1
Communications and Digital Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Arts Council England
Tuesday 14 April 2026
2.15 pm
Members present: Baroness Keeley (The Chair); Baroness Caine of Kentish Town; Viscount Colville of Culross; Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate; Lord McNally; Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge; Lord Tarassenko; The Lord Bishop of Winchester.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 – 16
Witness
I: Rt Hon Baroness Hodge of Barking DBE, Lead Reviewer, Independent Review of Arts Council England.
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv.
16
Baroness Hodge of Barking.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon. Baroness Hodge, I am delighted to welcome you to this meeting of the Communications and Digital Committee. Thank you for coming to speak to us. We very much look forward to discussing the findings of your report on Arts Council England, which was published towards the end of last year and was well received across the sector—it is always heartening to have that good response. The Government have now published their response, as has Arts Council England. I believe the Government’s response was very positive; I am sure you will tell us what you think, but they accepted all the recommendations that you put forward and proposed a fast timetable for reform. I shall start the discussion today by asking what actions you feel the Government and Arts Council England should prioritise when implementing your recommendations.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: It is a massive programme for change. There are two important things that we confirmed: we should have an Arts Council—a non-departmental body responsible for delivering arts funding—and we should absolutely preserve the arm’s-length principle. In fact, we—or rather I, as it is my report—think it should be restated and reaffirmed, because that is a vital safeguard, ensuring that creativity is not stifled by political whim. Those are the things that we think.
The programme of change will require sustained determination and leadership from within the Arts Council. During my inquiry, I met a lot of people who worked for the Arts Council who were keen to promote change, were willing to grasp an agenda of change and recognised that there had been a loss of trust in the way that the Arts Council operated among its clients. There now needs to be a real determination at the leadership level to grasp the agenda, not just pay lip service to it, and drive it from the top.
Secondly, DCMS should be involved during that process of change. It should give support and facilitate where that is necessary, but it should also monitor. That is important. The focus of both ACE and DCMS should be not on each other but on both the clients of ACE—the artists, individuals and organisations that it supports—and the public, who benefit from the art that is created by those organisations and individuals. That outward-looking focus is hugely important.
When it comes to priorities, it is really hard to answer, but the reform of the NPO is the first thing that I would grasp, particularly because we are embarking on a new round, and I hope that some of my recommendations about that reform can be adopted quickly. On the NPO process, we have to move on from Let’s Create, which has achieved a lot, and simplify the route to accessing the funding that the Arts Council gives. We should focus much more on excellence. An argument that I put into the report, which I passionately believe in, is that I want everyone to enjoy that excellence; it is about access to excellence, not just access on its own. Bringing those two together is the principle that must underpin the funding approach by the Arts Council.
On the current system, time after time when we met individuals, when we did round tables and when I did Zooms—I thought we had talked to 700 individuals but I notice that DCMS said “over 600”; but still, we talked to a lot of people—I was surprised by the frustration that was expressed. I will tell you one story that stuck in my mind. A woman had been running a community arts centre outside London for years. She was an NPO so she had access Arts Council funding. She was rung up on a Monday night to be told that on Tuesday morning her funding would be cut, and she was going to get six months’ funding to wind down. One-third of her money came from the Arts Council so that was a real blow. She felt completely isolated. There was no one to support her through that process. She did not know why she had been chosen. People ought to know before the knife comes down that they are not performing to the standards expected of them; they ought to have some understanding of that in advance. She went into a panic but, she said, “After I got into it and started thinking, ‘What do I do next?’, I felt liberated”. I thought that was really telling. She did not get the appropriate support and monitoring that the Arts Council should be giving to the organisations that it funds. There were other stories but that one really stuck with me.
Another guy said to me, “I’d got to page 37 before they even asked me what I was putting on the stage”. It is a complex and difficult system that is seen as a tick-box exercise. It is sort of instrumentalist: rather than celebrating excellence, it is trying to change society. We all believe that art changes society and that it has a crucial role to play in that, but that is not the purpose of the Arts Council. Through what it does, it will change society, but that should not be its purpose, focus and underpinning principle.
