Opera
Lord Murphy of Torfaen
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support opera.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure, particularly after listening to that very interesting debate on Northern Ireland, to come to a very different topic: the future of opera in this country. I tried at the time of the general election to obtain a QSD and succeeded—but the election stopped it.
This is a particularly important and significant debate. Mainstream opera—and I am talking about mainstream opera—is, in my view, one of the greatest musical art forms in the world, and it enriches our society. It encompasses orchestras, soloists and choruses, and it is spectacular, musical and dramatic. My father was a coal miner. When he was a young man, his parish priest introduced him to “Cavalleria Rusticana” on 78s. The idea that opera is somehow elitist is completely nonsensical—certainly where I come from in Wales, but also in our country as a whole. You will pay more to go to a pop concert or a football match than you will to go to an opera. The idea that it is only rich people who go to the opera needs to be scotched.
Opera is one of our greatest institutions, but it is in crisis: in serious trouble. Over the last number of years, there has been a serious reduction in productions and performances of opera. Of the four main opera companies in England and Wales, excluding Glyndebourne, three have suffered considerable contraction in the work they do. Comparing our country with others, Germany has 59 opera companies and France has 17. In other European countries there are many others. But we have only those four.
As a consequence of the cuts, to which I will refer in a moment, there has been a considerable drop in audience numbers. It is not because people do not want to go to the opera but because, throughout the whole country, there is reduced opportunity for them to do so.
Even more worrying is the situation outside London, which is now very grave: there has been a serious decline in touring opera in England and Wales. For example, the Welsh National Opera, with which I have some affinity, used to go to cities such as Liverpool, Southampton, Oxford, Birmingham and others. It still does, but, as I will explain later on, in far fewer numbers.
Mainstream opera is inevitably much more costly than other art forms. It is 10 times more costly to produce an opera than drama, for example. Since 1945, public funding has been the cornerstone of mainstream opera companies. We have the Royal Opera, Welsh National Opera, English National Opera and Opera North. The last 15 years has, as I have said, seen a serious decline in the number of productions and performances.
The cuts to opera have been terrifying. I will give your Lordships some examples. In 2012-13, there were 455 performances of opera in England and Wales; in 2023-24, there were 294. Outside London it is worse: in 2012-13, there were 195 performances and in 2023-24 just 87. Last year, we saw a 40% drop in the number of performances outside London for our people to go to outside the capital city. It is not the same for ballet, dance or drama. The result has been huge inflation costs continuing for opera companies, and they simply cannot maintain orchestras and choruses. It is a spiral of decline that is simply terrifying.
Arts Council England has made a number of seriously daft decisions over the last number of years. I will not go into how it justifies them, but the result has been there for everyone to see. Cuts have been made to the highest-cost art form, which is opera, and the only company to escape this spiral of decline—this doom loop—was the Royal Opera, largely, of course, because of the Royal Opera House income from many donors. But the other companies—English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Opera North—have all suffered.
Your Lordships will have seen over the last number of years serious debate in the newspapers and elsewhere about what would happen if English National Opera—ENO—left London completely. I think that that has been renegotiated over the last year or so by the very effective chair of the ENO, and it has meant that it still has some integrity, but it is a reduced form. It is effectively a part-time opera with fewer performances than it traditionally had. It will operate in the north of England, but its base at the Coliseum will at least be continued.
Welsh National Opera is more seriously affected. We now have just 16 touring performances of Welsh National Opera in England and Wales, compared with 55 a decade ago. Opera North is down from 95 to 56 touring performances. Both companies operate on reduced terms, with loss of staff and opportunity. Mainstream opera outside London is now in great peril with a dispersal of singers, instrumentalists and management teams. We are faced with an enormous dilemma.
Happily, the Welsh Government are currently looking at their budget, and I am hopeful that they will give Welsh National Opera extra funding for it to continue. One of the problems that Arts Council England faced over the last year was a total lack of communication with the Arts Council of Wales, which meant that the very large cuts from Arts Council England, which gives money to Welsh National Opera because of its touring activities, were made without consultation. The combination of cuts to the Welsh and English Arts Councils meant that the WNO suffered considerably.
Opera needs, above all else, an immediate injection of cash. That is the only answer after 15 years of serious underfunding. We cannot wait until the next funding round of Arts Council England in 2027-28—that is too late. The DCMS must look seriously at the future of opera. If necessary, it must bypass the Arts Council. It would be best to work with it but to ensure that there is a continuance of opera in our country it needs this new cash injection. It happened 20 years ago with drama, and there is no reason it cannot now happen with regard to opera.
The Minister, or the Secretary of State, should meet Members of your Lordships’ House to discuss this important issue. There is a case for the DCMS to set up a special opera working group, working with the Welsh Government to ensure the future of opera. We should be looking too towards a national opera service.
The reason the Arts Council made the decisions it did some time ago was, we are told, because of levelling up. The opposite has occurred—with the complete reduction in performances and productions, it is in fact levelling down. So there is a serious need to relook at what is happening with our opera system.
Opera’s repertoire includes many of the supreme achievements of human imagination and incorporates more than all the major art forms put together. There is nothing quite like it. Unless we take this urgent action, we will wake up one morning and it will be gone.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Murphy. I agree with practically everything he said. I start by declaring my interests, but not the usual ones recorded in the register: I am passionate about opera and have a very firm belief that the UK needs a strong, sustainable opera sector.
Unfortunately, opera is phenomenally expensive, and it is a fact of life that it cannot exist solely on box office and other commercial income. On the other hand, not all opera is dependent on public subsidy, and some wonderful opera manages without. The very large programme at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Wagner-based programme at Longborough are but two excellent examples. These rely on the generosity of donors and, in many cases, a family whose passion for opera has provided the financial and artistic foundations. But donations cannot support the whole of opera in our country.
As the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, explained, the public subsidy to opera has been shrinking in real terms, which has had very significant impacts. This has led to less opera being produced. Very few companies have the ability to magic up replacement income streams. For example, the output of English National Opera, to which I will return, has significantly reduced in recent years and is certainly much lower than when the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, and I sat on ENO’s board.
As we have heard, touring has also been reduced. Glyndebourne used to receive a grant which allowed it to tour. When that was axed, Glyndebourne stopped touring, with the result that many thousands of people who cannot reach East Sussex or cannot obtain or afford tickets for the festival have lost out. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, about what has happened to Welsh National Opera and to Opera North.
