APPENDIX 23
Memorandum submitted by Mr Martin Rewcastle
REORGANISATION OF THE ARTS COUNCIL AND REGIONAL
FUNDING STRUCTURE IN ENGLAND
BACKGROUND
While I now run Beviss & Beckingsale, a
well-established law firm practising in Devon, Somerset and Dorset,
my background is in professional arts management. My roles from
1972 have included the commercial direction of a major visual
arts magazine; the first ever community and education work at
the Whitechapel Gallery where I also devised and led its capital
development programme under Nick Serota, I have variously chaired
a number of Greater London Arts committees, was a Member of the
Crafts Council, and Director of South West Arts from 1983-90,
where I also initiated the Tate St. Ives project. I have 10 years'
experience as a senior consultant working on major arts and museum
projects and community regeneration strategies in England, Scotland
and Northern Ireland. I personally have been involved in arts
funding and reorganisation issues including those of Lord Redcliff
Maud for the Gulbenkian Foundation, Sir William Rees Mogg's Glory
of the Garden strategy and the Wilding Report. In sum, while submitting
this as an individual, my comments are based on long, direct and
considered involvement in these issues.
IMPACT OF
THE PROPOSAL
SINCE MAY
2001
I, along with every artist and arts professional
I know, have watched with increasing disbelief as the Arts Council's
extraordinarily silly reorganisation proposals have continued
to receive political credence. It is now nine months since Sir
Gerry Robinson first tried to impose them, more than sufficient
time for a politician or Civil Service advisor to realise that
they were fundamentally flawed in concept and to see that no evidence
has come forth to demonstrate that they will achieve the systemic
effectiveness or fiscal efficiency which is so badly needed.
Indeed, a number of colleagues have decided
not to submit evidence on the grounds that, for such a badly conceived
project to have survived for so long and continue to receive government
backing, there must be some unpublicised agreement with Government
to support Gerry Robinson's proposal. As with the Dome and a number
of other Lottery projects, reorganisation must at some point have
become a matter of reputation, where no amount of serious research
could influence the outcome, no matter how conceptually or logically
flawed. One or two simply fear that to submit evidence will mark
them out and could negatively affect their position and work in
the art world.
I do not subscribe to either point of view but,
as a natural Labour supporter, the very fact that artists, of
all people, could ever feel this way about speaking freely in
a democracy disturbs me deeply.
CORE CONCEPTUAL
FLAW IN
THE SINGLE
ORGANISATION APPROACH
On 11 September, Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive
of the Arts Council, presented the proposals to a forum in Exeter.
He then made absolutely clear that the only reorganisation proposal,
which he and Gerry Robinson would ever entertain, is the amalgamation
of all the regional funding bodies into the Arts Council. The
reason he gave was to end both petty bickering and different approaches
to cultural support.
This is the conceptual core of the Robinson
project: that it makes sense to create a single, seamless funding
approach for the arts. It does not, and never has, due to the
very nature of the subject. A work of art derives its essential
quality through its uniqueness—not norm—of vision.
A cultural support system without a right of dissent built in
can never support a healthy diversity of vision and approach.
And a system which actually sets out to rid itself of diverse
courses of action inevitably will wind up supporting an inflexible,
normative approach to culture. Real culture, real vision will
bypass it.
In essence, the petty bickering between England's
funding institutions may be a seriously annoying by-product of
a diverse system, but it has a crucial function in the health
and constant renewal of the arts and culture in a democracy. Rather
like serious parliamentary debate and the concept of an official
opposition: definitely annoying for some but absolutely essential
for all.
SOME PRACTICAL
FLAWS IN
THE SINGLE
ORGANISATION APPROACH
(a) Loss of best practice: A single system
simply cannot easily adjust itself since it will have destroyed
the constant, comparative learning process, an endemic function
of diversity. From whom will the new English monolithic system
adopt best practice? The irony is that Peter Hewitt made a great
play in his 11 September presentation how the Arts Council itself
had learned in so many areas of its work how to do things better
precisely because of original advances and experiments first made
in the regions.