Lastly, it is wasteful that all the big organisations employ staff who do nothing but have a relationship with the Arts Council—they are using Arts Council money to fund individuals who then simply fill in the application forms and relate to the other councils—while the smaller organisations go to the growing industry of people who have set themselves up simply to fill in massive Arts Council forms. All that has to go. I have suggested a radical new approach, although I do not know how much of this will be taken up: organisations should approach the Arts Council based on their USP—what is their contribution going to be?
I also think they should set their own KPIs. The whole way in which the Arts Council monitors organisations is hugely burdensome. I know that, when I was chair of a theatre, it used to drive us mad getting these thick papers that were full of stats and you wondered, “What on earth are we going to do with them?” They should set their own KPIs, although obviously you would then have to negotiate them with the Arts Council. But they should know what their USP is. The Arts Council ought to have an overarching strategy with four or five objectives: excellence, access, financial sustainability, environmental sustainability—we can think about what they could be—and then, within that broad strategy, it could ask, “How are you going to contribute to that?”
We also suggest that arts forms have lost their way within the way the Arts Council operates. We think that it should bring back the panels that it had before in order to have a first look at every application in a particular art form so that your peers could have a first look. People will do that for nothing; they would love to do it again. That gives a really professional view of the quality of the application. People say, “You’ll get bias”, but you get just as much bias in the Arts Council bureaucracy, and I think the arts community would be fair in its assessment. It should not take the decision, but it should have a view.
When we have done that, we suggest a complete change in how the question of national and local works. We want to devolve, because of the arm’s-length principle, not to the new elected mayors but to local communities. The Arts Council was forced to reduce its number of regional bodies, and now there are too few. We do not want to spend money on that, but we can establish local boards, perhaps coterminous with the new local authority boundaries, and have on them local artists, community organisations, education and possibly health, as well as local authority representatives. That is a broad body, but decisions would not be taken by the elected representatives; they would be taken by the local community. That is real devolution to the local. So the national organisation would determine what was national and what was local—there would be a row about that question, but they would just have to go through it—and then the local boards would determine it from there, so you would really get a bottom-up view on that.
Arts organisations do not plan on a three-year or four-year cycle. They plan on a much longer cycle, so that is what we should give them to reduce bureaucracy. I would even go for an Ofsted-type approach, where some organisations know they are going to get funded. Tell them they are going to get 80% of their funding, and then 20% is up for grabs. You could also stagger applications. Why do they have to be all at the same time? That would reduce the bureaucratic workload and allow the staff to do what they should be doing, as well as assessing applications and supporting people.
Those would be my top priorities. My other priority, which we will probably deal with later, is that we want more equitable distribution across the country.
The Chair: We have some questions on that.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: We also want a national programme for individuals, and we want to persuade the Treasury that a tiny bit more money might go a heck of a long way in supporting the arts, the cultural infrastructure and the lives of people in their communities.
Q2 The Chair: We have questions on all those aspects. Thank you, that was very comprehensive. You touched on maintaining, or indeed going back to, the arm’s-length principle. Did that come across as very important? What evidence did you have on that? Clearly it went wrong somewhere in the last number of years.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Really it was the intervention of Nadine Dorries and the way that it was done, forcing money out of London. People just felt that was wrong. Ironically, last night I was at an organisation that is creating new opera, which was showing a short version of what it is hoping to create. It had approached the Art Council but was told, “Don’t bother to apply. You’ve got the wrong postcode”. That is what came out of Nadine Dorries’s interference. I have no doubt that it was an incredibly difficult time for both the members of the Arts Council and its executives, but that was the point at which they should have stood firm and said, “There’s an arm’s-length principle”. That is where it came from.
Q3 Lord Tarassenko: Thank you for coming to talk to us about your very clear report. I want to talk to you about private investment. I come from the higher education sector, where we probably started doing this about 30 years ago. Your report says that, in 2023-24, higher education raised £1.5 billion and the arts just under £1 billion. So is there anything that the arts world could learn from the higher education sector? That is one of my questions.
I know donors—my college was endowed by the Reuben Foundation to the tune of £80 million and, as I am sure you know, in October last year it funded the Courtauld to the tune of £30 million. So it is the type of donor that will work across both higher education and the arts. But there are two things about private donations and philanthropy. First, they like to have some form of recognition. Secondly, the higher education sector is also very sensitive about who these donors might be. We have screening processes. For example, we will not take donations from fossil fuel companies now. Do you think that the Arts Council should have a process whereby potential donors are screened? Do you think it is right for them to put their names to galleries and so on?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: I am very keen—totally pragmatically if for no other reason—that we should encourage more philanthropic giving. If you look at the public finances, much as I would love to think that we could double the amount of money for the Arts Council, that is unrealistic over the next period. So we have to bring it in.
