Funding for the Arts

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone; it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship.

There is a little point in the Library briefing for today’s debate that should, perhaps, be clarified. That point is that the Scottish Government fund our national performing companies separately from Creative Scotland: the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra are all funded directly, unlike their counterparts in England. The arrangement began in 2007, which explains the drop in funding to what was the Scottish Arts Council at that time.

Those companies create and perform some remarkable pieces, giving much more value in return for the investment than we might have expected. It is unfair to single out any one of them but I am going to, having seen a performance of theirs recently at the National Theatre on the south bank: “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour” by the National Theatre of Scotland. The National Theatre of Scotland has produced some stunning pieces and is internationally acclaimed for its imagination and bravado—a legacy of Vicky Featherstone’s time as its inaugural artistic director. She was an inspired and inspirational choice and one for which we should thank Robert Findlay and the board.

Scotland’s national companies are a fine example of getting fantastic value for money from arts funding. The continued support of the Scottish Government, though, is getting harder and harder to deliver as their own budget gets hammered time after time by this UK Government. As has been mentioned, the same is true for local authorities the length and breadth of these islands. Their ability to support arts spending in their areas will be severely limited by the perpetual squeeze of a Government obsessed with austerity and lacking, it sometimes appears, any real comprehension of what austerity is doing to services, including cultural services, provided by central and local government.

Birmingham is a fine example—local politicians forced to cut their culture budget by a quarter in a city that is proud of, and has promoted, its cultural side to great effect in the recent past. In 2012, Newcastle announced its intention to impose a 100% cut to its culture budget; that was, after a UK-wide outcry, eventually pegged back to a mere 50%. Once councils are cutting back so drastically, the services start to move towards a point where they will not be recoverable if resources become available again in the future. It moves to a point where rebuilding those services from scratch will be the only option—and that is only if the resources to do so become available.

As Mr Hollobone mentioned, I do not speak of this in the abstract but from experience. Before I came here I was a councillor—convenor for culture and sport—in Edinburgh, the city that is host to the world’s biggest arts festival every August. For five years I had the task of trying to balance the books for the city’s cultural activities. Trying to develop the cultural ambitions of a city while firefighting the effects of a diminishing budget is a thankless and unending task, and my sympathies lie with the councillors and officers who are having to try to do that in every local authority just now.

The judgment that is so often made, it seems, is that arts and culture spending is a luxury that can be dispensed with more easily than other spending commitments—that support for theatres, galleries, museums and libraries is a little indulgence that we should jettison at the first tightening of the belt. Public art becomes something to be mocked, rather than a vital part of the wellbeing of communities.

When that happens—when we allow the spend on culture to drop—we start to strip away from communities some of the social cohesion that makes everyone’s lives better. Whether it is about offering art that people can appreciate or offering them the chance to become part of the art of an area, the opportunities are about allowing and encouraging people to be part of something bigger, something more than themselves. It is about giving people the chance to lose themselves in the glory of something beautiful and dynamic and offering them the chance of learning something new, feeling something new, dreaming something new. Funding for culture is not a frivolity, nor is it a decoration; it is a vital part of what makes us who we are and what makes our society what it is.

From small-scale community events and amateur dramatics in church halls to touring orchestras and exhibitions of great works, the engagement of people in art is an enterprise whereby the benefits far outweigh the investment required. We risk much more than jobs when we put that enterprise to the sword. Each cut to culture spending is a cut to society, just as cuts to health provision or education provision are. We should ensure that the investment continues and that it is distributed across communities everywhere.

Yesterday, I had a look at the English Arts Council’s website, where there is a warning for anyone who cares about England’s culture: the funding distribution, in my opinion, is far too London-centric. London, with only 16% of England’s population, has 45% of all the organisations in the national portfolio of Arts Council England, and those London organisations take 40% of its funding to service that 16% of the population. That will include funding for the national companies, but if people value the benefits of cultural spend they will surely want to share it more widely. There is no reason why the national companies have to be in London. Take a leaf out of Scotland’s book: share the national companies with other cities, spread the funding more widely, involve more communities and help more people.

The investment in art is worth every penny and worth every debate that is needed to get it made. It is time to dump austerity from every part of public spending, but it is definitely time to dump it from arts spending.