|
Skip nav
Arts debate
Back to Features home
Raids on Lottery funding will hurt says Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive Arts Council England
There is a view currently circulating in Whitehall and Westminster that the arts sector can absorb the impact of the Olympics raid on lottery funding without visible impact. This is not true.
Five weeks ago the Prime Minister heard from a number of arts leaders gathered at No 10 that this was a 'golden age' for the arts and he went on to say that he would do everything possible to ensure the arts were not negatively impacted by the Olympics. It was a surprise and a disappointment to find a few days later that we were to lose a further £63m in lottery income.
That £63m will need to be found over four years from 2009 and will sadly impact on the arts at local level in every corner of England - with very many youth organisations, festivals, dance and theatre tours, exhibitions, concerts and other activities being turned down for funding
In fact the damage will be felt sooner than that. In the current year the Arts Council's budget for activities of this kind has been reduced from £83m to £54m. There are three reasons for that. Firstly, a reduction in the arts Lottery share, partly caused by the Olympics, even before the recently announced cut. Secondly, the need to scale back in anticipation of the 2009 cut. Thirdly, the government's earlier insistence that we pre-commit substantial sums of lottery money over forthcoming years, concerned as it was that the Lottery Distributors were perceived to be sitting on large sums of Lottery money. We took the government's request seriously and reduced our cash balances substantially.
The Arts Council has been a staunch supporter of the Olympics. I have consistently argued that the arts would be a net beneficiary, and that the 'dividend' would exceed the 'loss'. We are currently being asked to part fund regional Olympics co-ordinators to develop projects at regional and local level. We are also being asked to put £5m into a new Trust charged with funding cultural activities linked to the Olympics. Recent events and the impact on our funding programmes means that we are now having to consider these decisions very carefully. After all, what is the point of having people at local level develop projects when the money to realise such projects has been removed?
The experience of Sydney is instructive. A four-year programme of activity was put in place in the years leading up to the Games in 2000. Far from taking money away, 70m dollars additional government money was found for the Cultural Olympiad in Sydney.
The UK games has three strands of cultural activity. There are the big ceremonial events - for example the opening and closing ceremonies. This is thankfully already funded within the £9bn recently announced by the Secretary of State. Then there is a slate of fifteen major 'bid projects' - including a Shakespeare festival, a Festival of Youth Culture, and an International Music Programme. These formed part of the bid and having won the right to host the Olympics they now have to be delivered. There is a small sum of money within the £9bn for these projects but nowhere near enough. The implication is that the cultural sector is expected to make up the very large difference with other public and private partners. Then there are the very many local projects and activities that are expected to take place in the years leading to 2012 - no extra money is available, indeed the budgets that were to fund these projects have now been reduced. Added to which we know that arts sponsorship will be hit, inevitably diverting to some extent to sport.
What is the answer? Twofold. The Secretary of State should be asked to consider an appropriate allocation for the Cultural programme from the £9bn Olympics budget. And the Treasury should be asked to consider a larger than inflation increase to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport when it makes its decision on Exchequer funding this autumn coupled with an expectation that the cultural sector should receive a good proportion of that. Anything less and the arts sector may, sadly, have no choice but to tell the government that it is simply not able to deliver a large proportion of the much-vaunted cultural Olympics. The golden age would then, certainly, be over.
Peter Hewitt
Chief Executive
Arts Council England
"What do you think about the latest raids on lottery funds to pay for the Olympics? Have your say now."
Join the debate
* = required
Click on the image to access a PDF (990Kb) of the new summary report, What people want from the arts
News
-
Arts debate overall findings now available!
06 November
-
Open space event report
11 October
-
Final stage of arts debate fieldwork highlights the importance of quality of experience
28 September
more news > >
I am very disturbed at the raids on the all of the Lottery Funds to do with the arts. I have been following how many grants the HLF have been making to various plans to celebrate the Slave Trade Abolition Bicentenary. I believe it totals more than 16m. This kind of grant has become part of the work of museums and galleries etc., such will not be available so easily in the future; ceratinly not by the time the Olympics comes around in 2012. I acknowledge the Government has changed the arts scene for the better in their ten years in office. It is hard to recall how it was in 1997. But by their actions in raiding Lottery funding they are in danger of throwing all that away.