The other thing is that if you get a range of funding into an organisation, it is actually more stable for that organisation because, if money is suddenly cut from one area, you are not impacted quite as badly. Public sector funding has absolutely declined, particularly from local authorities, which have halved the amount of money they put into culture since 2010 to 2012. So I am very keen that we should do that. I have chaired a university, so I have some experience of that.
Two things are really interesting in the arts and culture sector. First, most of the money—two-thirds—goes to London and the south-east. If we want to improve the access to excellence offer across the country, we have to think of ways to encourage philanthropy outside London. That was one of the things. I have no idea whether my idea would work, but I think a differentiated tax relief is worth a try. If it does not work, it does not work, but we should actually try it and see whether it works. That is really important. I suggested doubling it.
The third thing is that, in the French system, individuals get a 66% tax relief and corporations get a 60% tax relief. There was an increase there in the amount of money. In 2004, €1 billion went into the arts and culture and, by 2018, when the law was in, it was €4 billion, so it quadrupled—a huge increase. It may not work here, but it is worth thinking about, and we should do so here.
People want recognition—I got that constantly. It would be wrong to buy honours, in a sense, so I would not support that. But there are discussions about a King’s medal for support of philanthropy, and that would be a good compromise way forward that would ensure that recognition.
This issue about cancelling is really difficult. If the Arts Council got back to its development agency role—it is supposed to be the organisation that thinks about the future and tackles the difficult issues—it ought to develop a protocol because the cancelling has got too wide, and it is scary. Some of it is just so you do not lose money, but some of it is cancelling for political reasons—cancelling things such as artists and performances. That is not right. I am not pretending that this is an easy task to undertake, but it is a job that the Arts Council should do, certainly for corporations. It has been a real turn-off to corporations from putting their money into the arts, so we have to challenge and reverse that and support organisations that want to contribute to culture and the arts.
Q4 Lord Tarassenko: I will follow up on something you have mentioned already—the loi Aillagon in France—but before that, on this differential in the rate of gift aid, I suppose that if regional mayors will be given more powers, you could almost set the culture tax, the culture gift aid or whatever you want to call it, locally and differently in different regions. That might be a way of doing it. But, on the example of France, it is interesting that the loi Aillagon was introduced in 2003, in different times. If you read the French press in the last couple of years or so, there is a lot of pushback now because people are saying, “At a time when we really worry about the cost of living, is it right that we transfer some of the funding of the arts effectively to the taxpayer?” Is there any way, in the current economic circumstances, that something similar could really be introduced in the UK?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: I had several ideas to try to find more money for the arts, and the tax relief was one. I am a bit nervous about giving it to the mayors, if I am honest with you, partly because tax is always a national issue. Also, we may come on to talking about this a bit later, but, even with the tourism tax, we want this money specifically for culture and the arts, and clearly the mayors, because of the cuts, have other priorities.
We are not going to get more money in the DCMS over-the-line budget, but we could look at under-the-line stuff with tax reliefs, and this would be one. The other idea I had, which we may come to, is to encourage touring, which is really important for a whole range of reasons. So doing stuff under the line is politically much easier. People would say, “Why are you spending on the arts and not spending on hospitals and those sorts of things?” It is a very difficult argument that we still have to win. Most of my ideas are below-the-line ideas. One of them is tax relief and another is increasing tax relief for individuals in philanthropy. I make no apology for that.
This is with my other hat on. I have not looked at the figure recently, but over £400 billion is spent by us. I looked at this in the Public Accounts Committee when I was doing tax and things. Over £400 billion a year is spent on tax reliefs. That is a lot of money, and a lot of the reliefs do not meet their intent.
Without theatre tax relief, theatres would have died. A lot of money goes into theatre tax relief, and into the arts and culture. When I was chair of a theatre, it was constantly trying to balance. You want to maintain access. We were in an East End community and wanted to encourage local people to come to see the plays.
