APPENDIX 40
Memorandum submitted by the Incorporated
Society of Musicians
MEDIA RELEASE
ISM Responds to "Working Together for the
Arts"
The Incorporated Society of Musicians has submitted
a commentary on Working Together for the Arts, the document published
earlier this year which sets out proposals for reorganising the
Arts Council of England.
The commentary takes the form of a letter dated
14 September 2001 from Neil Hoyle, Chief Executive of the ISM,
to Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive of the ACE.
The complete text of the letter is attached.
Text of letter dated 14 September 2001
to Mr Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive, Arts Council of England from
Mr Neil Hoyle, ISM Chief Executive
I am writing to offer a contribution from the
Incorporated Society of Musicians to the debate on Working
Together for the Arts.
The ISM is the UK's professional body for musicians.
We are not, and never have been, a client of any Arts Council.
But many of our members depend on public funding for their livelihoods.
So we have an interest in ensuring that funding systems for supporting
artists and arts organisations are based on rational frameworks,
and operate equitably. We have therefore been closely following
the progress of the proposals for reorganising the Arts Council
of England. Our primary concern is with principles rather than
operational matters.
We share many of the reservations which have
been expressed about the substance and handling of the proposals.
Working Together is a considerable improvement on its predecessor,
which consisted mainly of assertion rather than argument. But
a strong flavour of top-down fiat remains. Only one possible way
of restructuring is advanced for discussion, and an unduly compressed
timetable is envisaged.
In all organisations—especially administrative
structures, which have a natural tendency to inertia—there
is scope for change and improvement. But particular difficulties
arise when the impetus for change arises from external pressures,
which may not reflect the needs of those the organisation exists
to serve, but are derived instead from priorities drawn up by
an influential external agency which wants it to serve a wider
purpose. The difficulties are compounded if the external body
holds the purse-strings. This is the inauspicious context against
which Working Together must be considered.
The thinking behind the proposals is understandable.
In a large corporation, where a conventional structure of business
units is pursuing clearly-defined commercial goals, the suggested
processes might well be valid. But they are not suitable for a
less formal type of organisation dealing with largely unquantifiable
outcomes, where policy-making must reflect the importance of value
judgments, as well as the difficulties of defining goals, of measuring
output, and of serving clients whose preferences cannot be expressed
through the price mechanism.
The proposals are evidently underpinned by a
belief that what is good for a large business should be equally
good for an organisation which exists to support artists. But
that is not self-evidently true. Indeed, the instincts behind
this style of management, which are corporatist and centralist
rather than diverse and dispersive, go against the principles
which led to the breaking-up of the Arts Council of Great Britain
and the establishment of the RABs, and which are generally accepted
as correct. These devolutionary principles—that as many
decisions as possible should be returned to people in their own
areas—are an intrinsic part of the spirit of the age, and
it would be imprudent to ignore them. It is helpful to have a
united voice—sometimes. But at other times it can be even
more helpful to have several voices, contributing different views.
And there is nothing wrong with robust internal debate.
The proposals appear to equate the public with
a company's shareholders. But the interests of the public, especially
in artistic matters, are notoriously hard to identify—certainly,
harder than those of shareholders. Pressure groups, which give
voice to concerns about "needs, interests, circumstances
and accessibility" are not necessarily representative. It
is unhelpful, and almost certainly wrong, to suggest that the
public's interest is solely in "delivery"—itself
a vague term, given the range of objectives, not all of them quantifiable,
which an artistic enterprise will be seeking to achieve. Furthermore,
members of the public are not passive consumers of art. The more
knowledgeable they are, and thus the more likely to bring critical
judgment to bear on the quality of output, the more interest they
will take in the mechanisms of a system which is producing that
output.
