Opera

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.