Who made these decisions? At the end of the day the Government are responsible but, as in so many areas of public sector activity, they have outsourced the detailed decision-making to an unelected and unaccountable quango in the form of Arts Council England. I believe the Government need to take a long, hard look at whether ACE is fit for purpose.
The Government’s funding for ACE has not kept pace with inflation, but at the same time they have told ACE to put more money into the regions and move stuff out of London. Levelling up then became a crude weapon of destruction in ACE’s hands. As an opera fanatic, I want as many people as possible in this country to experience opera, but achieving that by weakening what is good in an already fragile ecosystem in order to spread resources around the country is a very high- risk strategy. It can and probably will inflict lasting damage on opera as a whole, and everyone will lose.
The evidence points to ACE not having a firm grasp of either what it takes to maintain a healthy system of opera provision or what will happen if parts of the system become unsustainable. Its decisions on ENO epitomise this. ENO was told with no notice whatever that it was to be demoted from the national programme and that it had to locate itself outside London. Instead of receiving around £12.5 million a year, it was to get £17 million over three years to make its transfer out of London. This decision did not make any sense at all and was incapable of execution within the resources allocated. ACE largely backed down on 2023 funding and, after a long process, gave ENO more money and a longer relocation timetable.
We now know that ENO will relocate to Manchester, where it will undertake some rather vaguely specified activities that do not look much like the output of a major opera company. It will also put on a cut-down season in London. I have no idea whether this will work as a solution, but I would not bet on it. ENO will certainly not be the major force in the opera world that it clearly once was. We may well be seeing English National Opera entering the last phase of its life, and that will impoverish us all. I cannot think of a more wasteful approach to ensuring that opera has a firm future in the UK.
The Government need to take responsibility and act. They must step into the opera space before ACE ruins it for good.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, in his very powerful speech. I agree with everything that he said.
The final blazing “Amen” of the “Messiah”, which we in the Parliament Choir sang a week ago in St John’s Smith Square, was followed by a moment of profound stillness and silence. Nothing moved, until someone in the audience broke the spell by exclaiming, “Wow!” A standing ovation followed. Our conductor, Nicholas O’Neill, had emphasised to us that Handel had gained his reputation in London as the composer of Italian opera, and that we were to approach the work not with heavy thumping religiosity but with the lighter rhythms of Handel’s operatic works. Why had Handel moved on from opera to a series of oratorios? The answer is, largely, cost. The “Messiah” could be performed in Dublin or in Chester—anywhere—and in theatres or in churches, with no scenery, no machinery, no costumes, which all made it more profitable. But a concert performance of opera can never tell the story as well as a fully staged presentation can. Storytelling is central to every culture in the world. Later, from the 18th century onwards, great composers explored the whole range of human experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, said, opera became the peak of western culture.
I was hooked at an early age. At 18, I sang the part of Master Ford in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Sir John in Love”, with the composer himself in the audience. His appreciative letters to the producer of those performances, Brian Trowell, and the conductor, Leon Lovett, are preserved in his archives.
It has been a pleasure to introduce two of my grandsons to opera in a number of productions of the Welsh National Opera in Llandudno. One of them is now studying music at Cardiff University; the other is taking a music course for A-level. The development of their musical interest illustrates how devastating it is that funding has been reduced for the three remaining touring opera companies, WNO, Opera North and Glyndebourne. Ironically, as more and more funding has been taken away over the years, more responsibility has been given to them to provide outreach as well as community, health and education work—out of the funds which used to support just the performance of opera.
In England, many cities have lost their regular visit by a touring company, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has pointed out. Ordering the ENO to Manchester will not fill that gap. The consequences for Welsh National Opera are that, whereas it used to perform nine operas a year across three full seasons, the future looks like three to four operas across one extended season. Only 30 main-scale performances of these chosen works are planned for 2025-26. Spring performances in Llandudno and Bristol next year are now cancelled.
The recent announcement of a £755,000 grant from the Arts Council of Wales resilience fund is welcome but, with an in-year deficit of £2.7 million due to cuts in funding from the arts councils of England and Wales combined, a one-off payment like that will make no difference. Some 20% of the orchestra has been lost already since Covid and there is no funding to fill these pivotal seats in the orchestra pit. Twenty-five positions will still be lost in the administration staff, and the quality of WNO productions will suffer.
The chorus of the Welsh National Opera is always an exciting part of the evening. A group of 40 full-time choristers is now planned to be reduced to 20, supplemented by no more than eight freelance singers. Voluntary redundancy will have already reduced the number of full-time chorus singers to 23 by this coming Christmas. Talks are continuing but three strike days—strike days in opera—have been set aside for next February. Will DCMS work with the Welsh Government to come to terms with Equity in Wales to restore funding to the Welsh National Opera, and in particular to settle the chorus strike that nobody wants?
Labour must not let us down in Wales. It must ensure that the great tradition of opera performance is maintained. It has produced many stars and given so many chances to young singers and orchestral players and their contribution to the economy of Wales has been so great. I urge the Minister to act swiftly and to not destroy a tradition which has taken so long to build.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, ultimately as a society we have to decide whether we want opera, and if we want it, we have to find a way to pay for it. I must declare an interest, having written three operas and with another opera in the pipeline, although, given the prognosis of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, perhaps I should say, “Fingers crossed”. I was also on the board of the Royal Opera House for many years, chairman of its opera committee, and a member of the Arts Council panel that looked at provision—and underprovision—of opera in this country. That last experience is highly germane to our debate today since the panel was tasked with identifying areas that were underprovided for—less privileged areas in terms of opera reach. This we did and remedial action was achieved, thanks to companies such as the Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne touring, and Opera North. I soon realised that opportunity is everything—the chance to experience a life-affirming and sometimes life-changing transformation, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, mentioned.
More recently, the last Government instructed the Arts Council to move certain opera-making from London to the regions, as we have heard. I emphasise “instructed” because, as I understand it, this went completely against the previously observed conventions that Arts Council England should be free of political interference—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, quite rightly told this House that opera funding was a matter for Arts Council England due to its status as an arm’s-length body. Try telling ENO that because the instruction has led, as we have heard, to many cuts at ENO and its partial move to Manchester, a city previously well served by Opera North. Indeed, I went to Manchester as a composer with Opera North. Naturally, I wish ENO well and I appreciate the welcome the company has received from Andy Burnham and others in Manchester. However, whether this really is in the long-term best interests of opera in this country is, I fear, debatable, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes.
