The Stage

Councils swing axe over arts funding

Published Thursday 3 February 2005 at 12:25 by Jeremy Austin

Theatre companies preparing for a predicted £30 million shortfall in Arts Council England income over the next three years were warned this week to expect even worse news from their other main funder.

Chair of the National Association of Local Government Arts Officers Sue Isherwood said cuts by local councils - which provide more than 50% of all core revenue grants to arts groups - are now inevitable.

Some 85% of authorities nationwide have received standstill funding from Whitehall this year. Isherwood said that this, combined with a cap on council tax rates and central government’s insistence on improved statutory services such as education and transport meant non-statutory obligations such as arts funding will suffer.

She said: “This is devastating for the arts. There will certainly be closures [of companies]. This is a slow, downward spiral at a period when there is so much that is positive. Ever since this government came into power the amount of money going into local authorities hasn’t been increasing. Budgets haven’t been increasing in a higher proportion of local authorities, particularly district authorities, county councils, because on the whole they are rural and there aren’t any votes for the Labour Party in rural areas.”

The warning comes weeks after the arts community learnt that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was freezing its funding of Arts Council England for the next three financial years and that this would lead to a £30 million shortfall during that period in real terms.

The DCMS has allowed ACE to redistribute funds from its Creative Partnerships scheme but at a special seminar organised by the National Campaign for the Arts last week, arts council chair Christopher Frayling said that even with that concession and savings made from the reorganisation of the funding body’s structure it would not be enough to fill the gap.

Both NALGAO and the Independent Theatre Council claim that by freezing cash to both ACE and the local authorities, arts organisations, particularly the smaller ones, are facing a bleak future. Core funding will become a priority for local authorities, meaning money for special projects and the sort of work smaller arts organisations undertake will disappear. Normally, they could then go to the Grants for Arts scheme run by ACE but with that funding body trying to fill the shortfall from the DCMS there will be far less money available there.

Independent Theatre Council director Charlotte Jones said those projects that the government has publicly been keen to promote - those using the arts to fuel social regeneration - will be impossible to fund.

“There is always a very real fear that project grants will be the first to go and that is quite disastrous for our sector and for the whole thing. It is so short-sighted to take away the very thing that brings access to the arts for the first time and for new talent. It will have a devastating effect,” she said.

“The damage will be disproportionate to the money lost in the same way that the money injected had a disproportionately good effect.”

During the NCA debate, ACE representatives and the culture secretary Tessa Jowell implied that they both had to tackle the Treasury rather than battling each other. Jowell admitted that her department had received considerably less money than had been anticipated.

Isherwood said while the DCMS had to convince its governmental partners, so NALGAO had to make the Local Government Authority understand the positive effects the arts have on a community. While there was no enthusiasm within that body to make cultural provision a statutory requirement, there was a chance that such provision could become a significant part of the Comprehensive Professional Assessment - the independent survey of how a local authority is performing.