The more I think about how the government’s levelling-up policy is being applied to the arts — and I gather that Arts Council England (ACE) bureaucrats have been instructed to think about little else — the more misconceived it seems. As a newspaper critic I am privileged to see dozens of shows around the country each year, so I have a vague idea of where the regional arts are flourishing and where they could improve. Unfortunately, the mission imposed by the culture secretary Nadine Dorries — which will remove £75 million of arts funding from London to boost activity in the regions — seems based on four complete fallacies.
The first is that London gobbles up a disproportionate amount of England’s arts subsidy. The second is that persuading, say, a theatre company to relocate its offices from London to Doncaster will magically boost the economic revival of South Yorkshire. The third is that the cultural side of levelling up is best masterminded from above by a central body, namely Dorries’s culture department, rather than by responding to local demand. And the fourth is that it’s an excellent thing for cabinet ministers to commandeer the arts for social-engineering purposes.
Let’s look at those fallacies one by one. According to Darren Henley, ACE’s chief executive, his London “clients” get about 25 per cent of the total client funding. That seems a lot for one city, but remember that there are 14 million people in Greater London and its commuter belt. That’s 14 million with easy access to central London. And 14 million is exactly 25 per cent of England’s population of 56 million people. So even leaving aside the argument that, as a great capital, London should have a wealth of world-class arts institutions because it is competing with Paris, Berlin and New York for cultural tourists, its present share of subsidy is still justifiable on population terms.
Second, offering London-based arts organisations financial inducements to relocate to the regions seems like a huge upheaval with little guaranteed benefit. For a start, Dorries’s department has specified that what will count, statistically, is where an organisation’s office is registered — not where it puts on shows. That seems like an open invitation to bend the rules. Yet even if this does result in a substantial transfer of London’s arts activity to the regions, how will the companies already existing in those places feel about competition from interlopers? Most are clinging to survival by a thread already.
Third, using the culture department and ACE to impose all this seems perversely against the spirit of levelling-up. Why not let elected local councillors decide what sort of cultural activity they want in their areas, and boost their budgets to make it happen? Over the past decade cultural spending by English local authorities has almost halved. That’s not surprising, because over the same period the government has cut their overall funding by £15 billion in real terms. If ministers are serious about making culture an integral part of levelling up, they should recognise that local authorities run most of the institutions that bring culture into ordinary communities — 3,000 libraries, 350 museums and 116 theatres among them — and give them more support for doing so.
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Boosting local authority budgets, however, would mean ministers such as Dorries forfeiting some control over how it is spent — which brings us to the last point. How much is this whole exercise really about improving the spread of culture in England as opposed to winning cheap headlines that might persuade voters in northern England to re-elect the Tories? I would say quite a lot of the latter. And that strikes me as unethical, to put it mildly. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I look back with nostalgia to that era — only about 30 years ago — when the Arts Council was a fiercely independent organisation, and government ministers took pride in not interfering in artistic matters.
If Dorries needs convincing about the wisdom of that approach, she need look only at Unboxed, the year-long “festival of Brexit” that started this month in a flurry of total public indifference. Entirely conceived by Tory politicians, it is financed with £120 million of public money that’s desperately needed elsewhere in the arts, and — a committee of horrified MPs declared this week — is shaping up to be a fiasco.
They can’t be right, of course. It’s happening mostly in the regions, so it must be a triumph!
One step to boost visitor numbers
Covid may be receding, at least from the front pages, but its disastrous effect on box-office figures is far from over. Newly unveiled by the Insights Alliance are the results of a survey of 23,369 formerly regular arts attendees. About 14 per cent haven’t returned since the pandemic started and say they won’t do so until Covid is over. In other words, possibly never. Another 30 per cent said they expected to attend less often in future.
That gloomy picture is reinforced by the 2021 admissions figures from the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA). Predictably, outdoor attractions did well (Windsor Great Park tops the list for the first time, with 5.4 million visits, followed by Kew Gardens and Chester Zoo), while museums and galleries struggled horribly. The British Museum, which pulled in 6.8 million visitors in 2015, managed only 1.3 million last year. Neither the National Gallery nor the V&A reached a million.
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Lockdowns accounted for much of that decline, of course, but so did the collapse of international tourism. ALVA maintains that one simple step the government could take, at no cost to the taxpayer, would greatly boost the figures. That would be to reverse the decision that school and youth groups from the EU need passports rather than ID cards to enter the UK — a decision that seems to be deterring many EU groups from coming at all. Is it too much to hope that, in this small matter at least, common sense will prevail over ideology? I won’t hold my breath.