Among other changes to opera support were some devastating cuts across the board, not least to the excellent Welsh National Opera, which, along with other companies such as Glyndebourne touring, as I have just mentioned, actually took touring to those areas that we had identified as being underprovided. So will these cuts be reversed? Is it too late, I ask the Minister, to save musicians and singers at WNO? Indeed, should we not look at a more sensible way of funding opera? Is it really sensible for the Arts Council to look at small-scale, versatile companies, of which we have several, in the same light as multimillion-pound national companies? How can they conceivably compare?
Another effect of the recent cuts is that young singers and musicians have lost work opportunities. Touring was always a wonderful opportunity to try out young singers and give them experience, but that experience and the opportunity to make a living have been profoundly and further eroded by the effects of Brexit, so that singers are rarely now invited to perform. Research shows the quite astonishing decline in work opportunities abroad. It is necessary to understand that securing singers, casting singers and getting them in to replace sick principals—sometimes at 24 hours’ notice—depends on availability and having no problems with travel and visas. As a result, many European houses are avoiding hiring English singers altogether, despite their sight-reading abilities. Will the Government please attempt to reach a rapprochement with the EU to ease the rules on cabotage, visas and carnets so that singers, instrumentalists, pop groups, dance companies et al can once again spread what used to be our enviable cultural reputation beyond these shores and therefore contribute to the Treasury a huge amount of much-needed income?
I shall say a few words about why I think opera is so important. When I was on the board at the Royal Opera House, I initially had a problem with Wagner— I could not quite get it. Then I went to “The Ring”, conducted by Haitink, and it was as though I had been through some miraculous experience. At the end of it, I was a blithering, blathering wreck; I was in tears. Opera can do that, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Murphy. I have seen children come to the opera and be transformed. There is something about the ability to put music and drama together in such a powerful way that takes it above almost any other art form—but it is expensive. As I said at the beginning, we have to decide as a society whether we do or do not want opera. If we do, we have to find a way to pay for it. Perhaps looking at the tax system for donors is one way forward.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for securing this important debate. From one coalmining family to another, I say that access to opera should be for all.
I speak in this debate primarily in support of the Welsh National Opera. As I was the youngest of seven siblings, my parents had to get a bit more creative with my name. They called me Carmen, after one of the most popular operas ever written. My mother watched the performance, her first opera, in the 1980s in what was formerly known as the Gaumont Theatre in Southampton, now the Mayflower, and she was taken by the story of a fiery woman.
Although named after an opera, I attended my first performance only a couple of years ago. It was a brand new opera by WNO, staged at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, called “Migrations”. It was a journey at the heart of the way that humans behave in the 21st century. Act 1 was a story of modern-day refugees struggling with the reality of living in another country, dealing with a different language and culture, having left their own behind through necessity. Act 2 focused on the experiences faced by those who chose to pack up their lives to help our NHS, only to face the prejudices of the racially troubled 1960s. The performance was a skilful example of storytelling. I am yet to watch “Carmen”, but it is on the list for the future.
As has been stated, the Welsh National Opera is funded by Arts Council England and Arts Council Wales in recognition of its work in both countries. WNO is the last remaining full-time international British opera company that also tours extensively across the UK. It runs projects on and off stage across England and Wales. As we are focused on Arts Council England funding in this debate, I shall share some examples of the health, education and community projects that WNO leads offstage in England. The CLEAR Project in Southampton is a charity empowering and assisting refugees and asylum seekers with advice services, English classes, work clubs and more. WNO has partnered with the project and has run sessions at the University of Southampton, teaching songs from Iran and Syria.
WNO has also worked with the Woodlands School, a specialist school for children with complex physical and sensory difficulties, covering Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall. It held a globally unique concert for PMLD students, doing what it does best, which is providing music for all. There is also the Creative Classrooms project that provides CPD for teachers across the academic year, focusing on creativity and exploring ways of embedding music in the classroom and how this links to the curriculum. These are just a handful of the types of projects that WNO leads offstage—this is not just about performances.
As a result of the financial cuts from Arts Council England, the Welsh National Opera finds itself struggling and has had to make substantial redundancies alongside a reduction in its activities, as was highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. I am a big believer in widening opportunities for all and I fear that, without restoration of funding to WNO, there is a huge risk that opera will be guarded for only those that can afford it, both in terms of performers and those who watch in the audience.
In conversation recently with soprano Camilla Kerslake, who runs a foundation that offers opportunities for all children to enjoy music and support, I discovered that only 5% of people in British opera are from working class backgrounds, and most of them are from Wales. Wales is a success story in this regard and, when it comes to widening access to music and the arts, Wales has proven that it is possible. What would happen to this statistic without the WNO? Are this Government happy for a world-leading sector to be a preserve of the rich only? The statistics speak for themselves. Investment in arts in school enriches every aspect of a child, from academia to self-esteem. In the 1970s, the proportion of working-class people in opera was almost double, most likely due to heavier investment in music education in schools too.
I will conclude with some questions to the Government, which I hope will be addressed at the end of this debate. What assessment have His Majesty’s Government made of the impact that cuts to the WNO will have on the numbers of people from working-class backgrounds in opera? What discussions have taken place regarding the difficulties being faced at WNO and the risk of the sector disappearing altogether? I hope that a solution is forged and a sustainable plan put in place to secure WNO’s future and the enjoyment of future generations. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wrando.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, on obtaining this debate at a suitably operatic time of the evening, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, in the debate.
For those of us who know and love it, opera is the most enthralling, inspiring and uplifting art form of all. Unfortunately, as we have heard, it is also one of the most expensive. You really cannot do it full justice without an orchestra, talented actor-singers and designers, sets and costumes, large theatres, dramatic lighting and more. There are not enough people who know and love opera to protect it from accusations of elitism—unlike popular music or football, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, pointed out.
So it is hardly surprising that there are challenges facing the state funding of opera, which takes up such a large proportion of total arts funding. I was at an opera APPG event last week where a music professor, who had formerly worked for the Arts Council, suggested that, to preserve opera in the long term, opera lovers themselves might need to pay a greater share of the costs and rely less on the Government. But I wonder, picking up from something that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said, whether the Government could not do more to promote greater private support. Perhaps when they want to reduce public funding for opera, they could think about tax or other incentives—even public recognition through honours—to encourage private donors to replace some of the funds lost. Other countries do it: why can’t we?
