Culture Politick

Culture is Right October 2009

Introduction

Delighted to be here.

I have been in the job for almost three years. I think I am only now beginning to make an impact. I would like to think that is because of my perseverance, charisma and charm, but I suspect it is because of David Cameron, and the possibility that there might be a Conservative Government in less than a year’s time.

I asked David Cameron for this job. I thoroughly enjoy it, and I hope I will keep it if we win the next election, and more than that, hold on to it for a considerable period of time, at least long enough to make a difference.

I believe strongly in the importance of culture. It permeates every aspect of our life, it is the hallmark of a civilised society. We’re actually pretty good at it, and our culture has thrived in the last fifteen years, thanks to the huge injection of cash provided by the National Lottery, set up by the Conservatives.

I like to say that culture is the most efficient public service in the country. It’s a slightly clunky phrase, but I use it to highlight the fact that the arts, far from being subsidy junkies, provide a huge bang for their subsidy buck. In fact, on the whole subsidy only represents something like a third of the income of most subsidised arts organisations, with the rest made up by sponsorship and ticket sales.

For this modest investment, we get back some of the best arts to be found anywhere in the world. Along with heritage, which receives even less subsidy, we have the main driver for tourism, our fifth biggest industry. And we have a sector that plays a crucial role in employment, civic pride, urban regeneration, education, health… I could go on, but I hope you see why I like my job.

Having started on what I hope is an optimistic note, let me also sound a word of caution. Our ideas are set out against the backdrop of ongoing concern about the state of the economy, and of course this translates into concern about funding. We believe that the real solution to worries about funding is to work as hard as possible to get the economy and Government finances back on track – a strong, healthy economy is the best solution to any future worries over funding. But there will be short-term pain. I hope that we can protect the front-line arts as much as possible, and work smartly and quickly to reduce bureaucracy which soaks up unnecessary costs.

National Lottery and philanthropy

Having sounded that note of caution, let me now look to the future. Our flagship policy is to return the National Lottery to its four good causes. The amount of National Lottery funding going to arts and heritage has fallen by more than half from £906m in 1997 to £444 million ten years later, a fall of more than 50%. This is an absolute scandal, with money being siphoned off to pay for the Government’s pet projects. Just think what a difference that money could have made in the last few years.

So we will redistribute money that the Big Lottery Fund is currently giving to Ministerial pet projects back to the good causes of the arts, heritage and sport. On today’s figures, that represents an annual increase of £53 million for each of the good causes. The proportion of the Lottery that they will receive will rise from the current 16.6% to 20%.

We will also reform the regulations surrounding giving. A key priority is to enable people to give works of are to the nation during their lifetime. In addition, we will simplify Gift Aid will be simplified to make it much easier to sell its attractions to potential donors. We would also like to free up museums and other arts NDPBs so that they are able to acknowledge and celebrate their significant donors much more easily.

The Mixed Economy

Central to our approach to the arts will be a continued commitment to the mixed economy of arts funding, a mix of public subsidy private philanthropy and commercial ventures. We have no hidden agenda to wean the arts off public subsidy, and we recognise that public subsidy plays a vital role in pump priming arts organisations.

We are absolutely committed to maintaining free admission to national museums – I know free admission has significantly increased attendance, and that it gives real meaning to the idea that these museums’ collections are owned for the nation.

Since the publication of our arts task force report in 2007, we have considered, consulted and widely discussed one of its most controversial recommendations: that national RFOs be transferred from the Arts Council to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Between them these organisations, the National Theatre, South Bank Centre, RSC, Royal Opera House and ENO, account for a quarter of the grants given by the Arts Council.

I have decided, despite its attractions, to reject this recommendation. I feel that too much time would be wasted on re-organisation. Instead, I would like to discuss with the Arts Council the possibility of putting in place long-term funding agreements with these organisations, accompanied by a light-touch supervisory regime. If this new structure is successful, I would seek to extend it to the additional 45 semi-national organisations which account for a further quarter of ACE spending.

The Arts Council was established in circumstances very different from today – there was no Department responsible for culture, it was not until the 1960s that there was even a minister responsible for the arts. There is now a department of state responsible for cultural policy but there has never been a debate about its relationship with the arts council.

