Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 236)
TUESDAY 27 JANUARY 2004
ARTS COUNCIL
ENGLAND
Q220 Derek Wyatt: There is a purpose
I am asking. In my constituency there is one cinema for 75,000
people, we have very little theatre, we have very little museum
facility and we have no art gallery. In a sense I am attracted
by the French concept of doing an audited need so that they take,
as it were, a 35,000, a 50,000 population and then say that should
have, you know, these glues, as it were, that will help the community.
What work are you doing on that and how come, as it were, you
know—I cannot be the only one, but we do not seem to have
anything?
Q221 Mr Flook: But you!
Mr Hewitt: Our work in this relates
very much to our relationship with local authorities. We, as a
national body with regional offices, have to work closely with
and listen to what the local authorities are saying they need.
Local authorities have their own plans—they have their own
cultural plans. We have a very close relationship with them, and
we try and get into partnership with them to answer the very needs
that you are referring to. I recognise that that does depend on
the local authority's own priorities and where the local authority
wants to put its resource. I also recognise that, of course, local
government is itself under tremendous financial pressure right
across the board, but I think that is the principal body that
we do work with.
Derek Wyatt: I understand that, but if
you have a new Turner Centre (as there is in Margate), that eats
up all the money in the south-east of England and will do for
some time to come. I was more interested in the idea that there
was a need for art and there ought to be an audit of art. Therefore
have all the arts councils been asked for an audit rather than
the other way round? Asking local authorities, "You may or
may not have offices . . ." in their list of political priorities
is pretty low down. This is more or less in the concept of getting
better facilities at every level?
Mrs Tambling: I think one interesting
example of that is to bring in a programme for Creative Partnerships
which is actually looking at cultural entitlement rather than
looking at provision—and this is mainly for young people
and young people in schools—but what we see is a very, very
different scenario if you are working in east of London where
you have access to pretty much the best and most well-funded arts
in the world in contrast to working in Cornwall or another place.
What we are looking at is mechanisms to look at the cultural needs
of those communities, the desires and wants of those communities
and how we broker the relationships. Sometimes that will be in
terms of bringing extra organisations into the area or, indeed,
making buildings available for the arts, but sometimes it will
also be in terms of touring companies and bringing special initiatives
in, and sometimes the special initiatives will lead to a very,
very good case for a new building; but certainly the trend is
much more towards looking at what people want to have and what
they need and away from looking at what people want to provide
for them.
Mr Hewitt: I think there is an
important difference here between arts and sport. I think sport
is in some respects more able to make some formulated assessments
of X numbers of people living in X population, and you can relate
that to sports halls, swimming pools and those sorts of things.
The arts are by nature more varied, more difficult to find a formula
to apply, and what a particular community may want or need—as
Pauline has said, the community may look very similar in terms
of levels of deprivation and social indices or whatever, but they
might have very different cultural interests and cultural needs.
It is a more various exercise, I think.
Q222 Rosemary McKenna: I suppose
the last set of questions is demonstrating the perennial debate
that we have between the higher arts and popular culture. You
are not answerable for the Scottish Arts Council. I am not suggesting
I have any questions there, but recently in Scotland there has
been some opinioned work done on whether people would continue
to support the Art Council's funding of, for example, Scottish
music or the substantial amount of money that that needs as opposed
to traditional music and modern music. Is that reflected in any
way in how applications are coming to you for funding? Is there
an increase in popular culture, traditional music, people coming
forward for that? Is that being reflected in England?
Mr Hewitt: Yes, it is. In our
Grants for the Arts programme we do state that we are particularly
interested in supporting areas of the arts that have received
traditionally less support than perhaps some of the more well-established
and traditional art forms, and we have been successful in getting
substantial additional resources into street arts activity, for
example into jazz, into folk music and into those areas of the
arts which at one time the Arts Council would have paid a great
deal less attention to. So, yes, that is very much our priority,
to broaden the range of activities. I think the Arts Council traditionally
some years ago had a very, very narrow set of definitions. It
was about a particular kind of music, a particular kind of theatre,
a particular kind of classical dance or movement. We have actively
sought to question that and to broaden it, and have done, I think,
up to a certain point. We need to do more.