Another challenge is to increase the audience for opera, to which the answer has to be education. I will illustrate this with two stories. Some of your Lordships may remember Frank Johnson, erstwhile editor of the Spectator. Frank came from a poor home in the East End and went to a sink school in Shoreditch, having managed to fail the 11-plus. The school provided children to appear in operas at Covent Garden. Frank discovered that he could get out of some of the maths lessons, which he hated, by volunteering for this.
He appeared as an urchin in a succession of great operas, culminating as one of Medea’s children, whom she was about to murder, in Bellini’s “Norma”. Having spent an entire act clutched rather painfully to the bosom of Maria Callas, he became a passionate and deeply knowledgeable opera lover for the rest of his life. It is possibly not a route for everyone, but it does show the value of gaining early experience of opera.
My second example comes from another opera APPG event last Tuesday in the Jubilee Room. This featured 20 children from St Joseph’s Catholic primary school in Chelsea, who provided the children’s chorus for ENO’s recent performances of “La Bohème”—which also featured my godson as Marcello. The school offers a highly impressive music curriculum, involving all its students from all backgrounds. I suspect that many of the children who sang the Act 2 chorus of street children with such thrilling confidence and enjoyment at the APPG event will retain a fondness for opera throughout their lives.
That shows the power of opera to engage children, and it certainly calls for a proper level of government investment in large-scale main-stage opera across the UK so that companies such as English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North and the Royal Opera can continue their brilliant work with young people and enable many more of them to experience opera, to fall in love with opera and, in due course, to demand that their Government keep opera alive.
I end with two questions for the Minister. What are the Government doing to boost private investment in opera? How will they ensure that the vital outreach and education work of the major companies can continue and expand to ensure that all young people are able to experience, enjoy and value the unique rewards of opera?
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, I was going to start by saying that I am very keen on opera, because I thought that might be quite an original way to start, but it turns out that I am not alone. It seems that everybody in this Chamber is, and that is very heartening.
I agree with those who said that, at its best, opera is the most complete and satisfying form of theatre ever imagined. I make no apology for saying that and believing it. It has given me some of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, as clearly it has to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I have also been close to the business of opera, as indeed he has, over the years in executive and non-executive roles, including as a member of the board of WNO and briefly, as the noble Lord knows, as chief executive of the Royal Opera House.
I have been involved with conservatoire training and seen at close quarters what it takes to acquire the skills needed to perform opera. My daughter is a professional opera singer and has been for 20 years. She is now also the artistic director and chief executive of OperaUpClose, to which I will return, a national touring company based in Southampton and included since 2023 in ACE’s national portfolio.
So I know something about the art form and something about the sector. But what I mostly am—to go back to my original point—and always have been, is a fan of opera in all its guises, and it is the variety of those guises that I want to touch on. I have loved and admired our big opera companies all my life. We have been told who they are. I would add to the four that have been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Murphy Glyndebourne and Scottish Opera. I know it does not fall within the purview of Arts Council England; none the less, it is part of the ecosystem, to which I will also return.
I am very dismayed by what has happened recently. My views about Arts Council England and the decisions it has taken recently are on the record and I am not going to repeat them. Over the years, these big companies have expanded what they do beyond their wonderful productions to encompass education, outreach, training and much else besides—as we have heard. They are also key local employers. Their work is crucial and they are right to deploy their formidable advocacy skills to defend their interests.
However, in supporting such companies, we must not forget that they are not the whole story and that what they do is not everything that opera can be—that is despite what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said; I hesitate to disagree with him, but I do. They are part, as I know they would readily acknowledge, of a complex, wide-ranging ecosystem, largely reliant not on long-term employees but on an army of freelancers. The vital innovation that will keep opera alive for the future happens across the whole of that ecosystem. All of it needs support in these very challenging times.
OperaUpClose is a good example. It is a small but ambitious company, where emerging composers, singers, conductors, directors, designers and technicians can test their ideas and learn their craft, and where established practitioners can do things differently. OperaUpClose actively chooses to perform in smaller spaces and places where opera is rarely available. It engages with local communities, inviting them to contribute directly to the creation of work. It runs important early career training opportunities and commissions work for very young audiences. If you have never been in a room with a bunch of very young children—three and four-year-olds—watching a man dressed as a teddy bear talking about not being able to get to sleep, then you have not heard “Peace At Last”, and you have not lived. All of this is delivered by a tiny team, with tiny budgets, competing for diminishing resources in an increasingly tough funding environment.
Yet there is nothing second best or reductive about what companies such as OperaUpClose are doing. High musical standards and production values are at the heart of their work; they extend the boundaries of what opera can be and the impact it can have. Doing that depends on a workforce that is almost all freelance, and as skilled and extraordinary as you will see in any grand opera house—and indeed many of them are the same people.
When we talk about supporting opera, we must talk about supporting the whole sector, at all scales and iterations; otherwise the whole sector will wither and ultimately die, as we have already been warned this evening. I believe that opera, no matter where or at what scale it is performed, is a living, breathing, evolving art form, with a unique ability, as we have also heard, to stir our most deep-seated emotions of joy, anguish, longing and acceptance. That is why it is important. I say to my noble friend the Minister when she comes to reply that opera speaks in many voices—let us make sure we are listening to all of them.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, like others, I will talk about funding, with particular reference to Welsh National Opera, and about Brexit.
My wife has told me that, living in the West Country, her first introduction to live opera happened as a teenager, when her mum, a schoolteacher, bought tickets to see Welsh National Opera at the Bristol Hippodrome. It was the first of many such visits, leading to a lifelong love of opera. No doubt many others, as we have heard, will have had similar experiences.
There are a number of points to be made here, but one of them is that WNO has, over the years, benefited, and continues to benefit, English audiences— although today the cuts have meant a reduction in such touring, with Liverpool now dropped as a touring venue. The current crisis—and it is a crisis—at WNO is, or should be, the joint responsibility of both the Welsh and British Governments, a point that cannot be emphasised enough.
If, as a society, we believe in an art form, we should fund it properly, irrespective of its relative expense. This means public funding. That is why the idea of an imagined “fair deal” for each of the arts or arts organisations is misguided, because different art forms demand extremely varying degrees of funding in order to thrive. That is a fact of artistic life. Although there is overlap, opera in a car park or a street is a different form from opera in a concert setting, which is different again from a full staging, yet there has to be a sense in which all opera will depend ultimately on the survival or otherwise of our larger companies.
