Arts must be placed at ‘heart of regeneration’

Published Thursday 2 August 2007 at 16:20 by Alistair Smith

Exclusive: Culture minister Margaret Hodge has warned that, with a tough spending round approaching, the arts must explore new avenues to help supplement traditional sources of subsidy.

Speaking to The Stage, Hodge explained that she was investigating how culture could link up with regeneration and education initiatives to gain access to funds which fell outside the jurisdiction of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

She added that while she and culture secretary James Purnell were fighting hard for a “fair deal” from the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review, the sector would, in the future, need to look to organisations such as the Regional Development Agencies for alternative or additional investment.

Hodge explained: “We’re in a really, really tough fiscal situation. I’ve come from a department where we’d agreed our settlement over the next spending review and it was a 5% real terms cut and that was really hard to implement. What I strongly feel is that [in the arts] Labour inherited a starved legacy of investment. We’ve put that right and it would be terrible if we threw that away. So we will fight hard to ensure a fair deal on funding. But it’s going to be tough, no one pretends otherwise.

“So what I want to do beyond that is to capture other resources for theatre and the arts. I’ve just come from being sponsor minister for the Regional Development Agencies. So I’ve got a relationship with them. They’ve got a budget of £2.3 billion. That’s all about economic regeneration in their regions and if we can place theatre and culture more strongly at the heart of regeneration, if we can persuade the RDAs of that, I hope that we can attract greater investment than we have in the past from them.”

Prime minister Gordon Brown has recently signalled that he may consider alternative means of regenerating deprived areas of the country than through super-casinos and Hodge said that she felt that culture could be used as such a catalyst. In particular, she gave the example of seaside resort Margate and its plans to introduce a gallery into the town. Meanwhile, she said that she wanted to investigate how the cultural offering in schools could be improved.

She added that her department would also be looking at how it could increase the amount of cash coming into the arts through private patronage.

“We do want to argue the case for the best settlement we can get in the very tight and constrained circumstances in which we are having to operate. We then want to argue much more strongly for synergy between budgets - around place and identity and education. The final thing we have to explore much more is patronage and philanthropy. I want to see what we can do to get people giving more,” she commented. “But I do know that if there’s one thing I have to try to deliver, it is a bit of stability and investment in theatre and the cultural infrastructure.”