Mrs Tambling: One crucial thing
we have done over the last two years in reforming our grants programmes
is we have stripped out all the specific requirements in terms
of types of art. So, for example, in our previous 120 plus schemes
that we used to run before we got them down to five, we had schemes
for classical music, or visual arts, or whatever. Now you come
into the scheme and you come in as an organisation wishing to
do an arts project, and the nature of the particular art form
is then taken forward without saying, "Oh, you are not doing
the particular sort of art that we want you to do," and that
has been tremendously successful. On the other side, we have started
to use cultural ambassadors, as we call them, to go out and work
with communities to help them make applications. So we set internal
targets—for example, the black and Asian arts groups—we
set internal targets for all our regional offices as to how much
they should be giving to those groups in order to increase the
amount of take-up, and then we send people out to help those organisations
to know about our grants programmes and to know how to apply and
to formulate a very good application so that they do not fall
out by the rubric.
Q223 Rosemary McKenna: Is most of
that funding from lottery funding or from core funding of the
Arts Council?
Mrs Tambling: Well, the joy of
being able to use grant-in-aid and lottery funding together is
that we can prioritise new, innovative additional work to people
who would not have come to us with the lottery funding whilst
looking at the historic clients and making sure that they are
getting grant-in-aid, and the lottery means that we can get some
new and different sorts of projects which is refreshing the whole
art sector.
Q224 Rosemary McKenna: Does that
not undercut the additionality aspect of lottery funding?
Mrs Tambling: No, absolutely not,
because it is actually going out and finding new applicants and
new projects and new sorts of work. What we can then do is use
grant-in-aid as a legacy where we do get those fantastic projects
that maybe other distributors have to query whether they can take
them on for another three, six years. I am stressing the additionality
rule. We can be establishing our targets within our grant-in-aid
and look at some of the better projects and take them through
beyond.
Q225 Rosemary McKenna: So you actually
have people going out. Ambassadors, you say?
Mrs Tambling: Cultural ambassadors,
yes.
Q226 Rosemary McKenna: Do they go
out into the communities throughout the country?
Mrs Tambling: In every region.
Q227 Rosemary McKenna: So there are
people employed as ambassadors?
Mrs Tambling: In every region.
Q228 Rosemary McKenna: In every region?
Mrs Tambling: Because we are working
with targets on the one side and ambassadors on the other, the
two things can work so that we achieve the targets we are setting
ourselves and we can measure region against region: because, quite
evidently, there are some regions who have more problems, for
example, reaching Black and Asian communities and others that
have more problems reaching rural, deprived communities. So we
can look at the different needs in each region.
Mr Hewitt: This goes back to our
experience. When we put in place the first capital programme with
lottery funding we were horrified to find that the level of requests
from the Black Asian sector throughout the country was terribly,
terribly low. It was really quite shameful. When we came to the
second programme we employed some people and said, "Your
job is quite simple. It is to go out there and tell people the
Arts Council has changed. It wants to hear from you. It is listening.
It is ready to fund your kind of work." It was only through
that person-to-person contact that we were successful. What happened
in the second capital programme? One-third of the total program
was spent on black and Asian organisations absolutely as a result
of that person-to-person contact. I think it is in the discretion
of how you access new activity, new arts, new people and new communities.
By far the most powerful way of doing it is through people. You
can do it through portals, you can do it through improving your
funding, the application form. You can make things simpler—you
can do all that—but the key thing, in my view, is people.
We can provide some of those people, and we have to work with
other organisations who provide people who are prepared to spread
the same message.
Q229 Rosemary McKenna: Good. Like
local authorities, because—I agree with you—they should
set the priorities.
Mr Hewitt: Absolutely.
Q230 Rosemary McKenna: One more question.
When talking about the Olympics, the arts aspect of the Olympic
bid, will you work closely with, for example, the Arts Council
in Scotland, because there will be events taking place throughout
the country and it would be a great shame if you did not work
together to demonstrate the kind of culture that is available
in different countries.
Mr Hewitt: I agree entirely, and
we have already started talking with the other countries.
Rosemary McKenna: Thank you.
Q231 Mr Flook: You may not like the
fact, but it would appear to me that you are at the bottom of
the pile of all these people who have money to hand out, in the
sense that if the average player of the lottery said, "Where
do you want the money to go?", you might say, "Hospitals.
