Arts and Cultural Organisations

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I sit as a trustee on a number of organisations involved in the arts, and they are all recorded in the register. I am also a working filmmaker. I feel that it is necessary to declare to the House that I am married to a writer who has been most vigorous in his campaign against cuts to the arts and libraries in his home town of Newcastle.

In April of last year, the Culture Secretary, the right honourable Maria Miller MP, told us:

“When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact”.

Although she acknowledged that this argument would not be to “everyone’s taste”, she did call for all of us to accept this “fundamental premise”. Ironically, my own discipline of film is something of a poster child for those who believe that the value of an art form can be measured by the wealth it produces, having contributed £4.6 billion to the UK economy in 2011 and a wealth of provocative, engaging and beautiful moving image. But while it is easy to quantify art that successfully makes an economic impact, it is harder to account for the delicate ecosystem which allows that success to flourish. A spreadsheet tells only part of the story.

The insistence on an arts sector measured in economic outputs creates a bias towards certain kinds of art, a bias towards the capital, and a bias towards large, well funded institutions which leaves the vast majority of the arts and practitioners of the arts behind. The November 2013 report, Rebalancing our Cultural Capital, illustrates in great detail the growing gap in arts spend outside London over the past two decades. Further work by the same authors shows that just four institutions in the capital receive more lottery funding than do the 33 local authorities, home to 6 million people, at the bottom of the list. These local authorities are predominantly although not exclusively in the north, but they all cover areas that are already challenged by other symptoms of deprivation and where current and prospective local authority cuts are biting most deeply. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that local authorities will have to cut any services they have no legal obligation to provide. I think we all know that local authority funding is disproportionately important to the artistic community outside the capital.

London benefits not only from a disproportionate amount of lottery funding, it receives the greatest proportion of public investment in other ways and attracts the lion’s share of business sponsorship and private philanthropy. I would vigorously assert the need for world-class arts organisations in the capital, but we must consider how to protect and deliver the same values and benefits to citizens elsewhere. Many of them are major contributors to the lottery through the purchase of tickets, but they suffer a measurable deficit of benefit.

Sir Nicholas Hytner, at the end of what was considered to be a triumphant decade as artistic director at the National Theatre, wrote very movingly in the Daily Telegraph of the importance of “innovation”, and the vital role of government subsidy in that innovation, rather than the role of sponsorship and philanthropy—about which he also has much to say and much to be grateful for. What starts as an experiment in the National Theatre studio so often ends up in the West End. London West End theatre brought in more than half a billion pounds in 2012 alone.

Just as the National Theatre feeds the West End, the National itself relies on an ecosystem where talent is nurtured in regional theatres all over the UK. For decades, the artistic directors of the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and many other of our great theatres—and the greatest proportion of their creative contributors—have honed their skills in regional theatre. What we fund now, in all corners of the UK, will create the practitioners and aesthetic of the future—a vibrant and ever changing aesthetic that has made our theatre envied and loved the world over. Starving the ecosystem of the tiny, the local, the experimental, the site-specific and the amateur groups, or insisting that this same list become little businesses, will simply kill the juggernaut of British theatre which has conquered Broadway and beyond. This ecosystem, mirrored in dance, in music, in the visual and voluntary arts, in the digital arts and other performing arts, has palpable effects on other industries, from tourism to tech. Talent is not centred in London; appreciation is not centred in London; the need to see oneself reflected in our world is not centred in London.

I want to ask the Minister just these questions. Since Her Majesty’s Government have placed great emphasis on sponsorship and philanthropy, what steps will they take to protect the small, the experimental and the regional arts institutions that are traditionally of so little interest to commercial sponsors? How would the Minister suggest that the communities that contribute most to lottery funds ensure that they benefit proportionally from their distribution? Given the enormous cuts to local authority funding at a time when their duties have increased and their efficiency savings are largely complete, could not Her Majesty’s Government consider making arts funding a legal requirement of local authorities and provide the resources to support that requirement, in order that we do not decimate arts provision outside the golden circle of the M25 and, in doing so, deprive ourselves of the artists and art of the future?