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Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster): I know the subject to which the hon. Lady is turning. Does she agree that that was a coda to the central problem, which is that the Government had decided to take millions out of Westminster's budget in respect of people who come in for the day as visitors? The figures for several of the institutions that she has mentioned show that, to a great extent, they servicepeople from outside Westminster, rather than purely Westminster people.
Ms Buck: I have attempted to make it clear that the funding Westminster gives to community organisations is directed to the benefit of local residents and school
children, and funds projects involving work with local schools and community groups, so it is not right to make the allegation that the right hon. Gentleman makes.
As for the right hon. Gentleman's point about cuts in funding to the borough in previous years, he is absolutely correct to say that a change was made to the spending formula in 1997. Westminster objected to that; the council sought and was not refused leave to have a judicial review of that decision. However, that decision was taken in 1997, and the local elections were fought in 1998, after the decision had already been incorporated into the Budget. The manifesto did not say a word about the fact that the council would seek another round of cuts--indeed, the council prided itself on the fact that, thanks to its good housekeeping, it was able to sustain front-line services and maintain a low council tax. However, immediately after the local elections, an axe was taken to community, voluntary and arts organisations.
To return to the point about asylum seekers, I want to express my anger about the fact that some extremely vulnerable people who have arrived in this country are being blamed for the crisis in arts funding. Although in recent years many London councils have borne too large a part of the financial burden for a matter that should be dealt with at national level, Westminster council knows full well that the new Government are taking several measures to assist central London boroughs, including Westminster, with the cost of asylum seekers. Those measures include an additional £130 million grant to help London boroughs, which was announced before Christmas. The combination of proposals to assist other communities to take a fair share of asylum seekers and the additional money means that it is completely wrong to attempt to pin the blame on asylum seekers. I believe that was a cynical and provocative playing of the race card for which there is no excuse.
The arts and community groups deserve nothing but praise for the work that they do, and have done, in Westminster and for the campaign of persuasion that they have run in recent months in an attempt to influence the council to change its decision. The London Arts Board and the National Campaign for the Arts should also be commended for their vigorous support at this difficult time. The arts will survive in Westminster because our communities and our institutions are strong, but much damage has been done to both morale and vital services.
The Minister for the Arts (Mr. Alan Howarth):
As is her way, my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) has done a service to Londoners and to us all by securing this debate. I am grateful to her for raising the issue of funding for the arts in Westminster, and for speaking with such vigour and strength of feeling.
I want to place the problems with which the arts have been confronted in Westminster in the context of this Government's policy for the arts. To us, it is a central and
welcome responsibility of Government to support the arts. The arts are integral to the quality of our lives, private and public. For the experience of the arts to be accessible to all people, there is an inescapable obligation on Government to act to bring that about. It is a responsibility that falls on both central and local government.
We have been willing to find the money that the arts need. The settlement we achieved in the comprehensive spending review will put an extra £125 million into the arts over the next three years--the largest increase for a generation at least, and is in stark contrast to the recent history of arts funding in this country. In announcing my Department's funding plans for the next three years, we intend that the Arts Council and the bodies it funds should have greater certainty over the coming period and an unprecedented opportunity to plan strategically.
Beyond money, we are working to create an environment in which the arts can thrive and satisfy audiences across the country. We want access, as I have said, to ensure that the arts are for the many, not the few. We want excellence, because we believe in it for its own sake. We want education, so that people's enjoyment of the arts is enhanced and because that is our investment in the long-term future of the arts and in the quality of life of our society. We want a healthy arts economy, because it underwrites the rest of our objectives and provides jobs. In the United Kingdom, the creative industries have been growing at about twice the rate of the economy as a whole. They already employ more than 1.4 million people--5 per cent. of the total employed work force.
All those principles will be enshrined in the funding agreement we are currently preparing with the Arts Council. We are investing on the condition that the recipients of public investment--our partners--share our commitment to excellence and innovation, access for all, education and the creative economy. We believe that the administration of funding for the arts should be cost effective. Accordingly, the Arts Council is restructuring to deliver a better service to arts practitioners. It will be a leaner, more effective organisation. Many of its current responsibilities will be delegated in future to the regional arts boards, bringing funding decisions closer to the people most affected.
I am happy to be able to tell the House that, in the coming year, the Arts Council and the London Arts Board between them will invest £36 million in Westminster. Like my hon. Friend, however, I am very unhappy about the view that Westminster has taken of its own responsibilities in the coming year.
Our system of public support for the arts will work as it should only if everyone plays a part. Responsibility must be shared between the Arts Council--in distributing grant-in-aid and lottery funds--the regional arts boards, local authorities and other funders, such as business sponsors and the European Union. One partner cannot retreat in the expectation that others will pick up the tab. Our artistic ecology is fragile. The confluence of funding streams that keeps many precious artistic enterprises afloat is finely balanced: damming just one tributary can be enough to leave them high and dry.
My hon. Friend will understand that, as Minister for the Arts, I cannot and do not wish to determine local priorities in Westminster or any other authority. If the arm's length principle applies to the way in which the Arts Council and regional arts boards distribute grant-in-aid, it must
also apply to local government spending on the arts. The accountability of Westminster city council is to its electors. If the people of Westminster do not believe that their council is getting its priorities right, they can seek to persuade their locally elected representatives to take a different course of action. They can also express their dissatisfaction through the ballot box.
It has already become clear that cutting funding to arts organisations is not a soft option for a local authority. When damage is gratuitously inflicted on the cultural life of an area, there is a public outcry, both from the artistic community and from local people. So it has been in the case raised by my hon. Friend. Her voice and mine are but additions to the many who have criticised the actions of Westminster city council.
