First the Lord giveth, then the Lord has taketh way. After the good news in October of the treasury settlement to the Arts Council of a rise in funding from £417m to £467m (a welcome increase above the headline inflation figure of £2.7%), at a time when many in the arts world were bracing themselves for standstill funding or worse, the Arts Council wrote to its clients, “We are delighted that this settlement indicates that Government listened to the case for the arts made by us all, and has recognised the need to continue to invest in world-class arts for more people.” But now has come the announcement that they are looking afresh at the way those funds are being distributed, and – in what The Guardian has called “the most bloody cull since the Arts Council was set up more than 50 years ago”, nearly 200 arts organisations in England have now been told that their funding will end from next April.
The list of 195 organisations affected includes some 37 theatre companies, among them Northcott’s Exeter Theatre (as I previously reported here), London’s Drill Hall, Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, the touring London Bubble Theatre Company and the National Student Drama Festival. This has cued a predictable chorus of cries of foul – but decisions are not final, and the organisations have four weeks in which to appeal (Of course, since Britain is about to shut down for at least two of them, as we seem to every year between Christmas and New Year, it’s compressing the actual time available in which they can do so).
But I’m shocked to discover that some of the organisations affected have not only already effectively admitted defeat, but also seem to have actually proved the Arts Council’s case against them by immediately beginning to wind down. In the case of the Drill Hall, The Stage has reported that it “immediately closed the doors” after receiving the ACE letter last week, immediately laying off its part-time staff and closing the doors on its current show, Bitch Slapped By God, because it was “cheaper not to be open”, according to the theatre’s artistic director Julie Parker.
Actually, that may have been dictated by a commercial reality that not many people were going: I previously wrote here about not lasting beyond the interval when I saw it, and several people have said to me that they didn’t either. ACE have said that the Secretary of State have asked them “to give a particular priority to building artistic excellence,” and this show clearly demonstrated a failure of that. But then we must not judge an organisation by one failure; but the Drill Hall, by putting up the shutters so summarily, seem to suggest that they agree witih that judgement. However, the funding cuts – if they are implemented – only apply from next April; so why exactly the need to close so suddenly now? Are they going to return the grant they are currently in receipt of that covers the current year? Are they throwing their toys out of the pram – or simply proving the case against them?
Another potential loser is the National Student Drama Festival that takes place every year in Scarborough and is due to run next from March 15-21; in a news report in The Stage on the intention to withdraw their £52,000 ACE grant, it was reported that “according to officials at NSDF, this will threaten next year’s festival”, but again I must ask why so. The cuts only take effect from the month after the festival actually takes place.
The Stage has also reported that ACE insists its decisions”have not been taken lightly”, and they are all subject to appeals on a case-by-case basis, so some may yet be saved. There is also, of course, an upside: as The Stage reported, the changes “form part of a broader strategy that will see around 80 new organisations, including more than 20 theatre companies, joining its portfolio of regularly funded organisations. Meanwhile, 746 of its remaining 795 RFOs will receive an inflationary increase or better. ACE also claims that of the 195 cut companies, several are being reorganised or combined, and the real figure of those losing subsidy is closer to 160.”
But there are also wider issues at play than the particular winners and losers in this particular apparently swingeing round. Public funding isn’t a right but has to be earned. As The Guardian suggested in its leader feature yesterday, “Reflect for a moment and it becomes obvious that it cannot be sensible for all existing arts organisations to be funded out of the public purse indefinitely or unchangingly, even when - as now - there is plenty of money available. Such an approach would create a protectionist cartel. It would be hard or impossible for new groups to break into the market. If that happened, some of those who are today denouncing the Arts Council for pulling the plug so radically would seamlessly move to denounce it as a barrier to innovation. The big argument in arts spending today is not whether there is enough public money for the arts but whether that money is spent in the best way. In one sense, of course, there is never enough money. But the arts have had a good spending round for 2008-11, not a bad one… Unlike in New Labour’s earlier years, spending on the arts for the arts’ sake has been a winning argument this time and rightly so. Nor has the arts budget been robbed for the sake of the Olympics. That argument is lazy and wrong. The money that is being saved by the Arts Council’s decisions will go to other arts organisations, not to the Olympics.”
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