Unlike Germany, we have very few large opera companies, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, pointed out in his excellent introduction. We should absolutely treasure these companies, rather than run them down, which is the direction that certainly Welsh National Opera is heading in, unless there is a significant turnaround. It is clear from the facts and figures—the facts include the loss, this weekend, of seven members of the chorus—that Chris Bryant was wrong when he recently said, in an Answer to a Written Question, that he is
“confident that the WNO is in a strong place to succeed”.
Chris Bryant, Lisa Nandy and the rest of the DCMS team need urgently to look at this again. Given the current deficit of £2.7 million, the announced £775,000 will be swallowed up straightaway. What WNO needs most, immediately, is emergency funding, as we have heard.
As soprano Elizabeth Atherton, who has campaigned ceaselessly for Welsh National Opera, told me this week,
“if we want our national opera companies to succeed, then that comes with a financial commitment at a certain level in order to safeguard the sustainable future of the companies and to enable everyone to access performances without it becoming the realm of the wealthy”.
Bearing these arguments in mind, there is a strong case that the core running costs of our national opera companies should be removed from Arts Council England’s oversight and protected by government instead, in a similar way to how the national museums are protected. Companies that need millions of pounds to be viable should not be competing with smaller grass-roots organisations—that makes no sense whatever. Somewhat ironically, such grass-roots organisations include the hugely worthwhile Streetwise Opera, which works with the homeless and which is also struggling for funds, albeit at a very different level of funding.
I believe that we need ACE, but through the Let’s Create programme it is overloaded with the kinds of community projects that used to be in part funded by local government. ACE needs to be much better funded and able to concentrate on what ought to be its core function of funding artists and performers, which includes the kind of companies that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, referred to. All this funding is doable, considering that, within the scheme of things, arts funding is a drop in the ocean compared to the budgets of other departments. Ultimately, it is a question of political will.
Opera singers have rightly spoken out against Brexit—notably Sarah Connolly and, recently, Royal Opera star Rachel Nicholls. As reported by the Independent, she said that
“unless we are very careful, we are going to lose our entire classical music industry in this country”
through Brexit. Such a strong statement might raise a few eyebrows, until you realise how much of a European ecosystem classical music, including opera, is in its fundamental character. Rachel Nicholls has admitted that, despite being a star, she has not had a single contract in Germany since free movement ended. The problem is about not just touring but filling positions at short notice—now virtually impossible—and longer-term positions, which are so important for artists at every stage of their careers but which are now often advertised as being for only European passport holders.
I ask the Minister the same question I asked at Questions today. Without a commitment to rejoin the single market, how will the Government address these particular concerns? In some ways, these feel among the most intractable.
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Murphy of Torfaen has done a great service to this House, opera and WNO in securing this debate and introducing it so compellingly—a case of a good revival being a great substitute for a cancelled first run. Although I was fortunate enough to be brought up with opera from an early age—I went to Sadler’s Wells first when I was nine and to the first night of Sadler’s Wells at the Coliseum, before it became ENO, in 1968—it was a great performance of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” by WNO in Oxford when I was a student that had me really hooked, to use the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas.
Those of us who have become hooked on opera should recognise that it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but those who respond to this extraordinary four-dimensional art form come from every social, economic and demographic background, if they have had half a chance to experience it. The burgeoning country house opera scene does wonderful work and provides employment, on-stage and off, often for young singers, musicians and technicians. However, I cannot help feeling that there is a cost to this that the opera community should recognise—that the elitist image, which my noble friend Lord Murphy powerfully demolished, is inevitably reinforced by the pictures of an audience in evening dress on lawns, with champagne glass in hand. If you go to a performance of Opera North, where my noble friend the Minister was a member of the board, WNO, ENO or Scottish Opera, the audience looks very different from that. If you went to a performance at any time over the past 25 years by English Touring Opera in Hackney, York, Norwich, Durham, Sheffield, Buxton, Poole or Exeter, you would have seen work of extraordinary quality being enjoyed by people from all walks of life.
The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, whose time as a fellow board member of ENO left me with deep respect and affection, is not known in your Lordships’ House for advocating fiscal profligacy. If she believes that additional funding is needed without delay for opera, my noble friend the Minister should listen. I also share her views of Arts Council England. The seeds of ENO’s recent problems were sown as long ago as when we were on the board together, 20 or more years ago. The board was perhaps not as robust as we should have been in challenging the Arts Council then.
When I look back at the ENO and opera more widely over the past 30 years, the Arts Council’s influence has often been baleful, and recent years have seen this only worsen. As I said in the debate that I was privileged to introduce two years ago following the national portfolio awards by the Arts Council, its inexplicable and damaging decisions were not confined to opera—there were the 100% cuts to Britten Sinfonia and the Donmar theatre as other examples. As I said in that debate, I am not persuaded that the arm’s-length principle any longer justifies the existence of a central Arts Council, but for as long as it does exist and holds the responsibilities that it does, its performance must improve, immediately and transformationally.
I was therefore dismayed to hear reports that the chair of the Arts Council, Sir Nicholas Serota, was going to be given an 18-month extension to his two terms—during which I can only say that he has run Rudolph Giuliani close in destroying a once strong personal reputation and in presiding over the terrible damage by the Arts Council to the performing arts. The culture of Arts Council England needs change now. Eighteen months from now, this Government will be halfway through their term. The arts generally, and opera in particular, need help now, and delay will be deeply damaging. Will my noble friend say whether she believes that the reappointment of Sir Nicholas would ensure that that help came? If not, will she assure the House that his reappointment will not happen?
Lord Freyberg (CB)
My Lords, I rise tonight to thank with enormous pleasure the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for tabling this important and timely debate. As others have said, the UK has a large, important and rich ecosystem of over 100 opera producers, from community projects to world-class companies. At its heart are five major organisations: the Royal Opera House, Opera North, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne, which have been essential catalysts for opera’s success in Britain. However, as others have said tonight, this ecosystem now faces an existential threat.
Since 2015, our major opera companies have been severely impacted by real-terms funding cuts. The evidence is stark: Welsh National Opera has seen a 51% real-terms reduction in Arts Council funding, Glyndebourne’s funding has fallen by 63% in real terms and even the Royal Opera House has experienced a 32% real-terms cut. This has led to a devastating reduction in performances, touring, education, work and job opportunities, as others have said.