Trevor Phillips, chair of the London Arts Board, has written eloquently in the Evening Standard of Westminster's lamentable decision, of the joyless, miserable and depressing vision of the chairman of Westminster city council's arts committee, Councillor Harvey Marshall, and of the ugly whiff of bigotry that he detects. Peter Hewitt, chief executive of the Arts Council, has said that he is deeply disappointed by Westminster's actions. The Evening Standard itself, in an editorial, has described Westminster's decision to cut arts funding as one that smacks of Philistinism and narrow-mindedness, and has deplored the damage that Westminster will do to the education of its children.
I can only agree. Westminster's cuts to arts funding will do damage to arts organisations of high reputation. To name but a few of the hardest hit, we are talking about, as my hon. Friend told us, the orchestra of St. John's Smith Square, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Photographers' gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Another is the Serpentine gallery. Westminster's grant to the gallery is spent on education, but it will now be reduced from £58,000 to £28,000. Last year, more than 500 teachers, mostly from Westminster, attended workshops run by the gallery. The gallery runs regular events for three local primary schools. Disabled people attended 12 similar events. The reduction in funding can have only the most serious implications for all those activities.
That is happening in the heart of our capital city, which is one of the world's great capitals of the arts, attracting artists and performers from within and beyond our shores. London's audiences create the opportunities for London's performers; they treasure and insist upon the public support that is indispensable to the vitality and quality of the arts in London.
The particular organisations that I have mentioned will have to bear reductions of between 47 and 100 per cent. in their local authority funding. For smaller organisations, cuts of that order can have a devastating, if not terminal, effect. For their larger colleagues, they are still deeply undermining. Twenty-three arts organisations in Westminster are to suffer. Those that will bear lesser cuts to their funding will still be damaged.
As in the case of the Serpentine gallery, to which I have already referred, so too with Wigmore hall--my hon. Friend described the damage to its educational programme--the Institute of Contemporary Arts,the Photographers' gallery and other organisations,
where Westminster's dereliction will hit the activities that put most back into the community, such as arts education. Dr. Nicholas Tate, the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has said:
The harm done to individual organisations aggregates into a bleaker picture overall. A community in which those in authority care about its culture, reflecting the values of the people whom they represent, has depth and substance. It has pride and it presents itself proudly to the world. The damage that the authority may do to itself through a cut of £360,000 in investment in arts organisations in the city of Westminster, through discouraging tourists, investors and employers, not to mention the detrimental impact on education, is incalculable.
When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State negotiated the substantial increase in arts funding during the comprehensive spending review, he did not do so with the intention of filling, in retrospect, the gaps left by local authorities. When we see the Arts Council offering the Serpentine gallery an increased grant of £80,000 in the coming year, while Westminster city council withdraws £58,000; when we see the London Arts Board upping funding to the Unicorn children's theatre by £8,000, while Westminster withdraws £17,000; when we see the way in which funds channelled through my Department are negated by cuts by Westminster, we feel a sense of betrayal.
We all know that when a local authority sets its budget, some hard choices are inevitable. There are many competing demands for funding, of course. From time to time, funders of arts budgets need to alter patterns of support--perhaps because the management or the artistic output of an organisation is not what it needs to be. But, as my hon. Friends the Members for Regent's Park and Kensington, North and for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) have made clear, there is no persuasive rationale for what is planned by Westminster. It intends to cut the funding of the organisations I have listed by nearly 30 per cent. for no decent reason.
The chairman of Westminster's arts committee, Councillor Harvey Marshall, has stated that one reason for the cuts is a reduction in central Government support for the council. The right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke) also made that point. I will give the House the facts. The standard spending assessment for Westminster city council--the pot from which arts funding is drawn--has risen by 5.2 per cent. compared with 1998-99. That compares with an average increase for inner London of 4.2 per cent. Overall, the total external support for Westminster will rise from £187.72 million to £192.74 million in the coming year.
I turn to the most extremely offensive aspect of what Westminster has done. As my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North told us, Councillor Marshall has stated his view that cuts in the arts are necessary to pay for asylum seekers in the borough. Again, I will set out the facts. Westminster has by no means the largest task among the London boroughs in dealing with the number of asylum seekers needing support. Moreover, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has already responded to pleas from local authorities for more assistance, making an extra £30 million available to support new arrangements for asylum seekers, focusing on London and Dover in particular. Local authorities will be able to recover from Government the costs which fall to them of accommodating and supporting asylum seekers. Those steps have been welcomed by both the Association of London Government and the Local Government Association.
Councillor Harvey Marshall proposes an equation--more asylum seekers equals less art for Londoners--which should shame the local authority whose arts committee he chairs. The politics of making scapegoats is
ugly, nasty and unacceptable. My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North expressed her anger about that. The right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster offered a plea in mitigation, but it will not suffice. He is a thoroughly decent man, and must be as ashamed as any of us of what his Conservative colleagues have said and done.
"It has become very clear to us how powerful is the contribution of the arts to a whole range of skills and attitudes that are vital to learning right across the curriculum, and indeed to employability."
Westminster's schools face many difficulties and challenges. The arts offer to schoolchildren, not just the high fliers but those who are disaffected and see too little prospect for themselves in formal education, a kindlingof the imagination and opportunities for personal development, which we should grasp and not reject. It is not some social elite that suffers when the arts are cut, but people--adults and children--who might otherwise have little or no opportunity to experience what the arts have to offer.
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