(b) Adjustment to broader change: a single
body will find it far more difficult to adjust as cultural or
political landscapes shift, especially in a country where both
cultural and financial power is so centralised, influenced by
the inevitable London grouping of wealth, media opinion political
and cultural monuments (both people and buildings). Inevitably—and
this problem certainly is not confined cultural agendas—Gerry
Robinson's new London based monolithic agency is practically guaranteed
to create popular suspicion amongst those who choose to live outside
and detached from London's inner circles of influence and patronage.
And this just at a time when the Government is, through a series
of forthcoming White Papers, considering strengthening the role
of regional agencies, in effect to try to bring decision-making
to some degree closer to the people directly affected by those
decisions.
(c) Power to influence more public funding:
In Gerry Robinson's early statements as well as in Peter Hewitt's
presentation, both said that the single most important point of
changing the system was, in effect, to get more money. To quote
Peter Hewitt: "The £8-£10 million back of the envelop
calculation of savings we might find in the new system is tiny
compared to what we think out funding case to government via single
system will bring to the arts from the Treasury".
However, if the crude underlying
issue is to access more public subsidy by proving the system capable
of far less bureaucracy and systemic staff overlap, then it is
perfectly possible within the system that exists now to sit down,
negotiate and, if necessary, drive through those results without
throwing the baby out with the bath water. Bluntly, the Arts Council
has absolutely no need for total integration for its present funding
power to talk very seriously where a region is patently inefficient.
The degree of funding power it now has over the independent regional
system is more than sufficient to give it the upper hand.
The issue here really is the Arts
Council's present ability to act as national housekeeper. For
example: if, after nine months, it still is holding to the £8-10
million savings estimate but still is unable to identify exactly
where these originally back of the envelop savings are going to
come from, then one could rightly conclude that the Arts Council's
basic analytical capability is flawed.
(d) Loss of financial potential beyond public
subsidy: The change to a single system seems only to be about
public subsidy as practised now. It has not once addressed the
broader longer-term support issues being put in place by the Government,
nor the fact that public subsidy, if well used, provides an ideal
tool to leverage extremely important financial support from other
sources. While I am aware that some regions continue to cite the
loss of longstanding local government support directly to them
as bodies, it is as relevant to suggest that a future Regional
Arts Board could be its region's ideal cultural foundation vehicle
to maximise the Chancellor's recent, massive changes to the tax
regime, themselves meant to encourage far more direct personal/corporate
charitable support as in the US. Indeed, that combined function
of public funding/charity support is precisely the role adopted
by many US regional arts agencies, some of which now have built
up quite substantial endowments through this process.
Independent and still charitably based English
RABs would be perfectly placed to address such a broader, personal
support agenda in their region. A monolithic Arts Council, subsuming
all RABs and seen inevitably a far distant national agency by
most potential donors, simply has no similar capacity to grow,
change and act as a serious lever to private donors/sponsors in
the respective regions.
SUMMARY
It is tragic that the leaders of the Arts Council
have adopted and still cling to a model so fundamentally flawed
in both concept and delivery. It simply is a Dome by another name,
lacking seriously in vision, serious research and development
as a functioning model, and, above all, in practicality. After
all the lessons of the past few years, I do not want to believe
that it still is possible politically for any political group
or party to drive through such a flawed idea without testing it
thoroughly. It really is time to sort the system properly, not
to adopt a model that, as history has shown since 1956—when
the Arts Council first closed it regional offices and thus caused
a new regional movement to be born—that we will all be here
again over the same old issue in a year or two.
Finally, I sense that the Committee may have
a simple solution to hand which could do the future of English
cultural support an enormous favour. Could it not ask the Commons
Accounts Committee thoroughly to test the Arts Council's monolithic
model alongside the other—and to my mind—more efficient,
creative and culturally friendly means available to reform and
revitalise the arts funding system?
10 January 2002
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