Written evidence submitted by NewcastleGateshead Cultural Venues [WAC0096]

 

About NewcastleGateshead Cultural Venues

    1. NewcastleGateshead Cultural Venues is a partnership of ten leading building-based cultural producers operating 19 venues across visual arts, performing arts, music, dance, film, writing and literature, heritage, archives and museums and science communication in North East England.
    2. NGCV is now recognised as one of the strongest examples of area-based cultural sector collaboration in the UK.   As a partnership, we create significant economic, cultural and social impact and play a key role in contributing to the distinctiveness of the North East as a great place to live, work, visit and do business.  We have a local, regional, national and international reach and work together to develop strategic initiatives and promote the economic, social and cultural benefits of culture and creativity.
    3. NGCV members are: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Centre for Life, Dance City, Live Theatre, Northern Stage, Sage Gateshead, Seven Stories, Theatre Royal, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums and Tyneside Cinema.
       
  1. Overview

Our submission addresses each of the main areas raised by the Committee, and affirms:

  1. Our wish to work with national and local partners (including ACE), pioneering imaginative new approaches to regional cultural development in NewcastleGateshead and the wider region we serve;
  2. The need to balance national funding appropriately between London and the English regions, and the need to see the whole of England benefit more from ‘national’ organisations.

 

  1. Summary of key points
    1. We support the Arts Council’s assessment of the importance of London and its leading arts organisations to the UK, nationally and internationally. The capital plays a vital role in the cultural ecology, and we recognise the importance to the whole of the UK of London’s exceptional concentration of globally outstanding cultural institutions. 
    2. We also welcome the fact that the Arts Council and its new Chair have recognised the serious consequences of the major imbalance in the distribution of funds between London and the English regions.  We believe there is a credible argument for spending on the arts in London that is not in direct proportion to spending elsewhere in England, but we also believe that the extent of the current disparity is excessive, and that the health of the country as a whole requires that disparity to reduce.
    3. We agree with ACE that any future redistribution of funding should reflect the needs of both London and the English regions, so not being to the undue detriment of the capital. ACE needs to achieve a new strategic balance for the arts in England that recognises the needs and development potential of London and the regions, not London or the regions. 
    4. We recommend that ACE should prioritise addressing the current imbalance in the immediate term in the selection and formation of its new National Portfolio.
    5. ACE should also prioritise the further development of more examples of national and international excellence outside London.
    6. We note that excellence in the regions (just as in London) is not only found in large or building-based cultural organisations.
    7. We recommend that organisations with a national remit based in London be challenged to demonstrate how their activity and their use of their subsidy meaningfully benefits artists, arts organisations and audiences across the English regions (other than as tourists to the metropolis) as a clear justification for their funding.  
    8. We believe the RoCC proposal for an allocation of lottery funds for the English regions has merit but we do not support the notion of reducing this debate to a crude per-capita metric, recognising that the national cultural policy issues in this debate are more complex and plural than that simple formula.
    9. Above and beyond this historic imbalance of ACE funding, the arts in the English regions now face a perfect storm of challenges and threats.  Local Authority funding for the arts is in an unprecedented long-term decline, and all the national and regional economic pressures are now combining to threaten our capacity to create, present and distribute Great Art and Culture for Everyone.
    10. Nowhere has the Local Authority challenge gained more publicity than in our region. In the absence of any Local Authority support, ACE has long been the ‘sole funder’ of many of London’s arts organisations. This has not been the case in the regions, where partnership funding between ACE and Local Government has been the successful model. ACE has currently adopted a strategy of refusing to consider becoming sole funder of cultural organisations in the regions. Whilst we recognise this may be an initial negotiating gambit, it would be enormously damaging for ACE to further increase the weighting of funds towards London in the future by sticking inflexibly to that stance of being unwilling to consider being sole funder of some of the most significant cultural providers in the English regions in the face of Local Authority Cuts.
    11. For many years ACE had a strong track record in this region as a powerful partner developing both the range and quality of the arts in the NE, and also expanding opportunities for people to experience the arts. ACE leadership stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Local Authorities in our region. Changes to ACE’s staffing, governance and decision-making structures driven by Government cuts have together distanced ACE from many of its traditional regional partners, and is clearly evidenced in the weakness of ACE influence in the emerging new LEP structures - reducing what was previously a strong sense of shared purpose and exposing regional arts organisations yet further in a time of financial crisis.
    12. ACE should urgently reconsider its currently metro-centralised executive structure, and consider rebalancing its regional presence away from low-ranking officer and ‘relationship managers’ to provide a wider geographical spread of senior strategic leadership with meaningful decision-making powers.  That will be the only way ACE can reactivate  former partnerships with local institutional partners, and encourage innovative new co-investing in strategic ways to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, supporting the continued development throughout the whole country of Great Arts and Culture for Everyone which is now ACE’s sole central mission.
       