We will all be the poorer.
If ACE were involved and consulted over part funding the "fifteen major Bid projects" then there must be funds provisionally allocated already from within ACE.
If ACE were not involved and consulted, then who is making the requests, and do they have a budget to pay for them?
This tends to be how arts organisations are encouraged to consider trading. Leadership by example, as is being threatened here, would be welcomed. Are you going to lead Peter, or talk about the possibility of leading?
I worry about this current method of garnering support for the Arts. It smacks of encouraging people to sign up for a dossier of "facts" which are propaganda, even if we subscribe to the purposes
of the propaganda.
The Arts Council have been much too slow to make any kind of statement about this cut. Months ago we heard unofficially from our lead officer that major cuts to G4A were on the way, and the figure of 35% was rumoured some time ago. We didn't know that 1st April was the date that this would hit - most of us found out from Lyn Gardner on the Guardian arts blog. With nothing on the Arts Council website, that was all the info available. At Mr Blair's legacy speech a couple of weeks ago, why did no-one question his promise that the Olympics would not impact negatively on the arts? What he said just wasn't true!! but then he is the boss, I guess...
Lottery substitution by dissembling governments is a universal phenomenon, and is recorded in all the relevant international research. So this predictably crude smash and grab raid should have surprised nobody after it was clear the DCMS had screwed up the Olympics budget big time.
The problem is that ACE and too many of the other key arts/heritage bodies are now seen as so far up the New Labour trouser leg (in their own short term interest) that there is no longer any room for them to make authentic independent statements in their own defence which the wider public is likely to believe and get angry about. Anyone recall the celebrated and chilling Pastor Martin Niemoeller quotation these days? The invited Tate Modern groupie audience applauding Blair's mildly dishonest platitudes - and grovelling appreciatively afterwards - provides the perfect symbol of the cumulative cost to the sector of 10 years of compliance.
Yes, Peter's two positive approaches suggested at the end of his note need to be tried, and good luck to them, but don't hold your breath...
We're still quite a long way off from 2012, and we'd be naive to think this latest debacle is the end of it. 14 April 2012, by the way, will be the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, whose sister ship also had a habit of bumping into things in the fog and causing immense unforeseen collateral damage. It was called the Olympic, and they were both 'Olympic Class' ships. Irony, any one?
Well, I've just e-mailed the PM's office to ask his view. Perhaps we should all write to him. A flooded mailbag is said to achieve wonders.
It's ridiculous! The government are continually feeding there own fat pockets in order to please themselves, there's no solidarity in that, no faith in the powers that be and no justice! We must continue to express ourselves verbally and via our artistic excellence in order to bring out the best in ourselves. If we show the government that we are a part of this society and the greater picture, that we do have value and are worth investing in. They mite regret not giving us a slice of the pie! Splash some love on the world and create!
So fifteen large scale arts events for a 'cultural olympiad', but who might be creating and performing in these? G4A serve as a necessary and vital support for our future world class artists, but without the financial support early on in their career they will struggle to develop their practice. A distinct parallel with the future olympic champions themselves I feel. Surely if the government can see the need to invest in the development of our future athletic champions ahead of the games they can see the need to invest in our future artistic ones. A few cultural events around the times of the games is not a sustainable training plan.
As for the Olympics is undoubtably London-centric what hope have the regions in making up the drop in arts funding (Stratford-upon-Avon aside)?
Having argued the case for adequate funding for the Arts for over 30 years based on the verifiable economic benefits, social improvements and international acclaim that such investement returns, I am unsurprised at the failure of this Government to understand how deeply damaging a raid on Arts funding will be to support a London centric sportsfest which will last a mere 3 weeks and bring no benefits at all to the ordinary citizen. The regeneration of the Lee Valley would have happened regardless of the Olympics simply because of the self evident need to act in that area. Blair, Jowell et al are either incapable of understanding the mistake they have made, or are deliberately seeking to damage the fourth most important UK economic sector's R&D base - the subsidised Arts...
At a time when Local Authorities are decreasing their support (eg Derbyshire CC Grants to the Arts 1990/1991 was £450,000; 2006/2007 was £148,000)the support from the Lottery and from the Arts Council becomes ever more important...
