Arts: Funding

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, and to congratulate him on behalf of the whole House on his excellent and very thought-provoking speech. He comes to the House with huge experience in policing. A former Rhodes scholar, he served as a special adviser to the New York and Philadelphia police chiefs. He is an internationally known expert in criminal justice, science and technology, and for 12 years was the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for police science and technology in the Home Office. I know we shall all look forward to his contributions on this important area and others in the near future.

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for giving us the opportunity today to discuss public funding of the arts. On an occasion such as this, I would normally hope to draw the House’s attention to the pressing issues facing museums and galleries, but today I must make a plea for museums’ less glamorous siblings, libraries and archives. Why is that? It is not because all is rosy for museums at this time of austerity. However, there are nearly 4,500 libraries in the UK, the vast majority of which are funded through local authorities. Nearly 400, and at least 48 mobile libraries, are certainly under threat of closure, and we may learn of others once we know the outcome of individual councils’ local spending reviews.

Meanwhile, archive services—although a statutory responsibility of counties and designated county boroughs—also face an uncertain future. Reductions in funding are likely to result in drastic reductions of opening hours and staff numbers. The ability of archives to manage the collections they have, let alone to embrace new collections for posterity, will be severely hampered.

In recent weeks there has been much public discussion of this subject, and it has consistently been suggested that there is a choice between keeping libraries, keeping schools and healthcare provision, or caring for the elderly and vulnerable children. But that is not a proper way to think about it. Libraries must remain because they are at the heart of our communities. They are places where people can come to learn and meet and place where lives can be changed through the empowerment that those things bring. I know that that is true by having seen my own children’s joy at paying a visit to our local library. There is no question but that the archives also must continue. They are our nation’s memory and without them we cannot know ourselves.

So what are we to do when the axe must inevitably fall? First, closures that are based on short-term cost cutting will be irreversible and must be avoided at all costs. But who will be there to oversee all this now that MLA, the organisation overseeing museums, libraries and archives policy, is being disbanded? Arts Council England will take in libraries, but archives have been orphaned and are without a policy home. I implore the Minister to consider carefully who will advocate for archives from now onwards. Can he tell the House what plans are in place to oversee the archives?

Secondly, archives have for too long missed out on funding that has been forthcoming for museums. With the closure of MLA, it is extremely important that whoever oversees the archives in future can help the sector to gain fairer access to public money than they have enjoyed in recent years. Thirdly, I ask the Government to keep a close watch over progress on this and to ensure that the situation is reviewed at regular intervals.

The Arts Council is having to take over libraries policy at a time when it already faces a budget cut of 30 per cent in relation to its current responsibilities, on top of which it will have to make a 50 per cent cut in administrative costs over four years. That is a huge challenge. Surely checks and balances need to be in place to ensure that the Arts Council has the knowledge to deal with its new responsibilities. A governance review should be instigated immediately so that knowledge within the organisation properly reflects the weighting of its new responsibilities. More importantly, there must be a review within a year or so of how these new arrangements are working and of their impact.