Q5 The Chair: Could you expand on the tourism levy that you touched on there? Do you see it as a longer-term option? I guess I should declare an interest as it was my policy when I was in the shadow DCMS team.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: I am sure that, if it was your policy, you would have specified that it would have to go to culture and the arts.
The Chair: What did you see as the opportunities and challenges of that? It is sometimes known as a city tax when we pay it in other countries.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: I have just come back from a weekend in Rome and I spent an absolute fortune getting into the Vatican, the Colosseum and absolutely everywhere. A lot of other countries ensure there is a tourism tax.
I put it in my long list because I do not think there is an appetite in the current Government to introduce new taxes. So it was a pragmatic response: that is the first thing to say.
The second thing to say is that the experience from places such as Manchester and Liverpool, as we all know, is that, where they have used their business district, or whatever it is called, to introduce some sort of hotel tax, most of the money has gone on environmental expenditure. If you introduce it, you have to specify. It does not have to all go to culture and the arts, but you have to specify that that is a purpose for it, otherwise it will not bring in more money.
There is a third thing: I do not know whether it is relevant to say it at this point. It is whether we charge for museums. Perhaps you will come to that.
Q6 The Chair: Let us move on to that, because it is another aspect of charging tourists. Do you want to expand on your thoughts on that?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: That got quite a lot of press when the government response came out. I think there was a misunderstanding of what I was saying. When I wrote the report, we were still committed to introducing a universal ID card system. I thought, “If we do that, it’s very easy to ensure that you don’t charge British citizens for entry into museums. You can differentiate and charge entry to foreign tourists”. It is a tiny bit of money: I will come back to that. But I would be totally opposed to us doing anything about charging for museums until we have that universal system.
The Chair: Digital ID?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: You need universal ID. Just think about it. A Black kid comes up and the person on the desk says, “Are you a foreigner?” There are implications of that which would be completely against the spirit of everything we want to achieve as a community in terms of cohesion. So we should not do it—I am clear about this—until we have universal ID cards.
The other thing is the money it brings in, which would help the arts and cultural sector. I think it is less than £10 million. It is not worth the hassle and unfairness of doing it if you do not have a clear way of identifying who is who. I only put it in as yet another idea that would add a little bit to the measly pot of money that we spend on the arts.
It is interesting—I put it in the report, and it is worth saying, but I must make sure I have my figures right—that Berlin spends 525 million, either pounds or euros, on arts and culture. That is one place. The Arts Council in its NPO programme spends £458 million and the Mayor of London, who is really committed to arts and culture, spends £18.7 million. It is really stark.
The other thing is that, since 2010 to 2012, our expenditure in the UK on arts and culture has gone down by 13%. When you look at other European countries, you see that in Germany it has gone up by 33%, in France by 27%—probably because of the tax relief—and in Belgium by 40%. So we are pretty miserly on that: it is a tiny bit of total public expenditure. But we are in difficult circumstances.
The Chair: We would like to get into some regional aspects, so I turn to Lord Kirkhope.
Q7 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: I am speaking as a Geordie and, going back to Newcastle, I remember, historically, the start of what was Northern Arts, way back, and all the discussions and disagreements about how it should be run and so on. I note that in your report you talk about infrastructure and the regions. I am very concerned about that. I have connections with Opera North and also the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, which of course is an NPO. They are all doing extremely well, and on a national basis, too, from the regions outwards rather than from London upwards, as it were.
What I want to question you on a little is, first, infrastructure, and how we actually deliver in the regions. This is not just a question of how we allocate resources from the south, but of how we deal with applications and how we deal with infrastructure generally there, and how we can reflect in those regions not only an outward-looking position, such as with contemporary dance, but the flavours of the regions themselves.
There is a certain amount of pride in the north-east of England, for instance, which reflects very much its historical industrial culture, as well as Northumbrian culture and so on. How do you think the balance can be drawn here? How can the infrastructure be improved—you have referred to this, as I said—so that we can get better distribution in regions that are far-flung from the south?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: There is inequality. Interestingly enough, when I talked to the big organisations in Birmingham, it was a deliberate act of policy by the Government at the time to deal with the regional problem by focusing organisations in an urban area—people were expected to travel to that. This probably happened a bit in your neck of the woods as well. It goes back to the Thatcher era, and it was continued by us. It was a deliberate policy. We are where we are because of where we were then.
