Economy: Culture and the Arts

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury. Way back in 1998, when County Durham was in trouble with the Bowes Museum, the then Secretary of State commissioned a report. It was a very good report, and after he received it he said that he would think about the Bowes Museum every day in his bath. I hope that he still has a bath every day.

If noble Lords will forgive me, I will take the contribution to the economy for granted. I am much more concerned about the effect on society, the educational potential and social mobility, which I find much more difficult and more interesting subjects. Briefly, I will talk about the relationship between the state—central and local government—and arts and cultural institutions. I hope that noble Lords will find that as I go along, I will at least show that I have been in the front line of that quite often.

It does not seem to me that the arts can flourish without a high degree of independence. If they are not independent, then they have problems. I do not see how they achieve inclusion without that degree of independence. That, of course, takes one straightaway to money because it is a question of resources, and that has engaged your Lordships quite a lot during this debate. However, if one agrees that a degree of independence is a necessary condition for the arts to flourish, then one has to look and see about the state.

The state is basically uncomfortable with the arts, and so are local authorities. This makes the job of the public servants in the Arts Council, as my noble friend Lord Brooke said, and in other of the institutions such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, quite tricky. As noble Lords will have seen, there are spats between the Arts Council and government. This is not a political speech; it does not matter who the government were or are. There are spats between the Lottery Fund and government, and changes in position. I think this is because, while the state is comfortable with and understands expenditure, it does not understand income. It gets its own income by a form of legalised confiscation.

Furthermore, the state and local authorities are not happy with risks. They are not comfortable with experimentation and they worry about the electorate’s responses to things which neither they nor their civil servants really know about or understand. We have to remember that 35% of the electorate do not vote, and a lot of other members of the electorate are not too switched on by the arts. So why is the independence valuable?

I will refer briefly to Kew Gardens. I was fortunate enough after the Heritage Act 1983 to be the first chairman of Kew when it came under trustees. There was no “Friends of Kew” at that time; the Ministry would not have thought of it. We now have more than 70,000; it is a lot later, but that has happened. We have had enormously successful exhibitions of, for example, Chihuly’s glass and Henry Moore’s sculptures.

Many other things have happened at Kew; I think it relates much more to what the public like to go and see than it used to. Many of these things would not have happened if it had remained under Defra. Take, for example, the £110 million for the millennium seed bank raised by Kew. Does anybody really think that that would have happened if Kew had still been run directly by the department? There is a serious issue about independence and, with it, a serious issue about why an independent body deserves so much public money. That is a question that we all have to answer.

I will finish, briefly, with the Bowes Museum. In 1998, County Durham had a problem with the Bowes and proposed to shut it for 18 weeks over the winter. The argument was, “We haven’t got a lot of money, we’re subject to constraints”—goodness me, they are subject to more constraints now even than they were then—“we have villages down the coast where there used to be pits, and those villages have community centres and libraries but not much income, so what are we to do? Are we to give the money to the Bowes and Barnard Castle, next to Raby Castle, or are we to give it in grant form to the pit villages?”. One can understand their dilemma; it was perfectly genuine. They were not disregarding the contribution of the Bowes or Barnard Castle to County Durham; they had a problem. Therefore, we negotiated to take the Bowes back to being an independent trust. Since then, we have raised money to mend the roof and we have reorganised the collections. We now have contemporary art exhibitions, and we have had selling exhibitions of crafts. The café is also a great deal better than it used to be. All these things have been done and can continue to be done.

Of course, the basis for them all is an ability to raise money. That is how I will finish. When you go to raise money, people are very good at telling you, “I would have given you money yesterday, and possibly I will give you money tomorrow, but unfortunately I haven’t got any money today”. You have to look at them, give them a villainous smile and say, “I will not leave until I have the cheque”. We need to get a great deal better at raising our own money in order to support our independence, carry out the work of inclusion and solve many of our financial problems ourselves.