  2. The work of Arts Council England (ACE), including its scope, scale and remit
    1. ACE (and Northern Arts before its merger into ACE) has been a key partner with local authorities, business and the cultural sector in developing our cultural infrastructure, making a major contribution to the regeneration of our region following the industrial restructuring of the 1980s and 90s, drawing in significant amounts of UK, European and private sector investment. The culture-led regeneration of NewcastleGateshead has been a particularly striking example of that process, where over £200m of capital investment has created fourteen wholly new or extensively refurbished buildings including seven completely new cultural institutions, all now playing important roles in the life of their local communities, the wider region, and (many of them) on the national and international stage.
    2. This regenerative success has enabled a broad cross-section of our communities to engage rewardingly in culture and to develop artistic practice and creative businesses, with many artists based in this region now increasingly in demand nationally and internationally beyond their work in their own region. For an urban core emerging from recession, culture plays a key role in making the region an attractive place to live and work, increasing confidence and aspiration and fuelling economic growth.
    3. Although these developments have stimulated increases in cultural participation, levels remain low in many parts of the NE. Many NE local authority areas are in the lowest 20% for cultural engagement, though arts participation increased by 4.4% between 2005/6 and 2012/13 – the third highest increase nationally - and museums and galleries attendances increased by 11% over the same period.  The creative and culture industries are now worth £755m in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the North East Economy, 2% of total GVA.  We have consistently invested in innovative new models for cultural organisations, and entrepreneurial approaches to earned income have become key in an economically challenged region with few major corporate HQs, small consumer markets, and where philanthropic support is not easily won.
    4. Concurrently with these changes, ACE has been affected by a series of organisational restructures driven by a combination of reductions in grant funding and governmental direction, which have led to fundamental changes in the scale, scope and remit of ACE in practice. This has created a more challenging partnership situation, and this trend has been exacerbated by all the reductions more generally in regional control over governmental resources as well as the shrinking levels of those resources themselves.
    5. In 2002 ACE was recreated with a revised Royal Charter merging Arts Council of England with the Regional Arts Boards.  ACE’s Chair Gerry Robinson affirmed in the 2002 Annual Review that a fundamental premise of this change was  ‘greater decision-making at a regional level’, alongside efficiency and the creating of a ‘level-playing field’ for all regions. Those changes were intended to involve those based in every region in all levels of decision-making and governance. However, since 2010 this design principle has been first eroded and then more comprehensively abandoned. This has added to the overall centralising approach to the funding for arts and culture, with the principle of subsidiarity (which supported strong clear relationships with locally based decision-makers and genuine collaborative investment) being replaced with remote governance and a corrosive lack of clarity or accountability in decision-making. We note that many regionally based ACE officers say they are themselves increasingly often puzzled by decisions taken outside the region that do not reflect the knowledge of those working with the sector and partners at a local level.
    6. In the past a brokerage role was central to many of ACE’s greatest achievements, levering a very significant investment of time, money and other resources into the arts economy from widely diverse partners. For ACE colleagues working locally, that is now made significantly harder by the structural changes dating from 2002.
       
  3. The economic and artistic criteria that underpin funding decisions
    1. We welcome (after many years of vertiginously rapid change in ACE’s objectives and funding criteria) the simple clarity of ACE’s current 10-year strategic framework ‘Great Art and Culture for Everyone’. We welcome the three primary focuses on supporting excellence; on expanding opportunities for people to access and participate in arts and culture, and on work with, by and for children and young people.
    2. These are reflected in the criteria for funding decisions in relation to National Portfolio funding and Grants for the arts. However, the range of other funds developed by ACE under Strategic Funding vary more randomly in their intent and in their ‘fit’ with those three core national goals, and with locally developed economic and cultural visions. Traditional metropolitan, international notions of ‘excellence’ can push more local or participatory versions to the margins.  A reduced diversity nationally of local experiences leads in practice to a narrower view of what excellence means, and it may also restrict the arts’ potential contribution to regional economic growth.
    3. The criteria for balancing the National Portfolio or for Capital Awards could emphasise more explicitly the social benefits of investment in local cultural development, and its contribution to the creative economy across England. The enormous potential knock-on contribution to local and regional economies of the place-making impact of distinctive cultural successes has been analysed and documented innumerable times across the world, and is proven beyond any possible doubt.  In our own region, that points to the need for ACE to work more imaginatively and strategically with non-arts partners. Our experience working with the two LEPs in our region suggests a stronger and clearer case needs to be made by ACE, understanding the distinctiveness of each area but affirming the defining contribution which culture makes to regional image and to the visitor economy. We welcome the initial efforts of ACE National office to influence LEPs, and would encourage more strategic work, advocacy and investment across government departments to underpin the development of these relationships at regional level. We note (for example) that the Big Lottery has established a much closer strategic fit with LEPs and EU funding around community engagement projects than ACE has yet achieved.
    4. In addition, we suggest that a wider variety of funding mechanisms including loans and start-up grants should be available to cultural and creative businesses whose practice sit outside traditional metropolitan definitions of ‘artistic excellence’ but who can contribute powerfully to local creative and economic development. Funding should be invested at the point of most need and most impact to achieve an effective spread of cultural opportunity across England.
    5. This does not necessarily equate to equal funding per head of population per local authority area, either regionally or nationally. Local requirements and opportunities vary greatly - taking into account the varying local densities of venues and organisations and the increasingly compromised ability of people in rural areas to travel to events. For the same reason, we do not believe that subsidy per attendance is an appropriate metric to shape decision-making. It often discourages risk-taking and investment into exactly the distinctive kinds of work which develop great artists, or into the projects with the most potential for long-term developmental impact.
    6. Partnerships with other funders enable ACE to draw on the expertise of others in investing its funds, as well as creating larger combined grant pots. ACE can devolve or share decisions with appropriate experts, while retaining a national overview and the ability to be strategically reactive to local circumstances rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’. We commend recent partnerships such as those with NESTA on the Digital R&D Fund and PRS Music Foundation on the Momentum Music Fund, and would like to see this partnership principle extended to other areas of its funding, so that local expertise throughout the whole country can inform national investment decisions. Without the national arts funding system being able to access this kind of local knowledge, there is a risk of over-concentration of resources geographically or in particular organisations, and of missed opportunities to develop the arts and cultural sector or to draw in private sector investment or sponsorship.
    7. Instead, we have observed a tendency for ACE to partner largely with national bodies, exacerbating the issue of distance from local knowledge especially where ACE’s arbitrary ‘Area’ definitions are used to assess balance of investment across the country, e.g. counting Berwick-upon-Tweed as in the same ‘Area’ as Knutsford which is an inappropriate distortion of any rational national cultural map. Removal of local authority input into Grants for the Arts (driven by a need to make cost-savings) has also led to a reduction in shared knowledge of applications, damaging both the insight available to ACE to inform difficult choices and any local knowledge of applications.
       
