Regional Arts and Culture

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing this debate. It is a great pleasure to follow not one but two former Labour Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my right hon. Friends the Members for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Dame Tessa Jowell). It is very good that they have turned up to speak.

I will not spend a lot of time paying tribute to Bristol’s arts and cultural scene and creative industries, which are well known. Bristol has everything from the natural history unit to Aardman. We had the “Gromit Unleashed” exhibition, if I can call it that, in the city last year. There were some 80 Gromits dotted around the city centre, and more than 1 million visitors came. People came from Japan to take pictures of themselves with the Gromits, which shows that Bristol does not always do things in the established way. There is a big counter-cultural scene in Bristol, which for the most part operates outside the realm of Arts Council funding and is probably happy doing so. The Banksys of this world, for example, have no need for anyone’s money except their own these days.

As we have heard, arts in the regions have been disproportionately affected by cuts to arts and culture. The Bristol Old Vic’s artistic director Tom Morris described it as a “triple whammy” of national cuts, local cuts and the greater difficulties that places outside London have in getting philanthropic funding. We know from research published by the shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government that the most deprived local authorities have suffered a disproportionately large share of funding cuts, which has a knock-on effect.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a similar situation in many constituencies? In Bolton, the crescent building, which has a museum, a library and an art gallery, has had to make 25 people redundant and sell 36 pieces of art so it can survive.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Cuts have a cumulative impact. Not just the Arts Council cuts but other cuts are having a real impact. The artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse has said that cuts will particularly affect the theatre’s ability to commission new plays. He concluded that cuts are

“about centralisation....loss of identity and undermining of the regional voice”.

In the limited time that I have left, I will focus on the fact that not all parts of Bristol benefit evenly from Arts Council funding. We have talked about the discrepancy between London and the regions, but there is a discrepancy even within Bristol. None of the 15 national portfolio arts organisations in Bristol, which share the £4.3 million grant in aid that goes to the city, are based in my constituency of Bristol East. Of the 79 projects in Bristol supported by the Arts Council through its national lottery-funded grants for the arts, only four are based in Bristol East. That is partly because the city centre is home to historical and cultural buildings and activities, but we need to consider how we can use arts funding to take things out to the communities, and to bring the communities into the city centre, too. There is a divide, and many people do not feel that they share in the artistic spoils of Bristol in the way they should. I have been approached by the Arts Council’s south-west office on precisely that issue. We met a couple of weeks ago, and I am reassured that the Arts Council is committed to ensuring that Bristol’s imbalance is addressed.