Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow my noble friend’s speech, which was extraordinarily powerful and very moving. We are in his debt for securing this debate and for the case he made for creating a cultural strategy that can serve to lift the spirits as well as the economy. I agree with every word he said.

My noble friend’s argument was cast, rightly, against the background of the furore against the Arts Council settlement and, in particular, the decision to redistribute £50 million away from London and into other parts of the country. Of course, the context for this is pretty toxic in itself: a decade of funding cuts that have starved local as well as national culture, a pandemic that cut the arteries of culture and a period of political opportunism. Frankly, our cultural life has never felt more precarious or more precious.

Within this context I will focus on opera, not because it is a narrow aspect of the decision but because it illustrates the widest and broadest implications of what has happened and the decision in relation to English National Opera. I find it not just extraordinary and damaging on its own terms but symptomatic of a deep confusion in the Arts Council’s objectives and expectations. Culture succeeds best when it is embedded strategically and grown from seed, rather than imposed.

There is also a more recent contradiction, which thrives in the absence of a strategic plan for culture: the erosion of the boundaries between what government wants and what arm’s-length bodies—ALBs—are there to do. We are in a new landscape, and one of its features is that arts and heritage have taken on a new attraction for government as the light brigade of levelling up. I ought not to be against this—it could be an epiphany—because for years we have argued for the unique capacity of arts and heritage to make, remake and renew places, skills, resilience, jobs and identity, and this seems to have finally got through to government. On the other hand, this new use of patronage carries huge risks of loss of independence and integrity, and it is this conflicted nature that the Arts Council and other ALBs are well aware of.

There is no argument to be had against redistribution outside London or against closing the cultural deficit. There is every argument to be had about how this is done, and the perverse consequences which may follow. Goodness knows, in this House it is our special subject—perverse consequences. We are for ever telling the other place to think again, to make sure that it does not go down that road, but within this settlement is a set of perverse consequences.

Welsh National Opera has had the second largest cut of any organisation in the portfolio, of 35%, at £2.2 million, after a glowing assessment. It now has to reduce its touring weeks in cities in England—and, of course, ironically, Liverpool, where it has an enormous and loyal following. This is a real threat to the company. Glyndebourne has already been mentioned; the touring company is the one approach to opera which makes people who think that Glyndebourne is simply for the rich understand that it is there for them as well. Most people in Liverpool will not care whose decision this was. They will know only that the WNO has been taken away.

This is not levelling up—it is damage by design, and, like a clock which strikes 13, it questions the credibility of the Arts Council policy of cultural democracy. This is where the decision on ENO fits in; a decision which will drive this extraordinary opera company, with a unique social mission, to a cliff edge next March, with no future in London and an unviable and potentially unwelcome future in Manchester. I say unwelcome because, just as ENO had no warning, so Manchester has had no warning that this is being done. Manchester has its own plans and its own loyalties. I am inclined to think that Gilbert and Sullivan could have set all this to music.

One of the most baffling things to me is that the Arts Council, after so many years of thinking about this, seems to have lost confidence in its own instincts. Who can forget the powerful case that Darren Henley himself made in 2016 for the arts dividend? Cultural placemaking relies on two things: resilient and trusted local and national partnerships, and community engagement at a depth that is genuinely challenging. It takes years to break down the emotional and financial barriers of people who have never walked up the steps of a great museum or into a crowded foyer full of shouty people. That takes time and investment in schools, young people, families and community action. I know that, because I have done it with the support of the Welsh Government in Wales, over many years, through the Fusion programmes.

That levelling up is what ENO had achieved deliberately in London—a city of staggering inequality, with the highest rates of poverty in the UK and the lowest rates of cultural participation—growing a young audience for opera in ways in which could only be the envy of other opera companies. Such other companies have not given away 6,000 free tickets since September; have not grown a young audience, 50% of which is now under 30; and have not set up a highly innovative programme to help people suffering from Covid to breathe. What a waste, if that is all lost—to say nothing of a precious cargo of 350 skilled jobs and a loss of £6 million from cancelled shows. Where is the economics in that, let alone the ethics?

Many noble Lords, I am sure, will talk about the poverty of the process, the lack of transparency and the discourtesy, and the shock of being assured how well you are doing, only to be told how much you will be cut. I do not expect this from the Arts Council leadership. It creates in me a deep anxiety that this was perhaps not just a decision by the Arts Council. I have enormous respect for the Minister in question, but am I wrong to have suspicions that there was more than a ministerial eye on this decision?

My second question for the Minister is the one put by WNO and ENO. What did they do wrong, and when, and why were they not told? My third question is: how can trust and the future be salvaged for these opera companies now? Would the Minister agree with me that random and disproportionate cuts to opera are indefensible in the absence of a strategy for opera which seeks to optimise its benefits? I refer to all the benefits that we have heard about, and the many that I would love to talk about but do not have time. Will the Minister use his influence to secure with the Arts Council a strategic review of opera which looks at how best it can be supported so that it can thrive as an art form which belongs to everyone? Will he work with the Arts Council to give ENO space and time to develop a new model along the lines of the RSC, with a London base and a thriving base outside London?