Let me illustrate the human cost. Welsh National Opera, which had previously provided the most extensive opera touring in England, has been forced to withdraw from venues and reduce its chorus. It faces a £2.7 million deficit this year, as others have said. Its total budget must shrink from £18.7 million to around £12 million by 2027-28, a reduction that threatens its very existence as a major opera company. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has said, Welsh National Opera has been forced to reduce its chorus to just 20 members and is contemplating the loss of its full-time orchestra. It has already cut touring weeks in Bristol, Liverpool and Birmingham, creating financial stress on the venues it visits.
Opera North is now the only full-time opera orchestra outside the Royal Opera House. This is nothing short of astonishing for a nation of our cultural standing. Germany, by contrast, has 83 full-time state and regional opera companies.
For performers, singers, instrumentalists and technicians, there is less work and lower pay. As the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, has said, Brexit has compounded these challenges by effectively eliminating many European performance opportunities that British artists relied upon.
The consequences extend far beyond individual institutions. Opera companies are vital hubs in our cultural ecosystem. They train the next generation of singers, musicians and technical staff, they provide secure employment for over 3,800 workers and they reach hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren through education programmes. When we diminish these companies, we damage the entire performing arts sector.
The impact on regional access is particularly concerning. With Glyndebourne forced to cancel touring and Welsh National Opera reducing its presence in cities like Bristol, Liverpool and Birmingham, we risk creating cultural deserts outside London. This directly contradicts Labour’s mission to deliver growth and opportunities across every nation and region.
So what steps should government now take? First, government and Arts Council England need to create a joined-up and well-informed strategic approach to long-term funding. Government and ACE need to recognise that opera companies operate on three to five-year planning cycles, and that short-term cuts and changes create waste and instability. Opera company managements no longer have any confidence that ACE can meet their needs or find a way forward that is not simply salami slicing. The companies would rather come up with their own solutions than be presented with unrealistic and badly considered policy ideas which are not based on research. This echoes much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, have said this evening.
Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, also said, we must strengthen music education in schools, which is the pipeline of future audiences and talent. Most schools have effectively abandoned music provision following sustained cuts and a lack of Ofsted oversight, but music education is not just about creating future singers. Research shows that children who study music perform better across all subjects.
Perhaps most powerfully, we should consider the example of the Kyiv Opera, which continues to perform, even as air raid sirens pierce the night. When asked why they persist under such danger, their artistic director declared, “What are we fighting for if not our culture?” In the midst of an existential struggle, Ukraine demonstrates that opera is a defiant and vital expression of human civilisation. Let us keep it that way, accessible to all, and not let it become available only to the rich in the south-east at high prices.
Opera in Britain faces a critical moment. Without decisive government action, we risk irreparable damage to one of our greatest cultural assets. The companies have shown that they can adapt and innovate. They have demonstrated their value to communities across the nation. They now need the Government to match their commitment with proper support.
Baroness Harman (Lab)
My Lords, I warmly thank my noble friend Lord Murphy for securing this debate and the crystal clarity with which he set out the case for opera. I fear that, after such an excellent debate, I have very little to add, but I will speak in support of opera. I also strongly agree with the trenchant criticisms that the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, made about what Arts Council England did under Sir Nick Serota.
I will put on record my belief that opera is the pinnacle of art forms. I have so much admiration, and almost a disbelief, for what the artists who engage in it achieve—from what the singers, soloists, chorus, orchestral musicians, conductors and composers do, through to the creative wig-makers, costume-makers, choreographers, set designers, lighting designers and many others. They put their heart and soul into what they do for us, not just with their superhuman talent, dedication and commitment but by bringing an openness and generosity of spirit which is humbling. It is entertainment, but it is more than that: it is creative expression that helps us understand, and prompts us to question, everything about ourselves and the world in which we live, as the noble Baroness, Lady, Smith, so ably exemplified.
I celebrate opera for the excellence that it achieves and join those who insist on its place in our future. It should never be put in opposition to the question of access. On the contrary, it is precisely because it is such a great art form that we should ensure that everyone has access to it and can experience it. Breaking down the barriers to access must continue to be at the heart of the mission of these great opera companies. That means that we must have action from the Government and change from Arts Council England.
We heard earlier today that the number of students taking music at A-level is down 45%. I welcome the fact that the Government have put arts and creativity at the heart of the curriculum. Music cannot be the preserve of those educated in private schools—or those who have the great good fortune to be the grandsons of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. We need all the talents, and everyone has the right to experience it.
Arts Council England must turn over a new page on supporting large-scale opera. Opera has struggled to cope with the appalling cuts of 2022. An announcement in which opera was the biggest loser by hitting the ENO—outreach is at its core—and slashing touring budgets for Glyndebourne, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, explained, and the Welsh National Opera meant that, at a stroke, it shut off the very access that we should strive for.
There is a lot of talk about things in this country being broken; opera is nearly broken. Huge damage has been done to the opera sector by Arts Council England that needs to be addressed. We have heard of the possibility of support from the Welsh Government, which is very encouraging. I hope, too, that our regional mayors and councils and the Government in Scotland will recognise opera’s importance and do what they can to support opera for those they represent.
I agree with the points made about Brexit. We must have an agreement to enable EU touring and the reinstatement of something like the Erasmus scheme to allow the exchange of music students.
The Prime Minister is obviously a gifted musician; he went to the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He launched his plan for change at the creative industry sector of Pinewood. Let us hope that, after the dark years for opera, we must have better days ahead.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for the opportunity to debate the problems facing the opera sector. I agree with much that has been said. The noble Lord has come up with the next step following this debate—he spoke of the need for a DCMS opera working group and a national opera service. There is potential in those suggestions.
Mention has been made of Germany, which is correct, but there, local government has a key role in the offering of opera, the management of premises and opera companies, and so on. We have a very different structure. I have noted the challenges that we have heard across the Chamber about who makes what decisions, why and whether they are divorced from the impact of their decisions on communities. As we have heard, reductions in funding are having an impact. There are fewer performances and rising concerns about viability. Outside London, there are serious problems with touring opera to smaller places. Opera is more costly. It is difficult to maintain orchestras, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. There are now only two—one outside of London. The number of productions is declining. There are the pressures on freelancers and the impact of Brexit, and there is the importance of supporting the whole sector.
