Local Arts and Cultural Services

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, truly successful places that people want to visit and live in are always much more than economic powerhouses. Strong economies are always underpinned by a sense of creative vibrancy and cultural identity. That is as true now for towns and cities in the UK as it was for Florence in the Renaissance and London in the 1850s.

Unlike the noble Earl, I speak with no special expertise in this area, but as a local historian I am a heavy user of the museums, study centres and county archives of Norfolk and have come to appreciate the extraordinary role that local authorities can and do play in investing in our arts. I know that 2015-16 seemed like a bad year, with a sharp decline in educational visits and some predictable reductions in overseas ones, and it can feel extravagant to a local authority to invest in this area. However, new analysis by the Local Government Network showed that, perhaps surprisingly, if we look back over the past two to three years, the picture is not quite as the noble Earl reported. Many local authorities have protected their arts and culture funding and it has not taken disproportionate cuts. It is worth remembering that they have managed to sustain investment when some people here speaking up for social care would say that they have taken even further cuts. So they have managed.

How do we tackle this problem? Joint enterprise has already been mentioned. The Minister will remember last year’s report from the Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which highlighted Norfolk museum service’s hub model of museums and galleries, with collaborations with national institutions such as the British Museum, the Tate and the National History Museum—a mutually creative partnership since 1974 and a very cost-effective way of investing. Norfolk and Suffolk have also combined to create an East Anglia cultural board, which recognises that cultural tourism brings people into the region and encourages people to settle there. Social mobility is fostered by local arts, and social capital is not always allied to intellectual capital. Social creative capital can create social mobility.

I want in my last minute to comment on the crazy imbalance in arts funding between London and the rest of the UK. I know that Arts Council England is uplifting 4% more funding in 2018-22 to the regions, but at present the imbalance is shameful. It is often the provinces that produce artistic capital. It is a great shame that we do not have agreement on how to tackle the shift. We need to agree on a mechanism to get more money into the regions.