Economy: Culture and the Arts

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, for the opportunity to participate in this debate. If the Government wish to concentrate at least part of their efforts on maximising the arts’ economic benefits, policy making needs to stem from an understanding of—I say this to Maria Miller—the special nature of the arts. This is not to say that the arts are better than any other area, it is to say that they have a particular character.

Cultural value is different, distinct, from the normal values of business, even if the arts themselves may be economically heterogeneous, often expressed as a spectrum, with the non-commercial at one end through to the highly commercial at the other. This heterogeneity is not a statement of an ideal, it is a statement of fact. The arts that we may think of as commercial are often not wholly commercial at all, most obviously in current West End hits like the RSC’s “Matilda”. Most theatre and most commercial film in Britain uses actors and directors who have worked in subsidised theatre around the country. As has been said many times, if subsidised theatre did not exist, we would have not only an impoverished theatre scene but a lesser pool of talent. Barbara Broccoli joked last year that “Skyfall” was the national theatre of Bond.

However, the subsidised arts are much more than a seedbed for the commercial sector. The argument from those who would wish to have all the arts funded through private money and philanthropy is that the arts can stand on their own two feet; that they can become resilient. But the crucial assumption made here is that it will be the same arts doing this. This is the part that is not true. What is apparent to arts centres since the cuts is that spaces or services are lost or become taken over by more commercial productions. It is the disappearance of the innovative at grass-roots level that will have a long-term and significant effect on our arts economy. It is not the same arts regrouping.

Reducing public investment means that we will lose that cultural value. To treat the arts mainly as a commodity or a branch of manufacturing—which I fear that this Government may intend to do—is not to get the best out of the arts in terms of their intrinsic or economic value.

The uncertainty about the future departmental representation of the arts does not help. Can the Minister throw some light on this? Rumours would not be flying around if we had a strong department with strong leadership, which I add is no fault of anyone’s but the Government. If some or all of the arts got swallowed up by BIS, it would be a disaster for the arts in Britain. It is because of that special character of the arts that they need their own strong voice in government.

In terms of the Government’s attitude towards innovation or R&D, as it is increasingly called, the trend is often towards projects which can be bolted on to existing established structures. Where they are appropriate, this works really well—among many, one can cite NT Live, with hundreds of venues across the world, as a successful project. But project money is no substitute for the day-to-day running of the majority of arts organisations. The furore that occurred with Creative Scotland last year, when 49 arts organisations had their funding entirely removed and replaced with lottery money for what were perceived as prescribed projects, and the concerted rebellion by artists which forced out Creative Scotland’s then chief executive should act as a strong warning that it is the right kind of funding—core funding—which arts organisations most desperately need.

The Government have asked the arts to justify themselves in economic terms. As Will Hutton pointed out in the Observer newspaper recently, the Treasury will be awash with reports produced over the decades in response to this repeated demand and they all say the same thing, which is that, because of the sizeable multiplier effect, the more that the Government subsidise the arts, the greater still will be the economic returns to the country.

The other important point to make here is that this works as a macro effect. The danger of treating every original artistic endeavour as a discrete business, which the Arts Council is already having to do much more than it used to, is that the arts will become micromanaged in a way that will stultify their operation and stultify innovation. There should be no more reports justifying the arts economically. The case is proved many times over. It is an unnecessary waste of money.

So the leading question has to be: why are the Government not increasing subsidies to the arts instead of continuing to cut? I will say that again: why are the Government not increasing subsidies to the arts? In my view, there is no good reason why they are not. The Government say that in these times every department needs to take its own share of the pain. That is a false morality which cloaks what is in effect a divide-and-rule strategy. The reality is that no part of society works economically in isolation from any other. The actor-director Sam West points out that the arts pay for hospital beds.

The second objection that the Minister might raise is that there is no money available to invest. That is nonsense, considering how minute in departmental terms the arts budget actually is. If the public properly understood that greater public investment in the arts would help to create significant economic growth which would improve their standard of living, they would vote for it like a shot.

Germany, for one, is doing that. For the eighth year in a row, it has increased its central funding of the arts—last November, by 8%—and it is starting from a base investment which is already much higher than ours. Germany’s Culture Minister, Bernd Neumann, says that public funding is not a grant but,

“an essential investment in the future of our society”;

in other words, an awareness of both the intrinsic value of the arts and their huge economic benefits, which, bearing in mind that Germany has a population about a third larger than ours, amounted in 2011 to €63 billion compared with our current £28 billion—about twice as much. The main lesson to learn from Germany here is that, if we are at all comparable to it in terms of potential for growth in the arts, Britain has not reached any kind of ceiling.

We have been asked in this debate to talk about economic potential, but that is not what is currently most at stake. For many artists, it is their survival, and the future on 26 June looks grim. Whatever is lost will be a loss to the cultural value which drives the arts, including its commercial wing. Nor should we forget that on top of that are the cuts to local government and the more than chilling prediction given by the LGA last year that by 2020, 90% of our local cultural services will be lost if cuts continue in the same vein. This at a time when many local councils are becoming more switched on to the importance of their arts and cultural industries, according to the recent report published by the LGA.

Many—Danny Boyle is certainly one—believe that the arts and the creative industries, backed up by an effective art and design education, are vital for the future of this country. We sorely need a Government who will rise to this challenge.