  4. The geographic distribution of funding
    1. Pulling this picture together, our main concern is that the geographical distribution of national funding is now more and more driven by unhelpfully centralised decision-making structures, favouring the major national institutions and the London-centric versions of international excellence. We believe that any system designed primarily to guarantee equal spend per capita of either Government grants or lottery funding is unlikely to deliver either the developmental role ACE needs to play or consistent access to high quality arts and culture throughout the country, whether focused on the demand side (via audiences and participants) or on the supply side (via organisations and individuals).
    2. Instead, we argue for the principle of subsidiarity to be adopted more widely by ACE, which would help move to a position of more effective, more rational geographic distribution of funding, recognising that the current geographic distribution of funding cannot deliver the broad-based, consistent access that is a core goal of all ACE’s policies. As the report ‘Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital’ illustrates, in 2012/13 ACE distributed £20 per head of population in London and just £3.60 php in the rest of England. We accept entirely the importance to the whole of the UK of London’s exceptional concentration of globally outstanding cultural institutions, and recognise that will always create a credible argument for spending on the arts in London out of direct proportion to spending elsewhere in England.  However we also believe that the extent of the current disparity measured with such clarity in the RoCC report is excessive, and that the health of the country as a whole requires that disparity to reduce.
    3. North East England also has the highest proportion of households playing the National Lottery and the highest weekly Lottery expenditure by region.  The current geographical distribution of funding by ACE and other distributors is therefore effectively taking money from regional economies to invest in London-based organisations – an indefensible position from any moral or political standpoint.
    4. We value highly the partnerships that some of London’s national and international institutions have with arts organisations in the NE; the programmes of London-based touring organisations enrich our venues, and the growing digital access to national collections is exciting. Those are all trends we welcome and wish to see continue, and we urge ACE and DCMS to require more of that kind of activity outside London. However, we do not believe those ‘national reach’ arguments are sufficient justification for the continuance of funding patterns that are now so seriously out of balance. The actual extent to which national organisations work regionally is also patchy, given the sporadic and unpredictable nature of most touring as opposed to the far more consistent opportunities created by locally and regionally based provision.
       
  5. Envoi
    1. There is also an implicit assumption throughout this debate that many arts organisations based in London play nationally reading roles, where regionally based companies are only of significance within their regions  That may have been true in the past, but many of today’s regionally leading companies have significant international reputations of their own, regularly referenced internationally as well as nationally for the high quality and distinctiveness of their work which has grown organically from the local communities at whose heart the companies have grown.
    2. The problems with England’s current arts funding landscape have not come about through co-ordinated, strategic decisions.  Instead, they represent a resourcing ‘perfect storm’ for arts and culture in the English regions caused by many years of un-coordinated decisions, nationally and regionally, taken in isolation, in changing policy contexts, by many different and unrelated institutions.
    3. However, the combined effects of those decisions now places many high quality, highly regarded regional arts organisations in their greatest financial peril for a generation. The RoCC report is only the latest, but it is one of the clearest, demonstrations of the unintended consequences that have resulted from many individually innocent, unconnected decisions.  However, the thoroughness of its research and the clarity of its analysis make thinking about remedies an easier process than it would otherwise have been, and represent a rare moment of opportunity now for decisive action – which the welcome decision to set up your Inquiry recognises.
    4. We are very keen to work with Government and with national and regional partners to capture this national moment of opportunity to rebalance and restructure the current distribution of English arts investment.  In doing so, we have a unique chance to relieve at least some of the disproportionately acute pressures on the many high quality, high impact, distinctive arts and cultural organisations that have become such striking success stories throughout the English regions in the last two decades.

 

February 2014