Arts Council England: Regional Distribution of Funding

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, as the last speaker before the Front-Bench speakers, I will focus my remarks, as others have today, on opera, and in particular the ENO following the Arts Council’s recent decision to withdraw all national programme funding from this organisation. Like the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, I am concerned that Arts Council England, by its own admission, has made no strategic nationwide assessment of the need or audience for opera, yet, without consulting any opera companies, it has reduced funding across all opera by £32 million. The ENO is asked to relocate with a massive funding cut; the English touring budget of Welsh National Opera is cut by a third, and as a consequence it will no longer tour to Liverpool; and Glyndebourne’s touring budget is cut by half.

With regard to the ENO’s relocation, it is neither realistic nor compassionate for a large opera company to start moving to an as yet undetermined location with 20 weeks’ notice after the withdrawal of most of its funding. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, rightly mentioned, when the Birmingham Royal Ballet moved from Sadler’s Wells to Birmingham, it had 10 years from the first conversation to the full move, including five years of audience-building and local investment to grow the audience and brand. You cannot achieve that in a few months. To withdraw so much funding from the ENO at the same time as moving it would make it impossible for regional audiences to enjoy the kind of work that London audiences currently enjoy—which goes against the principle of promoting greater access and fairness across the nation.

It is worth stating that, before ACE’s latest decision, ENO was already far advanced in developing a plan for much greater regional representation, which would be interconnected with its London base. This was based on ENO’s experience that high-quality opera, of all kinds and in all places, is best achieved by maintaining the resources of a permanent company of top-level artists and technical staff. At Arts Council England’s new funding level, this plan is now totally unachievable, as the new funding level makes it impossible for ENO to maintain a high-quality permanent opera company as a base.

The Arts Council seems to see a future for ENO which lies mainly in small-scale projects with an undefined residue of grand opera, but none of this has been made explicit or, it would seem, thought through in any detail. For example, ACE states that it wants ENO to keep the London Coliseum and perform there for some of the year, letting it out commercially for the rest of the time. Yet it does not seem to envisage the ENO as a company that is, in fact, large enough to perform at the Coliseum at all.

The new funding level suggests that the Arts Council model is more one of engaging freelancers as and when required, rather than building quality and talent in a maintained opera company; again, though, none of this is explicit. If the ENO is to be a genuine national opera company, developing talent and creating opera to the highest standards, it is hard to see how it can do that without a permanent company within which to develop and maintain those skills—and that is the case whether or not the Arts Council feels that large-scale grand opera is worthy of support. This is a major structural issue, with ramifications for the ecology of opera nationwide. It requires far more careful consideration and needs to be addressed as part of a coherent national opera strategy.

One of the problems with the Arts Council’s process is the complete lack of transparency in decision-making. The ENO met or exceeded all the ACE targets. ACE considers it to be run in an excellent way, yet it is impossible to find out what criteria ACE used that resulted in it, and other well-run organisations, being removed from the national portfolio. The suspicion is that Arts Council England is no longer quite the arm’s-length body it is supposed to be. I share the concerns of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. Dr Darren Henley, the CEO of ACE, said in evidence to the Commons DCMS Select Committee on 8 December:

“We always receive instructions from the Secretary of State about our grant-in-aid investment”


and that it

“needed to move money out of London”.

However, in a Written Answer published two weeks ago by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, the Government stated:

“All decisions on which organisations to fund … and by how much, have been taken by Arts Council England. In line with the long-standing principle that the Arts Council makes such decisions at arm’s length from Government, there are no plans to ask it to reconsider these decisions.”


This is, of course, a contradiction. More clarity from both sides is therefore required.

In conclusion, in the interests of all opera companies, audiences and stakeholders, Arts Council England must remedy the confusion it has caused by urgently conducting a nationwide review of the provision of opera, taking into account audiences and need. It should, if necessary, be prepared to amend its decisions accordingly and it should be fully transparent about the criteria it uses in its decision-making process.