What I do not like is that the Arts Council has attempted to do this by forcing other organisations to change their postcodes. That is not growing organically from an area, which is what you have got to do. That was the wrong approach and it has not helped. Some organisations put their postcodes somewhere, but everybody still lived in London. That was not the right way of doing it.
So how do you do it? There are various ways. The first is the boards that I am suggesting, which can take decisions. You give them the money and they reflect local people, so that decisions are taken from the bottom up, not the top down. That is the first thing.
The second thing comes from my experience as Culture Minister in the last Labour Government. We created something called creative partnerships. I do not know whether you remember them, but I think that they were successful. We put only one person in them, but I think that we should put in a couple of people from the Arts Council.
Everywhere has artists in all art forms. We went to Norfolk and held a round table. There was a woman there who was running a theatre from her kitchen; another woman was running a dance group from her living room; there was a woman running creative writing classes from a library or a bookshop or something like that. These people are out there. None of them can access Arts Council funding because they find it all too difficult. They cannot fill in the forms. It is all too distant and remote, and they do not understand it. There are too many funding streams. These issues are identified, so you build from that and invest. I have a thing about funding individuals: you invest in individuals and that starts to help you build upwards and build infrastructure assets.
The third thing is philanthropy. If it works, it gets more money into underserved areas.
The fourth thing is making touring more viable. Touring is the one thing that many national organisations cut when they have less money, but at least you are taking excellence into those regions and they can see it.
The fifth thing, using individuals and taking a bottom-up approach, is artists in residence going into schools and communities—that sort of thing. You cannot do it overnight, but you can do fantastic stuff.
I want to go back to touring, because I saw you put your nose up at that bit.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: I had a tiny problem with that. I want to ask you something about it.
Lord Tarassenko: We have a whole question on touring coming up.
Q8 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: I will not intervene for long, but I want to add one more thing. Lord Tarassenko mentioned philanthropy, which you have just referred to again. It seems to me that philanthropy is often weighted heavily in favour of organisations in London or the south-east, as well as between the regions. I compare the north-east of England with Yorkshire. They are very different. In Leeds, where I was an MP, we had lots of money come in from people to support the arts—it was not too difficult to get that support, actually—but, in the north-east of England, things are very different. It is much more difficult to find such people there. If people are going to put their resources in, they want to see a response and something which it is rather more important for them to put their money to, and that tends to be in London and the south-east.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Maybe I am wrong about it—other people may have other ideas—but double the tax relief you get on philanthropic giving.
The Chair: There is a question around definition, is there not?
Q9 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: I have a quick supplementary question about your recommendation to raise gift aid from 25p in the £1 to 50p on shows outside of London and the south-east. As with French tax law, we could incentivise corporate giving outside London, but we need clarification on what we mean by the south-east. As you have rightly pointed out, Arts Council England’s south-east area covers East Sussex to Norfolk. We need alignment and clarification on exactly what we mean by the south-east. It would be helpful to clarify that with DCMS, otherwise we could get in a bit of a boundary muddle.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is the English devolution Bill, which is now going through. Colleagues’ have worked on amendments, as you may know, to make culture the eighth area of competence for the strategic authorities that have mayors. I think that is the definition, is it not? What are your thoughts on that opportunity and how it can align with the bottom-up work you are talking about?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Thank you for reminding me, because that should have been part of my answer to Tim’s question as well.
I was pleased to see that. I thought they were acting on some of my recommendations, so I felt chuffed. I know other people have been lobbying on that too. Local authorities have had at least a 50% cut in funding—massive. At least if they have to do a strategy, they will think about it. If they do that, they might consider putting money back into it. That is a great win. It showed the Government reacting promptly to what we were all saying.
We will have to see how it evolves over time. When I first suggested it to various Ministers in the DCLG, or whatever it is called nowadays, they said, “Oh, you have to give them money to write a report”. I thought, “Oh my God, if we are at that level then we will never get anywhere”. But we have got it in the legislation and it is a great win. For all of you who campaigned for that, it is really good.
Q10 Viscount Colville of Culross: I am interested in your campaigning on behalf of individuals. I am a freelance TV producer, so I care passionately about that. You put forward the suggestion of a national programme to support individual creatives who come from a diverse, more disadvantaged background. It seems that the Arts Council has responded with this idea of the new individual service, but it is not going to introduce it until 2027-28. It seems that it is going to rely on Developing Your Creative Practice funding to support it. My concern is that Developing Your Creative Practice is an excellent idea but seems to help only 19% of the people who apply. Are you concerned that this new individual service is going to be too little and too late?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Did you say 2027-28?
