The Stage

Secret service: Is Arts Council England being ‘open and transparent’ about Hackney Empire?

Published Thursday 15 October 2009 at 11:00 by Alistair Smith

When Alistair Smith heard Hackney Empire was experiencing considerable financial difficulties, he requested to see documents from Arts Council England under the Freedom of Information Act. More than a month later, ACE chose to draw a veil over proceedings and sent out 12 pages of black ink

A little over three weeks ago, I wrote a news story for The Stage headlined “Hackney Empire to close in January”. It was the first time that anyone had spoken publicly about the intention - which had been considered in private for some time - to temporarily close down the Hackney Empire next year.

I’d heard that the Empire was having a tough time a little while ago. Even a casual glance at its annual reports revealed that all was not well in north-east London. What confirmed in my mind that there was a serious problem was when I was told that the venue was - along with the Southbank Centre - appearing on Arts Council England’s ‘On the Radar’ list.

This is, for those of you who don’t know (and, to be honest, I didn’t until recently), a report that is given to the arts council’s executive board by its senior officers, in which they highlight venues or companies which are struggling, as well as successes across the country.

Soon after I heard this, I put in a Freedom of Information request, asking for all the papers to the ACE executive board from the previous three months - specifically the radar lists - in which the Southbank Centre and Hackney Empire were mentioned.

A month and a bit later - after a delay because the documents might “be subject to one or more of the non-absolute exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act 2000” - I got my request back. Following the above warning, I was prepared for small parts of the paper to be blacked out - or redacted, as it is called. What I wasn’t prepared for was 12 pages of black ink.

Now, it’s true that the arts council is allowed to withhold certain information - the exemptions referred to above.

But it’s also true that its default position should be - under law - to release information and it can only redact it “if the public authority considers that the public interest in withholding the information is greater than the public interest in disclosing it”.

Incredibly, the arts council had redacted so much of the document I had requested that the only way I could be certain that either Hackney or the Southbank Centre was mentioned was because I had requested “documents which mentioned either Hackney Empire or the Southbank Centre”.

Any reference to either organisation had been completely removed.

Interestingly, one section of the document was left completely untouched. The title of that section? “Good news.”

By my reckoning, there was a huge amount of public interest in knowing the financial state that Hackney Empire was (and is) in. It far outweighs the need to keep the information secret. Especially as, by this time, the decision had already been taken, in principle, to close the venue. It’s not as if the negative coverage from releasing the information could make it close twice.

Why do I bring this up now, though?

In some ways it’s water under the bridge - I managed to find out what I needed to know about the Empire through other means and the cat is now out of the bag. I thought about writing this piece immediately after we ran our news story, but I checked myself, thinking it might be a fit of journalistic pique. Maybe I was angry because my curiosity hadn’t been satisfied.

And, to be fair, I’m sure that was a part of it. But, over the last few weeks, I’ve canvassed opinion within the arts community to see what people thought about the scale of the redactions and, without exception, they were shocked.

It’s not so much the withholding of information, but the attitude it seems to betray. As well as sticking two fingers up at the Freedom of Information Act, it appears to show an arts council whose natural reaction is to resist speaking openly about the problems facing one of its major clients and its own involvement in trying to rectify those problems.

And this attitude extends beyond a simple Freedom of Information request. Its approach to the two most recent theatre closures in which it has had an involvement - Hackney and Bristol Old Vic - has been to attempt to draw a veil over proceedings.

In neither case has ACE been fully open and transparent about precisely what role it has played in the decisions to close these venues. The official line will always be, “It is the board’s decision”. But I’m sure that in both cases - to greater or lesser extents - the arts council has had a say.

The attempt to disguise this doesn’t do anybody any favours - least of all the arts council. The industry will always be suspicious of ACE’s motives if it is not open about the scale of its involvement.

And, in fact, while I don’t personally agree, there is an argument in both cases that the decision to close the theatre is the right one - in which case, surely the arts council is doing itself a disservice by not claiming credit.

Certainly, Bristol appears to be bouncing back stronger. But it is notable that the real recovery in Bristol started when people began to talk openly and freely about the future of that beautiful old building. The same needs to happen in Hackney. By taking the decision to close the Empire without any wider consultation, the theatre’s board and the arts council were preventing that from happening.

The arts council will argue, I’m sure, that announcing the closure was not their decision to make and that by withholding this information from my freedom of information request they were protecting the ‘reputational’ strength of the organisation. But ACE’s duty is not just to the Empire, but also to the wider industry, audiences and tax-payers.

As a journalist, my argument will always be that it is better for this information to be in the public domain than behind closed doors.

For the arts council, I admit, it’s not such an easy decision. On some level, they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. After all, what theatre is going to thank ACE for revealing its financial crisis?

But chief executive Alan Davey came in promising a new “open and transparent” arts council. And, so far, it seems that he hasn’t managed to deliver it.