The requirements of artists and arts organisations
are well summed up on page seven of Working Together. But
the basic simplicity of their needs is vitiated by the demands
of government, summed up in the last paragraph on that page. This
may be the nub of the problem. The government apparently regards
itself as the holder of a "golden share", entitling
it to impose detailed obligations on the Arts Council, and thus,
at one remove, on its clients. The arts are now expected to play
their part in achieving the aims of a plethora of social and economic
policies. But it is far from clear that the internal implications
of many of these policies have yet been resolved, let alone their
potential contradictions with one another. In the circumstances,
an expectation that the system will operate "in a way which
pays due regard to policies, not only in the arts, but also in
other, related areas, both economic and social" is bound
to result in "burdens of paperwork and statistical and other
returns". Apart from being compelled to adopt these bureaucratic
means of trying to resolve policy tensions, the bodies responsible
for those policies will have to be seen to be discharging their
functions in a fully accountable fashion. It is simply not possible
for them to "trust arts organisations to get on with their
work" when the application of so many policies has to be
overseen.
We fear, therefore, that the new system will
simply replicate many of the difficulties being experienced by
other "public service" national organisations which
are nominally devolved, yet are in fact closely controlled from
the centre by a variety of management systems and performance
indicators. The result is an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which
exists to devise, monitor, analyse, discuss and revise a phalanx
of performance targets. Another symptom of this dysfunctional
method of operating is a tendency to try and manage issues by
public posturing to air differences externally, and especially
in the media, rather than seek to resolve them internally and
privately.
The essence of the problem, then, is the excessively
complex socio-economic policy context which has been set up for
the arts by the government. The present Arts Council structure
is suspected of being unable to deliver the results, which are
required. Yet it is highly doubtful whether the proposed structure,
with its corporatist leanings, could do any better. Instead, it
would probably increase the degree of bureaucracy, as the national
office strove to ensure that every policy was being pursued at
every level. The £8-10 million worth of savings, which have
in any case never been accurately identified, are most unlikely
to materialise.
What is needed instead, as a first step, is
a reassessment of the policy context, to see how much of it is
genuinely relevant to the Arts Council's purposes, and to ensure
that the arts are not being made to carry too great a burden of
extraneous policy expectations.
A number of more specific points arise from
the proposals.
Many of the flaws identified in the "need
for reform" chapter on pages 10 and 11 (eg, sharing information,
inconclusive meetings) could be rectified by much less drastic
operational measures. Indeed, they are likely to be a symptom
less of inefficiency than of conscientiousness on the part of
officials, in trying firstly to understand, and then to implement,
the many and various policies laid down by central and local government.
Others are not flaws at all, but are instead characteristics of
a broad and flexible system, which has developed different ways
of dealing with local circumstances. In this respect, it will
be truly "market-based". A properly functioning system
of any kind may appear to suffer from duplication of skills and
functions; but the duplication is more apparent than real, since
the process of providing services to clients is dynamic, and not
static. Only a monopoly thinks otherwise; and monopolies are invariably
damaging both to those they purport to serve, and in the long
run to themselves. Mechanisms for ensuring that "best practice
is replicated from region to region" often become little
more than Procrustean beds, which fit no one properly.
For all its good intentions, the proposals fail
to resolve some key tensions between the national and regional
operations. For example, national companies who play a vital role
in maintaining and developing the evolving heritage of contemporary
classical music will find themselves pulled in other directions
by the imposition of regional and local priorities. Even there,
it is arguable that apparently locally-based activities such as
education and outreach work in fact have national audiences, based
on touring activities. It is far from clear that the proposals
will succeed in eliminating some of the difficulties associated
with touring programmes in the current structure.
As a professional body, we are especially interested
in the proposals to set up a pool of specialist advisers. But
there are some obscure aspects here. Most specialists will be
based in the regions. It is not clear how they would form a "national
team" in practical terms; or whether an acknowledged expert
who lived at one end of the country would regularly be asked to
travel to the other end to offer advice. The welter of socio-economic
policies, which the arts are being expected to bear is reflected
in the level of multi-skilling which seems to be demanded of the
advisers. It is implausible to suppose that a specialist adviser
in a particular art form will also be competent to contribute
to "policy discussions, appraisals, mentoring and other forms
of advice". The system for appointing these specialists needs
to be as transparent as possible, to avoid any risk of cronyism.
You will have received many representations—some
supporting the proposals; others opposing them. We would by no
means contend that the current system is the best there could
be. But that is not an argument for a wholesale reform, which
might leave some problems unresolved and introduce fresh ones.
We would urge you to examine some of the alternatives, which have
been advanced, particularly A Unified Approach, which has
come from the RABs themselves.
January 2002
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