Viscount Colville of Culross: That is what the Arts Council said in its response. It has some smaller programme that it is doing immediately but the main programme is not going to be until that time.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: When we looked at this, we thought it should be funded from existing pots, such as Developing Your Creative Practice and the National Lottery programme. Those are tiny pots of money.
Actually, it was Antony Gormley who put this idea to me. He did not come from a deprived background but, when he started his career, he got £5,000 and a mentor. He said that was absolutely central to enabling him to get through those early years and to establish himself. That was the genesis of that.
I have a daughter who is in theatre. We were able to fund her through her first year. She did not need it, but we were able to say that we could do that. It is a terrible situation. It means you have got to have parents who can support you before you can develop something.
You said 2027-28. That is a year on, and actually that is not too bad—we are already in 2026-27. Probably the Arts Council ought to prioritise the NPO review and then, in 2027-28, do the individuals.
We costed this—properly, I think; fingers crossed on that—and found that, if you paid somebody £25,000 and gave them a mentor, you could support about 450 people. If you paid £30,000 with a mentor, it could be 500. We think the money is there. It would mean that people could not go for the odd bit of training or the odd project, but this would be much better support.
If could be done in a way that focused on people coming out of conservatoires or drama schools who had been on free school meals. It could focus on disabled people or people living in underserved areas. It could be a focused programme that could support growth in underserved areas and support groups that simply cannot get access. It is quite shocking that eight out of 10 opportunities that exist for freelancers come through word of mouth. That is discriminatory.
Q11 Viscount Colville of Culross: If only 19% of the people who are applying for these DYCPs are getting help, that is helpful for those 19% but leaves 81% disappointed. Are you concerned that, if the funding for this new service that the Arts Council is suggesting is kept the same, it will not be nearly effective enough in pulling up people from those disadvantaged backgrounds?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Would I like more money? Yes. But this is a start. We could use these people as artists in residence and all sorts of interesting things—as local creators to develop new theatre groups, dance groups or whatever. It is a start.
I always tell this funny but true story. I was a Culture Minister in the first year in which we had the cuts, after the financial crisis. The cuts were such a tiny part of the total expenditure budget. We just held out. We refused to agree until, in the end, they got fed up and did not cut us. It meant a tiny bit more money going into arts and culture budget.
The other thing is that we never do the linking. It is outrageous that £250 million went to Nesta. Some of that was supposed to fund arts and culture. Nesta has now, for its own reasons, stopped doing arts and culture, yet it still has that pot of investment money. I think it should now go to the Arts Council.
The other thing, which I did not talk about, is that the Arts Council cannot trade and needs a change in the royal charter. That is completely daft—we should allow it to trade. I should say that every time something is developed in the subsidised sector that becomes a commercial success, a little bit should go back to the Arts Council, either through royalties, a percentage of profits over a certain level or maybe just as a charge. There are various ways in which you could do it.
Q12 Viscount Colville of Culross: I should like to ask you about advocates for freelancers. You talk about advocates for improved statutory rights and financial protections for freelancers, such as sick pay, parental leave and pension access. Whenever we ask a question about who is advocating for freelancers in this place, we are given the answer that the freelance champion is going to be that advocate. However, it is becoming clearer that the freelance champion is not going to have any statutory powers and will be much more advisory. Is your concern that, if you are going to have a champion and make a difference for freelancers, they need to be able to have a statutory power to push forward the improvements that you talk about in your report?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: I had not thought about that, if I am honest.
The Arts Council should take its development agency responsibilities more seriously and start really advocating. There are various things you can do before you come to statute. It is all about culture change, such as rewarding those that do it well and naming those that do it badly. There are interventions like that, including a bit of grant giving to support the change. It is a culture change that we are after. Legislation is often crude in achieving culture change.
This is off the top of my head, but I do not think I would go directly for that. I would look at leadership from the Arts Council, with probably some culture change tools that fall short of regulation. You can always fall back on regulation, if everything else does not work.
The Chair: Moving on, we have a couple of questions that we have touched on but would like to go into in more detail. Philip, the Bishop of Winchester, would like to ask a question about touring.
