announcement yesterday of at least £270m in a new fund is in the frame.
It wasn’t expected but it coincides with a couple of other curious/encouraging developments which together could point to a fundamental switch in cultural funding for which think tanks and arts commentators have been screaming for years.
This new Arts Everywhere Fund echoes Jennie Lee’s first ever arts white paper in which she envisioned “arts for everyone, everywhere”, and Nandy chose its 60th anniversary to, presumably, give it credibility. Which, for that money, maybe it does.
Because this is not, as far as we can tell, taking from Peter to give to Paul as it often is, or from the National Lottery; it’s largely new money written into next year’s DCMS budget which many assumed would be a sacrificed for the cost of boots on the ground in Ukraine, but which must have been sanctioned by Rachel Reeves. The initiative includes a new £85m pot for urgent capital works; £25m for the existing Museum Estate and Development Fund; £20m for local museums; £15m for Heritage at Risk; £5.5m for libraries; £120m more for the established Public Bodies Infrastructure Fund; a rather stingy £3.2m for four education projects.
But doesn’t the Arts Council do this kind of thing, at arm’s length?
It comes hot on the heels of an announcement on a different boost for the cultural powerhouse, as Ms Nandy likes to call it, this time from Angela Rayner as the communities secretary. She has pledged £64m of levelling up money – remember that? - for nine cultural projects around the country, including for a new National Poetry Centre in Leeds, a project close to the heart of the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage - why Leeds he was asked, why not he replied. Other projects to get the money are in Liverpool, York, Coventry, Worcester, Dundee, Conwy and Newport.
“Through investing in these critical cultural projects we can empower both local leaders and people to really tap into their potential and celebrate everything their home town has to offer” Rayner said in what has become a familiar mantra since the economic potential of the arts (currently worth £24bn a year) dawned on politicians a couple of minutes ago. “This means more tourism, more growth and more money in people’s pockets”.
This money had been promised in Jeremy Hunt’s last Budget and cancelled by Reeves in the autumn. She’s had second thoughts and has taken some of it back out of the till – Hunt had pledged £100m.
Some fundamental rethinking going on here, then, about the social and economic value of culture to the UK, and it could mean some startling iconoclasm.
The third thing that happened was the revelation this week that the Arts Council has put off its revision of its lottery grants, planned for April but now deferred until at least September. ACE hands out more £200m a year from its National Lottery allowance which has become a valuable adjunct to its National Portfolio, paying for things like the Let’s Create strategy, but ACE is worried because the lottery income is reducing at a rate of over 3% a year. The money is dwindling, projects’ costs are rising, the bids are growing with people realising culture has increasingly diverse applications, notably in communities, while funds available from trusts and foundations are at best tightening, at worst disappearing. So fine tuning to the lottery input seems not only essential but long overdue.
Why, then, put off such a vital review – possibly indefinitely? Maybe because there is more fundamental thinking going on about the Arts Council and what it does. Venerable as it is at almost 80, the future of the Arts Council and the relevance of the arm’s length principle ACE represents has periodically been under threat. Has its time come?
It won’t have escaped you that something else is happening regarding ACE. Baroness Margaret Hodge this week settled down with her team of advisors from around the country to conduct a review of the Arts Council to see, specifically, if it’s serving the regions properly. The previous government had commissioned Baroness Mary Archer to do a different review, to see, specifically, if it was giving value for the money. This went up in the same smoke, it was thought, as levelling up. But Hodge’s scrupulous reputation, surely, will not allow her not to take into account elements of Archer’s brief.
For the record, in 2022-23 ACE had £540m of government grant to disburse (almost exactly twice the value of the new Arts Everywhere Fund), plus £252m in lottery money, and a staff of 665.
ACE does other things too, it should be said, such as export licensing for works of art and antiquity, the government indemnity scheme, the acceptance in lieu and the cultural gifts scheme, and it does support work for the reviewing committee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest.
And it’s barely a month since Nandy joined forces with the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, to announce the Soft Power Council to do what, it looked like, the British Council has been doing for over 90 years, just as the British Council was announcing that it was starving to death and that without urgent sustenance the obsequies would be read before it was 100.
So between them, are three cabinet ministers, one of them the deputy prime minister (and it would be good if the education secretary in similar mood joined the group), presiding over the demise of two keystones of Britain’s 20thcentury cultural structure, home and abroad, as part of the government’s Plan for Change in which arts, culture and creativity for the first time have a leading role?
Hodge has 18 months to report on ACE, and if the government has a large-scale plan for a new arts ecosystem it will know roughly what it is before then. We don’t know what future is being seen for the Arts Everywhere Fund; what future funding is being seen for the Arts Council; whether the British Council is in God’s waiting room. We do know that the old arts funding system has collapsed and we need a new one very soon.
"Now, more than ever” said Es Devlin, the sculptor and set designer, in response to Nandy’s announcement, “the cultivation of our collective consciousness, our shared imagination, our ability to seek patterns and imagine possible futures is critical, and this investment in the arts and arts education is urgent and most welcome.”
We’ll see.