I will take a slightly different angle in what I am about to say. I wanted to speak in this debate because I believe that opera can build audiences. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, suggested earlier that this needs to happen. The noble Baroness, Lady Harman, talked about access, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about opportunity being everything, and absolutely it is. However, as we know, two-thirds of income for performances outside London is dependent on grants. I support Arts Council England’s aim to broaden access to cultural opportunities across England. That is right as an ambition, but action can build audiences. I understand that the 2022 announcement of funding has been controversial. In terms of English National Opera, it was never clear to me how ENO would work in the same broad geographical area as Opera North, which is my local opera company even though it is based 90 miles away from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
I noticed a reference in the resolution of ENO’s understandable and correct wish to maintain a London presence as well as its Manchester base: that ENO will perform in the “city region”—that is, Greater Manchester. I hope and had assumed that ENO would have a plan to deliver performances outside that city region—in Lancashire and Cumbria, for example. I have also been hoping that the north-east of England could benefit, directly or indirectly, from the arrival of ENO in the north of England, through more opera being performed and more outreach activity achieved.
I am going to count Gilbert and Sullivan as mainstream opera—we might have a debate on whether it is, but for many people, it is mainstream. A few weeks ago, the programme notes by Opera North for its impressive revival this year of “Ruddigore” pointed out that there are some 2,000 amateur musical societies across the country, with 100 dedicated solely to Gilbert and Sullivan. As someone who developed a love of opera through Gilbert and Sullivan, I understand the importance of that route. I believe that there is untapped demand for opera, and it has to be tapped. I recall that when I chaired the Theatre Royal trust in Newcastle there were frequent discussions about our poor audience for some operas. A difficulty was that we had limited performance availability. Arts Council England was funding new works, rightly, but they then had to be performed, taking some of those slots. This meant that some of the more popular operas could not be performed. The solution would have been more performance dates, but those could not be funded. Yet I believe that there is a latent demand.
My evidence is this. On 24 November, at the Glasshouse International Centre for Music at Gateshead, we heard Sir Michael Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time”. There were 300 performers, with international soloists; there were guest members of the chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia, with over 200 singers, mostly locally based; there were guest members of the orchestra—amateurs alongside the professional musicians. The standard was very high indeed and the audience was large. So audiences for work such as this can be transferred to opera. The Arts Council needs to provide leadership effectively on this, and it needs others to help manage that process, but the suggestion made at the very start by the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, might get us part-way down the road of achieving that.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for giving us this excellent debate tonight. I thank him again for the wonderful recital that he organised with WNO here in Parliament before the election; I and many from both Houses thoroughly enjoyed that.
As noble Lords have said, opera is a sublime art form, but an expensive one—although, as the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, rightly says, it is a drop in the ocean compared with other things that government spends public money on. The costs have been well rehearsed: the years of training for those musicians and singers; the litany of jobs that the noble Baroness, Lady Harman, reeled off expresses how many people it takes to put an opera on; the seasonality of the work, with so many people forced to juggle other jobs, not just on the way up but when they reach the heights of the art form; the need for rest days—you cannot do a matinee and an evening performance like you can six days a week in other theatre; and, of course, the international travel, as our Question this afternoon helpfully covered. When money is tight, it is the important things that are cut first: the touring; the outreach; the avant-garde and innovative performances.
But, at its best, opera really is like no other art form. I found myself in Milan at the end of last month on the centenary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, so I was able to make my first visit to La Scala. It was a wonderful evening and a very Italian experience; two and a half hours queuing for day tickets and then much of the orchestra and chorus were on strike. But hearing those arias in the theatre where they were premiered was spine-tingling, even with the handful of artists who performed.
Of course, as noble Lords have noted, we have wonderful opera in this country as well. It is an ecosystem with more than 100 producers of opera, but with the work anchored around the big companies whose names have rightly been on our lips today. I am glad the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, reminded us of the work of OperaUpClose. I have had great pleasure seeing them and companies such as Pegasus come into the national portfolio and receive funding: they, too, are essential to that ecosystem.
My noble friend Lady Noakes was right to point out the booming country house opera scene, often with no public subsidy. Audiences at Nevill Holt have grown at a rate of 15% a year. From Garsington to Glyndebourne, Grange Park to Holland Park, and so many more, there are many reasons to be optimistic. However, it is important that we support the proscenium arch—the big grand opera that is the pinnacle of this art form.
I will join the tributes that have been paid to English National Opera: the company, the board and others have weathered a turbulent period. I particularly single out Harry Brünjes, who bows out after a decade as chairman of English National Opera this year. He deserves all the praise, bouquets and garlands that ought to come his way, and he has done it without making friends in high places in the process. He has done the company a huge service, as indeed have Jenny Mollica and the team who carry on their brilliant work. We look forward to what they are doing in addition to their work at the Coliseum: their new partnerships in Manchester with organisations such as the Royal Northern College of Music, the Hallé Orchestra and Factory International. I am particularly looking forward to the “Einstein on the Beach” that they will be performing at Aviva Studios.
The benefits of opera are not just economic and social, as we have seen through ENO’s work on Breathe, which was mentioned in the Lancet and has won it a prize from the British Thoracic Society; the Welsh National Opera’s work with people suffering from long Covid; or the Royal Opera’s pioneering work on the Sound Voice Project, supporting medtech advances in the NHS for people with voice loss. There are huge benefits to this art form in so many ways. I wonder whether the noble Baroness can say anything about the growing interest in social prescribing: with these health benefits, is there an argument for using some of the other larger budgets we have across government to support the work that opera companies are doing?
The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, is right to say that opera speaks in many voices; even in a debate of much consensus, there has been some disagreement, or we would reach for different answers. I think a lot rests on the review of Arts Council England, which the previous Government set up in March and which the new Government have paused, understandably, in order to run it in their own way. I see that Sky News is today reporting that the noble Baroness, Lady Hodge of Barking, is to be picked as the new chairman of the review. I do not know whether the Minister can confirm that. If so, I am sure we will be delighted in your Lordships’ House to have easy access to her, although I do regret the way that Dame Mary Archer, who was selected in the last Parliament, was treated, not just over the review but as the prospective chairman of the Royal Parks.
Will there be an advisory panel? The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, very kindly agreed to sit on an advisory panel—I do not want to dragoon her into it again, but I think it is important, particularly if there is to be a party-political parliamentarian chairing the review, that we again make sure that it is a non-partisan and broad-based thing that can look at many art forms.