Perhaps this Arts Debate should transmogrify into an Arts Party to challenge the 3 that park the Arts at the margins of their Manifestos...
There should be no surprise at any Government's actions in relation to arts funding. When Gerry Robinson was brought in as Chair of ACE his 'hard noised business man' response was to note that here is an industry suffering from under investment. That led towards a massive increase in arts funding. Now he's no longer in post it appears the arts are no longer being listened to.
The arts industry itself have to take some responsibility for this for as much as we've tried to talk the language of economic and social benefits the reality is that the subsidised arts remain elitest. Until the industry as well as government commits even more to grassroots arts to a level where arts clubs are as common in areas as sports clubs we will always suffer.
Stop being so cynical and buy some Lottery tickets! For too long the bourgeois art world has been subsidised by the gullible and hopeful working classes. Stop griping and start a campaign to get more people in the arts playing the Lottery. You never know, it could be you!
Hewitt says very apposite questions 'should' be asked of Jowett and the Treasury. So are you asking them Peter? Isn't it time someone had some guts and started suggesting that if this decision isn't reversed, if adequate (and by that I mean more) funding isn't found for the arts, totally unconnected to the Olympics, cultural or otherwise, irreperable damage will be done to the UK's cultural ecology and that artists and musicians and writers and performers might start to think of sticking it to the politicians, both at the ballot box and through direct action. Individual artists and small-scale companies might not have much of a voice but they'd sit up and take notice if the Last Night of the Proms didn't happen, if a week of performances at the National and RSC didn't happen, if someone dared disturb their picnic at Glynebourne. Come on people - mobilise! Let's creatively shame them to admitting their mistake.
It is a great opportunity for our country to host the Olympics in 2012 and for this honour we should all be very proud. Diverting funding from other equally important aspects of our lives is a poor decison and would not have been sustainable at the bidding stage, and probably done because there will be little upset within the voting population, had funding been diverted from schools or health this would raise more protests and not be generally acceptable. The prospective new prime minister has the ability to reinstate the funding required from whatever source he chooses, so Peter what's next? In the Arts ourselves we also have a role to play and should be sharing our fund raising ideas to fill some of the gap, not that effort is not being put in now. Peter can you enable this?
a big problem will be that the circus arts, street arts and Carnival which are lower arts forms and really suffer in the funding market will be worse hit, we, circus companies got an email asking us what would required for a new centre of training for the circus Arts, now apparently that has been moved to be used by 2015 instead of 2012, which is such a waste, as providing this early would allow to train artist for the Olympiad, volunteers and proffessionals to provide the opening and closing of ceremonies of the Olympic games, I guess there is not enough importance given to that, as circus arts are so not cruicial for ACE!!! But lets realise that circus is becoming very trendy, new movements are happening and Circus is one of the most visual art forms used generally in these opening of ceremonies... for the aerial work, acrobatics juggling with large objects, all of the circus arts combine4d with dance tend to make up the opening and closing ceremonies...and I am willing to help if anyone would listen!!!!
Peter Hewitt's suggestion that the Secretary of State "should be asked to consider an appropriate allocation for the Cultural programme" from the 9bn Olympics budget needs to be couched in plainer terms, perhaps. Surely it will be impossible for the cultural sector, in the face of existing and future raids on its funding, to deliver the Olympics' Cultural programme without ringfencing part of this money and then some? Inflation is moving upwards again and the cynic in me can't help thinking that the budget seems likely to reach double figures by 2012...and that maybe the cultural sector will still be paying for the Olympics in 2022.
As chair of an arts organisation my questions are simple:
1 - can the nation afford an Olympics without it threatening its cultural life?
2 - do we allow uncapped capital development projects in the arts with 60% contingencies on costs?
If the answer to either is no, then it's a no brainer - cancel the games.
Solve the problem by scraping the Olympics, this is a money pit fuelled by political ego and one upmanship on an obscene scale.
The 2012 olympics smells of eugenics. Of course challenging such Stalanist, uncaring agendas is a massive problem for all those who lose out. We know that already that they do not care for civilians, hence the war in Iraq and not listening to 'real' people's arguments against such actions. So it is hard to imagine that they will have a change of heart regarding putting money back into the Arts - time to get rid of these greedy sorts and vote for a better and more caring group of souls instead (as if).