Q13 The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Thank you very much for the work you have done; it is very impressive. I want to ask about touring. I preface my question by saying that, before I moved to Winchester, I was the Bishop of Truro, so I looked after the Church across Cornwall. The refurbishment of the hall in Truro made a huge difference to the quality of provision in Cornwall but, of course, you have to help people get there.
Can you outline for us some of the main issues that organisations face in relation to touring? It would be helpful if you covered European, as well as national, touring. How would the changes to tax relief that you have suggested help address those issues? Also, for my own clarification, is there evidence that such tax relief is economically beneficial? In other words, is there a good return on the investment for the reduction in tax relief, in terms of the economic benefit that is gained? Is that an argument that we can use?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Touring has been cut. A lot of venues across the country are totally dependent on touring.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Like the one in Truro.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Yes. Such venues are in danger of closing. Touring is the first thing that organisations cut if money is tight. Again, theatre tax relief is a lot of money. I cannot remember the exact figure; it is around £800 million or something like that. Under £1 billion a year goes in, I think—my figures are probably completely wrong, but that is how I remember it. I will come back to what it should be.
If you introduced a touring capability into that touring tax relief, it would make a vast difference, I think. I would do it in two ways: first, paying for an Airbnb; and, secondly, paying for transport. It is about paying for those little things. You could define a series of activities that someone could undertake then claim back through the tax system.
The other thing is that the tax reliefs must be paid more quickly. It is absolutely terrible at the moment. A lot of organisations end up borrowing money because it takes them forever to become tax-free. Why can we not do it like VAT? I am sure that there is a reason why we cannot do that, but that would be my suggestion.
Orchestras that go to Europe, in particular, have been badly affected by, in part, Brexit and, in part, costs. We suggest that there should be a tax relief for all the visas and bureaucracy that one must now undertake, as well as one for the costs of moving the instruments and all that. That is really important for orchestras because they do so well in Europe. They make money out of their European visits, in terms of return, which they can then reinvest in subsidised activity here at home. Those are the two suggestions that we have made.
Has there been an assessment of whether or not that tax relief is economically effective? From my knowledge of HMRC, probably not, because it has not assessed lots and lots of its tax reliefs to see whether they meet the purposes for which they are intended and whether they are economically viable. I have taken it on, but I have done so instinctively.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: I do not doubt for one minute the cultural value but, pragmatically speaking—and in order to advance the argument—if we can say, “Actually, this is economically beneficial as well”, it makes the case for itself.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Again, I cannot give you the figures off the top of my head, but we know that, every time somebody goes to a show, they spend a bit on an Airbnb and a bit on a meal out. They might buy something. We know that there is a return there. I would have thought that my instinct that there is a return will be proved right, but I bet that that has not been done.
Q14 The Chair: Certainly in the regions, pantomime season secures a big chunk of the funding that they need for the year. Towns and cities love it because people come to them, have a day out, have a meal and so on. It just draws money in. We looked at Oldham when the Coliseum closed. For the town, losing the pantomime in the pantomime season was a big thing. Some of those things really speak to that point, do they not?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: You have reminded me of something. When I was the Culture Minister, another thing that we did was invest in those sorts of thing. We had seaside towns that were in trouble. We invested in cultural institutions in seaside towns as an incentive for, and a catalyst of, regeneration. I remember that, in Margate, we invested in the funfair. It really worked; these things do. In Blackpool, we did something about the lights. These things work. You are right, though, that somebody should probably do a study to demonstrate that there is economic value as well.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: It might be worth talking to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre either to see whether it has something or to ask it to do something.
The Chair: Our last question comes from Baroness Caine.
Q15 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: It is all about creative education; obviously, that formed a significant part of your recommendations. How far do you feel the Government’s proposed curriculum reforms go? Also, how do you feel about the Government’s response on setting up an advisory committee to look at better alignment in these areas, across the youth strategy and so on? How positive do you feel about those responses to your key findings in relation to both creative education and careers?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: It is about both. You have been at one or two of the meetings with me. I feel really heartened by the very positive response that we are getting from Ministers in DfE, in a way I did not feel when the curriculum review was taking place; I was very nervous at that point about whether culture and cultural education would come in there.
