Arts and Culture

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I have had to cut the congratulations to my noble friend and the welcome to the Minister. I will focus on private support for the arts and on classical music, including music education.

Corporate support for the arts fell to its lowest level for seven years in 2010-11, which was mistakenly designated the “year of corporate giving” to the arts. I am not surprised. I was responsible for IBM’s UK arts sponsorship in the late 1980s when it was already being overtaken by newer forms of advertising and brand promotion. Future corporate support for the arts is likely to be driven either by corporate responsibility goals, when investment in the arts is seen as achieving social or community aims, or by direct business relevance, when the arts help businesses to do better by increasing their creativity or flexibility.

The prospects for individual support are better. The Government were right to recognise, eventually, that donors need to be properly recognised and certainly not treated like potential tax-dodgers. Individual fundraising needs to be spread much more widely outside London, which received 81% of all individual arts giving in the year to March 2011. Arts strategies should include the promotion of good practice in fundraising through, for example, peer-to-peer advice and support among smaller arts organisations.

Other government priorities include broadening audiences and embracing new technologies. The national plan for music education is a welcome approach to the first of these, and I hope that all schools will be encouraged to engage with it. Efforts to promote the use of digital technology in the arts are fine, so long as technology is recognised primarily as an enabler—it has been described to me as the greatest discovery since the invention of the bucket for encouraging donations. I was delighted to learn that “The Space”, a new free “digital pop-up arts channel”—whatever that means—developed by the Arts Council and the BBC, has provided a live streaming of Berlioz’s opera “The Trojans” from Covent Garden, and I declare an interest as a trustee of the Berlioz Society.

Access is important, of course, but aspiration and accomplishment in the arts are even more so. In the current straitened times, the arts should take, and have taken, their share of necessary funding cuts, but care is needed not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The strength of the music scene in the UK owes much to the number of talented musicians who come to study, teach and perform at our world-class conservatoires: the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama each have over 50 nationalities among their students. Training top-rank musicians, like training scientists or doctors, is expensive, but it helps to create a valuable revenue-earning asset for the UK. A new study by the LSE on behalf of these three conservatoires shows that even during the recession the creative industries continue to act as engines of economic growth and innovation for the UK. The sector is estimated to have generated some £25 billion in 2010, and the presence of institutions such as the conservatoires helps to fuel this through what the LSE calls “agglomeration”.

How do the Government seek to encourage more private support for the arts in the regions outside London? What will they do to encourage all schools to engage with their local music hubs? Will music education be formally included in the key stage 3 and 4 curriculum and in the EBacc? Can the Minister give a reassurance that the UK’s leading conservatoires will continue to receive the funding they need to develop world-class musicians and to attract top musical talent to the UK?