The Stage

Arts funding: A time to cull?

Published Thursday 29 July 2010 at 11:15 by Alistair Smith

Painful cuts for the arts are an inevitability. Alistair Smith explains why the sector needs to be prepared for them and why it must avoid a repeat of 2008’s angry protests at the Young Vic

This autumn is going to be bloody and brutal for the arts. Heavy public spending cuts are on their way and there is little we can do to prevent it.

If Arts Council England emerges having lost only 20% of its funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, this will be a very good result. And the cuts could be much worse - as high as 40%, even.

The last time that cultural organisations faced the axe was in early 2008. At the time, leading actors and directors gathered at the Young Vic, there was gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, and Peter Hewitt, then ACE chief executive, was fortunate to leave the theatre with all his limbs intact.

This kind of reaction from the sector will simply not wash this time round.

When all walks of public life - and many private firms - are having to face up to severe austerity measures, there is simply no way that the arts can argue that it should be immune, or receive preferential treatment.

As an industry, we must take a much more measured, pragmatic approach to the situation.

Tub-thumping will be more of a hindrance than a help and the companies which are going to come out of the next few years in the best state will not be those who complain the loudest, but those who expend their energies thinking about innovative solutions to the problems that all arts organisations will undoubtedly face.

Companies must resist a bunker mentality and try to look to the bigger picture. Not all cuts are bad. Some of the tough decisions that ACE will take to disinvest or cut organisations will be quite correct.

While, on the whole, arts organisations are tightly, efficiently run, there are some that are not. There is wastage in the system and not just in terms of ‘administration’ - the recent vogue for large companies to employ multiple, heavily salaried associate directors seems an obvious example on the artistic side. It’s important that we are honest about this and accept that ACE has a duty to public money, not just to the arts themselves.

On the other side of that coin, though, it is crucial that ACE makes the right decisions and - perhaps even more importantly - that it can convince the sector that it has made the right decisions. It must be clear, robust and consistent in its reasoning. Individual cuts across the country must add up to a broader strategic picture of priorities and ambitions.

At a senior level, ACE seems better placed to do this than it was at the last spending review. On a micro-level, there are widespread concerns that many of the lower level staff are new and inexperienced following the recent reshuffle. It’s a worryingly similar situation to the mess of 2007/8.

So, what’s likely to happen? Well, DCMS will probably get at least a 25% cut. There are talks of 50% admin savings within the department. This appears to be a sensible idea. Few people in the arts really understand what the 500-odd staff at the DCMS do and there is clearly duplication between some of its functions and those carried out by the arts council. The arts council itself is also still quite large - even after its total employees were reduced from 622 to 473 in the most recent restructuring. Despite protestations from chief executive Alan Davey that he has trimmed as much fat as is possible, I’d expect the DCMS to ask for more cuts, especially if it’s making its own people redundant.

Still, while everyone is talking with glee about slashing administration and bureaucracy within the arts, we must remind ourselves we are still talking about job cuts. Civil servants are people too.

And, it’s important to remember that it is these very “bureaucrats” within arts organisations who have helped turn the creative industries into just that, industries. We can’t trumpet the sector’s figures about return on government investment and simultaneously ask for the very people who have made that return possible to be axed.

But, that said, if some of these cuts can be made at DCMS and then at ACE, there’s a chance that a loss of around 20% might be able to be passed on to regularly funded organisations. That 20% could be reduced significantly if organisations such as Creativity, Culture and Education were taken out of the equation. Perhaps, we could get down to an average of 12% cuts, which is starting to look a little more manageable.

What’s to be done, then? Well, the first step is for the sector itself to take the lead. Specifically, the large organisations within the sector. This is a time for the major companies, which account for so much of ACE funding, to stand up and be counted.

They must lead by example, go to ACE and say - “In the short term, we can afford to take this much of a hit and we’re prepared to do it because we can weather it better than the smaller companies. Yes, we’ll have to retrench a little, but we won’t cease completely. Perhaps we can launch fund-raising campaigns to mitigate for some of the losses. Then, later, when times improve, we’d like our money back, please.”

The noises coming from behind the scenes are that some of the big boys are willing to do this, but others are resistant. It needs to be a concerted effort.

For the smaller organisations, ACE must take a lead, give some instruction - show it is truly a development agency, not just a funding body. It needs to be decisive about who it wants to protect, who it might want to merge with other companies and who it wants to let go. Equal misery for all is not an option.

It would be far worse to have 200 organisations all producing mediocre work because they are half funded, than 100 producing great work because they are properly funded. And organisations are going to have to face up to the fact that they are going to have to work together more - small with small, big with small. Arts organisations will not be able to exist in isolation.

And this all means that communication within and among practitioners will only get more important. The sector needs to decide for itself what it wants to look like when it emerges from the next five to ten years of austerity and it needs to do everything in its power to achieve this. What it must not do is panic and start screaming.

• We’d like to hear your thoughts on this autumn’s spending review. Email editor@thestage.co.uk with funding cuts in the subject line, or write to The Stage, 47 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3XT.