I think this has created a problematic relationship – James Purnell, a Secretary of State long gone, commissioned the McMaster report knowing it would fundamentally change the direction of arts policy away from instrumentalism and towards excellence, yet the Arts Council had no involvement.

Under Labour, sometimes the Arts Council is independent and makes its own decisions – for example, the 2007 funding cuts debacle, but sometimes it implements policies imposed by DCMS – for example the £2.5 million scheme to give free theatre tickets to those under 26.

From where I’m sitting, it seems that successive Secretaries of State say that ideas that are badly received were taken by the independent arts council, while ideas that are well received have come from their Department. This is not only confusing to Arts Council clients, but unfair on the many talented people that work there.

So there needs to be a fundamental debate about the relationship between the Arts Council and its sponsoring Department. Of course Alan Davey and Jeremy and I are discussing this; I would welcome all your thoughts on the matter too.

Here, I will set out my own view:

This debate should be held in the context of the Conservative approach to quangos, set out recently by David Cameron. Our concern is that quangos shouldn’t be doing jobs that Government departments should be doing. So following David’s speech, we are carrying out a review of DCMS quangos and looking at moving policy making functions back to the Department.

Decisions on creative arts funding need to be impartial and free from Government interference. For this reason I am committed to the arm’s length principle – that the Arts Council is free to determine which bodies and projects it funds subject to new relationships being established with national and semi national organisations.

I would like to see it stretch itself further, to become a centre of excellence, able to give high-quality advice in key areas such as fund raising and technology, and areas where it seems not to have a voice such as rural arts and tourism. This advice should go far beyond the organisations it funds, to organizations which receive no public money across the whole arts sector. As part of this, I would like to see the staffing of the Arts Council itself open up, so that there is a revolving door, between the council and the entire arts sector, both subsidized and commercial. For example, senior arts practitioners should serve on the Arts Council, either in full-time or in an advisory capacity for short periods of time.

Heritage

Another of my responsibilities is heritage. The government still has not brought forward its Heritage Protection bill. It is dithering when the sector most needs leadership and clarity.

I am very concerned that important British sites such as Hadrian’s wall, the site of 1066 Battle, and the ancestral home of Lord Byron are at risk. Our report on heritage, published at the end of last year, revealed that the Government is failing to keep on top of the 37,000 heritage sites in need of repair.

In 2007/08 the number of British Heritage sites threatened by decay and neglect outnumbered those being repaired and removed from the ‘At Risk’ register for the first time in almost a decade.

With falling budgets English Heritage has been forced to halve the value of its ‘At Risk’ grants from £8m in 1999 to £4.1m last year. The cuts have meant some of the country’s best loved sites have been left to rot and decay for years.

Our lottery proposals will benefit the heritage sector and help restore some of these wonderful sites to their full glory.

We are conducting a review of the sector at the moment, and will share our results later in the year.

MLA

The role of the Museums and Libraries Authority is another one that I would like to reconsider. In terms of libraries, I would like the agency responsible for libraries to bring much needed strong leadership and advocacy to this disparate sector. This may require an adjustment of the role, function and funding of the MLA.

Turning to a different area of its responsibilities, the MLA is currently plans to relocate the Acquisitions, Exports and Loans Unit to Birmingham, and I will review the changes to the AELU if we win the election.

Cultural Education

Arts education is another area where reform is urgently needed. While there have been many well-meaning initiatives in recent years, I feel that there have been too many, which has lead to confusion. Proper teacher, training, for example, is something that urgently needs to be looked at. Dance is the second most popular PE activity after football, but when teaches training for a PGCE in PE select their specialism, only 62 places out of over a thousand offer dance.

Over 2000 teachers were supposed to benefit from the £2million music teacher training programme announced in 2006 to support professional development. Two years on, just 304 teachers had completed the course.

Meanwhile, it is still the case that 40% of primary school pupils would like to learn a musical instrument, but do not. Only one in five secondary school pupils has played a musical instrument in front of an audience, and nearly half do not visit any museum or gallery. So there is a lot of room for improvement.

There is also a great deal of money spent on these initiatives which could be spent much more effectively if there were fewer programmes with more straightforward ambitions. We would also like to introduce events such as a National Music Week, to act as a focal point for cultural, in this case music education programmes, and would be complementary to them.

