Arts and Creative Industries

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), but I must remind him that, under Labour, education and creativity were too often seen as the functions of failing schools and failing children who found strictly academic subjects to be a challenge—[Interruption.] That was what went on in his constituency and others. Unfortunately, he missed the point of what was going on in this debate. There has been a lot of cross-party agreement, and, as the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) said, we all recognise the contribution of the arts.

I do not want to repeat what others have said, but I must point out that a good part of the arts and the creative industries is non-subsidised. In my own town of Lancaster, I can see the cross-cultural relationship between the subsidised and non-subsidised sectors. We have three theatres. The university theatre, the Nuffield, and the Dukes theatre are subsidised by the Arts Council, but the oldest theatre, the Grand, is still commercially run and receives no subsidy. Many of the artists who flow out from Lancaster and its great university do not ask for subsidies and do not get them. Instead, they make a contribution, and we underestimate that at our peril.

To be fair to Opposition Members, most of them have made positive contributions to the debate, but some have underestimated the success of the Secretary of State and the Minister in achieving the return that they have done, and in working behind the arts. I fully support the amendment, although I would also have mentioned the support that we have given to superfast broadband, which will add a great deal to the creative industries.

I want to make a couple of points about the Arts Council. I know that Ministers inherited the previous Government’s funding of the Arts Council. I want to ask some questions as a northern Member of Parliament. The southern average per capita funding from the Arts Council is £7.93, the midlands average is £5.78, and the northern average is £4.66, yet the London average is £21.42. I accept that London has great theatres such as the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, but the Arts Council must be questioned about the continuation of this historical funding. The Labour Government did nothing to challenge it during all their years in office.

The per capita funding for the north-west is £3.50 and the funding for Lancashire is £1.45, and we wonder why there are suggestions of a north-south divide. There seems to be an historical north-south divide in the arts as well. Lancaster has seen a decline in Arts Council funding from £674,000 to £462,000 in recent years. Most of us in Lancaster accept austerity, however, and acknowledge that we have to pay for the grand schemes that Labour attempted to pay for by borrowing in previous years.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central defended the leadership of the Arts Council. I tabled a number of questions to the Minister, in which I asked how much lottery funding the Arts Council got. I was told that it received £152 million in 2010-11, but spent £123 million, leaving £29 million in its pocket. Where did that money go? In 2011-12, its lottery funding was increased to £182 million, of which it spent only £115 million. That left £67 million unspent while groups in my area such as Ludus Dance, the Dukes theatre and the Nuffield theatre were suffering cuts. I know that the Arts Council is an independent, arm’s length body, but I have to ask the Minister some serious questions about the Arts Council’s management and the regional balance of its funding, given that, over those two years, it could afford to underspend by £96 million.