I share with you an absolute passion for this; I always tell this story. When I was the Minister responsible for early years, we looked at this area when we were setting up Sure Start and all that stuff. We went to Switzerland to look at what the Swiss were doing in nursery education. The one compulsory element of their nursery education offer was that the children had to do music; one of the members of staff had some sort of musical capability. The reason for this, if you think about it, is that it makes children work as a team. It gets them to think about form and the relationships between things. It is really good for later learning.
I also remember us trying to do the “Every Child a Musician” and “Every Child a Theatre Goer” programmes when I was the Education Minister. Every child in a primary school—it was in Newham, I think—would do a term with a string instrument. Around that time, there was a little kid with an absolutely huge double bass; he was strumming away on it and jumping up and down. I thought, “My God, if we have captured that one child and got him interested in music, that is a great thing”. So I think that this is really important; I am very positive about it.
The problem is the money. In my last years in Barking, like everybody else—the Chair will have done the same—I went and visited all the schools. Barking is an area of great need. What struck me was that, although I saw people doing dance and singing, nobody could play an instrument. There were no teachers in the school who could play an instrument. It was all music that they listened to through the radio or whatever; they had equipment to deliver it. Ensuring that we have the right teachers is a massive task. There has been a huge decline in people taking these subjects at A-level, so we do not have a pipeline for them through to FE and HE.
However, going back to philanthropy, people are really willing to invest in this sort of education—more so than in other parts of this space. This is why I thought that what we need to do is bring DfE and ACE, which are not working very well together, together with DCMS. We then need to bring together foundations, trusts and individuals, through this advisory committee, so that we can create a massive fund. Remember: kids are not going to museums because their schools cannot afford the buses. It is as basic as that. Teachers are buying the instruments. We need to do those things.
We could raise a heck of a lot of money if we did that and really co-ordinated it. All of you will have seen the huge number of brilliant initiatives up and down the country. You just need to bring them together and focus them on disadvantaged and underserved areas and communities. Then you can start building your much more equal offer across the whole of the country.
Q16 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Thank you. There is just one more area on which I want to get your views; I do not know whether you are aware of it. The interpretation of “the arts” in the ACE review focused on music, art, design, drama and dance because those are subjects in the national curriculum and Progress 8. It did not focus on film and media studies, which are critical; the making of product is critical to media literacy, per Ofcom’s definition of it. That has followed through in terms of the curriculum review and the national centre, where film and media have been omitted. Do you regard that as a problem, given your view of what “creative education” is?
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Yes. One of the other things I said in the report is that we have all these organisations. The BFI is run by DCMS, right? They should all be working much more closely together in every way, including the way in which one applies for funding from them.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: So you arguably see them as, potentially, part of ACE, DCMS, DfE and the BFI. They are all part of the DCMS family, as it were.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Yes. They are in the same building: the BFI shares a building with ACE.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Excellent; that is a very good clarification. If you are talking to people, could you perhaps clarify that?
The Chair: I am very taken by the joint funding idea because the dearth—it is a real shortage—of music teachers in particular is very serious. We do not have a bursary. It is not easy to get physics teachers into training, but even they can get a bursary of £30,000. I have certainly run into such a case. Our RCNM had a young woman who lived in Wigan—in Lisa Nandy’s constituency, actually—and really wanted to be a music teacher. Once we took away the bursary, though—we did so this year—it was out of the question for her. Her family circumstances were such that she did not do it. You itch to try to find a philanthropist who could help someone like that, do you not? So I like the joint funding idea. It would mean that we could go into some corners of the country and ask, “What’s needed here?” It may be extra funding for individuals, as you said. However, my feeling—I do not know whether you share it—is that there needs to be some kind of boost in order to get what is in your review and the curriculum review to happen. There is this shortage but DfE seems to be somewhat slow on it.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Leaving aside the massive enrichment that the arts and creative subjects give to the young people who study them, it seems astonishing that we have allowed this kind of withering when the creative arts and the creative industries are so massively important to us.
The Chair: And so successful.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: There is a big job to do.
The Chair: Thank you very much for joining us on the path to it, Baroness Hodge. This has been great.
Baroness Hodge of Barking: Thank you for showing an interest. Let us hope that they do it.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: It was a great review.
The Chair: We do not normally do rounds of applause but perhaps we will this time. Thank you very much.