As Conservatives, we are committed to giving parents more choice in education. That approach will be extended to the arts, and ways will be found to empower parents and pupils to make their own decisions about the specialist education they receive and where they get it from, be it music, dance, drama or visual art.

Localism

Turning now to localism, our Communities and Local Government team have put forward proposals which will have significant implications for the cultural community, both cultural centres and arts organisations that operate mainly locally and regionally, and for nationally funded projects.

I would encourage anyone who runs a local or regional arts organisation to look at our Green Paper on the subject, it’s titled: Control Shift, Returning Power to Local Communities, and you can find it on the Conservatives website.

There are two proposals there which have implications for the arts:

First, we will bring in a power to allow local people to trigger referendums, by legislating to ensure that referendum will be held in a Local Authority area if 5% of local citizens sign a petition in favour of within a six month period.

There are both opportunities and threats for the cultural organisations funded by local authorities in this measure. The opportunity will be for an arts centre that has a strong relationship with its community to campaign for a referendum to protect their funding, if it were under threat.

For example, Swindon Dance, which was recently having discussions with its local council about funding could petition for referendum to require the council to protect its funding.

However, there is also a threat here – an arts centre which does not have strong links with its local community could be vulnerable to local residents triggering a referendum asking for its funding to be spent elsewhere.

Second we will give local people greater control over how central Government funds are spent in their area. We will use an act already in law, the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, to enable local governments to identify money spent in their area by central government agencies, which will include the arts council. If, after consultation with local people, there are recommendations of ways in which it could be better spent on a particular priority for the community, the money will be redirected towards fulfilling that priority wherever possible.

This will mean that a local authority could intervene in a project like The Public, and get it stopped, and the money redirected to priorities for the local community, rather than creating a wasteful white elephant.

It will also mean that new plans for arts and cultural centres that are hoping to get and keep central government funding through the arts council will only bring these projects fruition if they build support in the community it will be situated in, and plan their project with that community in mind, from the very outset.

This is a considerable shift in emphasis from the current Government’s top down approach, where once a project is signed off centrally it goes ahead whether it is what the local community want or not.

It will mean better arts and cultural centres, which are more closely tied to and respond and serve their communities better.

Cultural Olympiad

Finally I would like to turn to the Olympics.

2012 has the potential to bring the key strands of culture, creativity, tourism and sport together in the UK in an extraordinary way. As Conservatives we are aware of this, and we are thinking hard about how to capitalise on the multiple opportunities the Olympics bring.

First, we need a coherent, organised strategy to make the most the 15,000 journalists that will come to London for the Olympics. If we look at the example of the Sydney games, Australia managed to leverage those games to quadruple the number of tourists per year around the games. Nearly ten years on from their games, their annual visitor numbers are still double what they were prior to the games.

We would like to see a structured programme that ensures all visiting journalists have the opportunity to visit another part of the UK.

Where will we take them, and what will we show them? The obvious answer is our world class culture and heritage, from the Edinburgh Festival, to Stonehenge, to the Baltic.

We have concerns over plans for the Cultural Olympiad also – while we welcome the formation of the new committee and appointment of Tony Hall to the LOGOC board, I am worried that its make up is London-centric, and biased towards the subsidised arts. For a successful Cultural Olympiad which engages with as many people, we feel the full participation of the popular and commercial sector is vital. I would like to see free concerts in Hyde Park, or Buckingham Place – let’s remember 2012 will be the Queen’s Diamond jubilee - as well as up and down the country, with iconic musicians like Sir Paul McCartney, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin playing, as well as our exciting younger artists.

The irony of this is that it comes at a time when so much is going well. The Olympic Delivery Authority has made significant progress with the construction and The Organising Committee has done extraordinarily well to bank over £0.5bn in sponsorship. The BOA is reorganised and refocused and, with UK Sport, delivered a record medal haul in Beijing.

However, if in October 2012, the area around Stratford has been transformed and we are left with a host of happy memories but no more people enjoying the opportunities available through sport, our tourism numbers have not significantly increased, and no-one new excited by a amazing live gig, or new dance piece they have seen, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we will have missed a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Close

Both in the run up to the Olympics and the wider cultural agenda, we are committed to supporting, nurturing and encouraging the success we already see, and seek to set the direction of travel with the lightest of touches.

Under a future Conservative Government we will concentrate on creating a transparent, cost effective framework that allows the sector whole to thrive and not just survive.