Arts Council England: Funding

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for securing this debate. On the proper functioning of the Arts Council, there is a specific consultation at the moment on music provision across the country. A concern is that the timeline of the consultation was announced in December 2022, and the first real engagement with stakeholders begins and concludes in January 2023. Ministers and the Government have a duty to ensure that the consultation is proper and thorough. Centres such as mine, Dynamics CIC in Medway, that offer outstanding music provision will be severely affected if it is not done properly and thoroughly, in a way that respects outstanding provision, rather than pulling things together geographically for financial reasons.

[Sir Robert Neill]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. It highlights the interesting fact that this is not just a London issue. There are institutions outside London that have lost funding for no apparent reason. That is the difficulty: the lack of any apparent evidence base or transparent and proper process for these decisions. There is a lack of any proper consultation or impact assessment.

I have seen freedom of information responses rather perfunctorily provided to individuals by the Arts Council, in a process that appears to be like drawing teeth. Mr Bone, you and I have had experience of such things from public bodies in the past. It appears that no full impact assessments were made on individual changes, even though some of them will close institutions. Equalities impact assessments were made, but not the full impact assessment expected when dealing with many millions of pounds of public money, and the possibility of an institution ceasing to operate, with redundancies caused thereafter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Robert Neill]

It may demonstrate the lack of thought in the Arts Council England process. It apparently wanted English National Opera, although no longer based in London, to still run the Coliseum as a commercial venue—a taxpayer subsidised version competing against west end theatre. That does not seem either competent or terribly Conservative, for that matter; it certainly is not a good use of public money.

At the same time, Arts Council England wanted English National Opera to relocate to The Factory in Manchester, a venue that was not built to take unamplified singing—no one had bothered to check. Singing there has to be on a mike. Basic due diligence might have found that one out. The Factory, which, I am told, has been a pet project of some of the senior management of Arts Council England in the past, is a venue that does not have a set of users. It is £100 million over budget. I do not think that forcing a company that has been well established for 100 years or so in London to fill what has become an Arts Council England white elephant was necessarily a very good idea—particularly because Opera North, which performs in Manchester, was not even told. If it had been, it could have said what the audience figures were and probably told Arts Council England that opera cannot be done in The Factory anyway. It is the lack of basic competence, strategic thought and good management that is terrifying in all this. That is why there is a compelling ground for intervention.

[Rehman Chishti]

rose—

[Sir Robert Neill]

I will take one more intervention and then let others speak.

[Rehman Chishti]

My hon. Friend mentions the forced collaboration between one organisation and another. That is a quick fix. He talks about opera, but before we get to staging opera we need to ensure that our young people have the right music skills. The Arts Council at the moment is carrying out a consultation on the national plan for music education. It has said that all hubs will cover multiple local authority areas. It has subsequently said that this will be achieved

“via prescribing geographic delivery areas for Music Hubs”.

In Medway we have outstanding music provision in schools. Our neighbours in Kent do not have quite the same standards, but under those proposals one area will be forced in with the other. Surely forcing a merger of an outstanding provision area with another cannot be the right way forward—it will weaken the provision in small organisations such as those in Medway.

[Sir Robert Neill]

It sounds as if Arts Council England has fallen into bureaucratic speak. What would that mean to any normal person or sensible institution? It defeats me. There is a complete lack of understanding of what happens on the ground, and a complete lack of engagement with the institutions and their audiences—that is the great error in all this.

I do not have time to quote it all, but the playwright Dennis Kelly wrote a very powerful letter to me; it can be googled and found on social media. It was about the impacts on prose theatre—in particular, the Hampstead Theatre and others. There is a lack of appreciation of the impacts on audiences, and an unwillingness to engage with them. The fact is that people travel to many of those London venues from all around the home counties; it is not purely a London thing in any event.

Lest I be tempted to go on indefinitely, I should say that I have set out the case as to why the whole approach to this funding round has been seriously flawed. Egregious individual decisions have been made. Some of those have been rowed back on to some extent, and I welcome that—I am always happy if Arts Council England or others are prepared to listen and to look at evidence. But it needs to be much more comprehensive and to do it in a much more transparent and strategic fashion.

I will quote the former Secretary of State again. She said that when she arrived at DCMS, she was not a great fan of opera—I had a conversation with her about that —but she went. I urge all Ministers who come into the Department to go to opera, ballet, theatre, concerts and to look at some of the galleries and museums that they are responsible for. They should see that as an experience in itself. My right hon. Friend became a total convert; she said, in relation to ENO and the Royal Opera House:

“They have been the front runners in levelling up for a very long time. They leave many in other sectors of the performing arts in the shade in terms of how much they give back and how they try desperately via a number of measures to make opera accessible to all.”

That is exactly what ENO has been doing.

Then there are the insulting comments of the director of music at Arts Council England, who said, “We don’t believe there is any growing audience for grand opera”—a rather bizarre term to use. Anyone who knows anything about opera will know that is a five-act French production by Meyerbeer from about 1860; we do not talk in terms of grand opera any more. I think what she meant was full-scale opera, with a proper orchestra and chorus. How anyone can say that when theatres have been locked down because of covid for many years defeats me. Freedom of information requests have not evidenced any robust statistical basis for that assumption, which is another reason to go back and have a proper strategy.

I hope all that tells the Minister that something has gone badly wrong in this funding round. We cannot just say that Arts Council England is an arm’s length body; we need to do something before serious and lasting harm is done to critical parts of our cultural and artistic heritage.