There are huge questions to ask, such as on the length of funding cycles; on whether there is a case for treating larger organisations differently, analogously, as the noble Lord, Earl Clancarty, says, to the way the national museums are funded; and on how we can avoid the cliff edges when decisions are made to stop funding—could we give companies advance notice? I firmly support the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, about the importance of supporting philanthropy: for every £1 the Royal Opera and Ballet gets, it raises £6 in private philanthropy. How can we use the honours system and the tax system to protect it? What can be done in the short term for the Welsh National Opera, which is indeed facing a huge funding pressure? Its staffing cost alone is £9 million. Is there an argument for exempting it from the rise in national insurance contributions to try to help it weather the storm until these answers can be reached?
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Murphy for a very personal introduction to the debate—I am sure we all valued that, and we have continued in that vein—but, most importantly, for initiating this important debate on a subject close to my heart. I became a board member of Opera North way back in 2002 and have watched its progress with enormous interest, and I put culture into my portfolio when I was leader of Leeds City Council. I thank all noble Lords from all sides of the House for their thoughtful contributions. I will not be able to answer all the points raised—12 minutes is just not going to be long enough. I am so sorry. If there is anything in particular I do not cover, I will of course write to noble Lords to give the detail.
First, it is important to emphasise the points that were brought out about the value of opera and the contribution it makes to our cultural life. It is, as we have heard, an entirely unique art form, telling stories in an extraordinary way. I will not bore noble Lords with my own favourite examples, but I think we can say that opera represents one of the high points of all human achievement, and government should be proud to support it. I echo the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas—“Wow”—I think it just goes to show what we are talking about.
Let me also reassure noble Lords that the Government are not ignorant of the economic challenges faced by this sector, given that so many points have been raised by noble Lords today. As well as noting the challenges, we are all determined to ensure that arts and culture are no longer the preserve of a privileged few. As we have heard tonight, we need to reject the tired misconceptions and prejudice, particularly about opera and its supposed exclusivity. We all know the role that opera can play and the contribution it can make across society. We also know that opera is undoubtably an economic asset on national level, making up part of the cultural sector’s extraordinary £34.6 billion contribution to the UK’s gross value added.
Opera’s impact goes further, however, and I will highlight a few examples. To pick up on the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, yes, I believe in social prescribing, and I recognise the ENO’s Breathe project, which links opera to those recovering from Covid—a very interesting piece of work. Opera North has a really successful music education programme called In Harmony, which in October saw a record number of 12 schools participating, with over 3,200 pupils benefiting each week from the high-quality provision and performance opportunities. Half of those participating receive free school meals.
We have also heard a great deal about the contribution that the Welsh National Opera makes at the heart of Welsh communities. Its take-part initiatives include Cradle, an intergenerational project focused on dementia, which enriches both the older people and the children who participate. I noted in particular the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, on children’s education, and the wonderful examples given by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of opera speaking in many voices.
We know that in recent years the most significant direct government support for opera has come through higher rates of orchestra and theatre tax relief, from which opera companies are able to benefit. However, there was a clear nod tonight towards the contribution of philanthropy, and we need to echo that. Across the DCMS sectors, it is key to supporting our most beloved institutions and the whole of the cultural space.
We have had a lot of comment about Arts Council England. I do not wish to dwell on some of the comments made, but I confirm that we are working with it and others to understand exactly what the challenges and opportunities are for our sectors. As we have heard, we are undertaking a review into documenting current and past funding for the arts, culture and heritage sectors. We announced at the Labour Party conference that Ministers will undertake a review of Arts Council England, and they are considering next steps and further details. We do not comment on rumours or speculation, and the announcement of the chair will be made public at the appropriate time. However, I stress to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, that a non-partisan, inclusive approach will be absolutely central to the work that we know we need to do.
I understand from the comments made tonight by the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and my noble friend Lady Harman just how unhappy noble Lords have been about some of the decisions made by Arts Council England in the recent past. I am sure everyone will understand I cannot answer for investment decisions made not only under a previous Government but also by an arm’s-length body. Therefore, while I note the critiques noble Lords have raised, I will not respond directly to them. Furthermore, the issues around the chair of Arts Council England are based on rumour, so I cannot comment.
I think we all know that it has been a tumultuous couple of years for the English National Opera, which has weathered the storm impressively well. But it launched its Manchester season just a month ago and it has been received very well in the north and shows real ambition and commitment to making a difference in that area. I am pleased to say that Opera North is working very closely with ENO, from what I understand.
At the start of the debate my noble friend Lord Murphy eloquently raised his concerns regarding the Welsh National Opera. The Government recognise the unique and valuable role WNO plays in cultural life and its leading role in the UK’s opera and classical music sector. We also recognise the very real challenges that have been outlined tonight. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, recognises from what I am saying that I understand the wider impact of opera on all our communities. As noble Lords may be aware, Chris Bryant has had a series of very productive meetings with the Welsh Government, the Wales Office, Arts Council England and the Welsh National Opera to really understand some of the issues in more detail.
We had an interesting Question earlier today that picked up some of the issues that have been raised tonight, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, about Brexit, its impact, the parlous state of our touring companies and musicians, and the real challenges that we face. I hope I outlined earlier today the real commitment by the Government to work in partnership with the EU to find ways that we can come through this to benefit so many different organisations—it is not just music, as we heard earlier—and that engagement will continue.
I noted the comments about Glyndebourne, and of course it is regrettable that it will no longer tour. Touring is a big issue also for the Welsh National Opera, particularly the impact in Wales, but also in England. But I congratulate Glyndebourne on the success of its autumn season, which I understand proved extremely popular.
As we know, Arts Council England has contributed £10,000 towards the cost of consultancy support, which is helping the sector develop a concept for a new sector representative body. We see this as a positive development for opera, supporting the sector to speak as one. We know that other organisations have done their own research—I am thinking here of the Laidlaw Opera Trust and how it has identified key opportunities and challenges. Norwich Theatre’s Opera Voices research has focused particularly on audiences, and we must not forget the importance of audiences in this debate.
In conclusion, I thank noble Lords for taking part in such an important debate. I hope there is an understanding and a recognition that the Government take the cultural sector very seriously, whether in their industrial strategy or in recognition of the contribution that arts and culture make to society, health and well- being, as well as sheer and pure enjoyment. I loved the “blithering, blathering” mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, if I have got it right. I can end only by apologising if I have not been able to address all the points raised. I look forward to continuing this conversation and my door is very much open.
With particular reference to my noble friend Lord Murphy about the working group idea, I suggest that he writes to the Secretary of State, highlights the work he has experienced in the past, and suggests that it be reconvened. There is enormous benefit from sharing all the rich experience from around this House. We have a vital contribution to make and I look forward to being part of it.