Schools", you might say "Sports fields", and then
you might say, "Oh, and art". Are you concerned that
by the merger of two of those big funds you may get squeezed a
bit further?
Mr Hewitt: Can I say first of
all, we carried out some research through the Office of National
Statistics Omnibus Survey a year or so ago, and lots of very interesting
findings, but one of the findings was that 74% of adults over
16 in this country—I know this is not a lottery specific
but it is still, I think, partly relevant—believe that the
arts should receive public support, and 73% believe that the arts
play a valuable role in public life. I think that in itself is
quite an interesting statistic, and it belies some people's assumptions
at certain times that the arts are still seen as being out of
touch and elitist and not to do with people.
Q232 Mr Flook: But 100% would probably
say that the hospitals—
Mr Hewitt: Of course.
Q233 Mr Flook: My point is you are
still not at the top?
Mr Hewitt: Yes. Compared to hospitals
and schools and addressing crime, yes, of course, we are lower
down. Are we worried about the mega distributor? We have some
opinions about how we must make sure that we work well with the
new distributor, but we are not—we do not have a fundamental
concern about it. We are looking forward to having discussions
with it about their plans for transformational grants, their role
as a centre of excellence, what they are going to do with the
young people's fund, and we are already beginning to have those
discussions.
Q234 Mr Flook: Do you want to express
a couple of examples where it might overlap and you might feel
that it has to take over some of your functions?
Mr Hewitt: Yes. For example, there
is this plan for the new distributor to be a centre of excellence
in terms of capital funding. The new distributor will be made
up of three distributors, two of whom have no previous experience
of capital funding, one of whom has; but we have to recognise
that because everyone has known the Millennium Commission's lifespan
is somewhat limited, inevitably some of this expertise will be
drifting away at this time. We on the other hand, along with Heritage
and others, have a lot of experience of capital funding, so the
centre of excellence actually must build on our experience and
not try to create something new and separate which ignores the
fact that the other distributors have a lot to bring to this particular
issue. In terms of transformational grants, I know it is the current
intention of the new distributor to fund a limited number of big
capital projects in the way that the Millennium Commission has
in the past, in the way in which the Arts Council indeed has at
times in the past. I would like to hear a discussion about big
projects which are not about capital, which are actually about
people and about communities and addressing the needs of perhaps
a whole community, a whole town, even a whole city. I think the
future is at least as much about people and talent and ideas—the
software, if you like, as opposed to just the hardware. So transformational
projects, I would like to think, could be as much about people
and their lives as the buildings and the facilities that they
occupy.
Q235 Mr Flook: Would one way to deliver,
say, to a whole town—to do that would be just one lottery
distributor. Is that possible, do you think? Is it desirable as
well?
Mr Hewitt: I do not think it is
desirable that there should be just one lottery distributor, because
I think we need to get the best of both worlds. I think bodies
like Sport England, Arts Council England, can bring valuable specialist
knowledge. A lot of our facilities, for example arts facilities,
are specialist and we can bring specialist knowledge to considering
applications, etcetera. At the same time I think it is very useful
to have a distributor that can do things on a common basis and
can do things on behalf of a broader range of interests. I think
at times in the past we have had to create mechanisms for distributors
to come together, which is cumbersome and legally quite difficult
to establish. Having a distributor that can play some part on
behalf of them all seems to be something which is potentially
of value, so I think we need both.
Mrs Tambling: We have had a track
record in terms of working with other distributors, most notably
Sport England and the New Opportunities Fund on the Spaces for
Sport and the Arts, where Sport England has taken the lion's share
of the burden, but we have been very, very heavily involved in
making sure that the spaces that are envisaged for funding are
appropriate spaces for the arts; and I think we need to bear in
mind that this is not just about giving away money. Giving away
money and monitoring the use of that money is very, very important,
but much of what happens in terms—for example a transformational
project happens way before and way after the building goes up.
It is all that development work that is going on on the ground.
It is the expertise that is needed in terms of knowing the sort
of people to bring into the area to work with the communities
and others, then there is the building and then there is the living
in the building afterwards. I do not think we want to disentangle
the building project from the development work that needs to go
on both before and after that project is built.
Q236 Chairman: Could I put to you
a question which, I suppose, applies to Sport England as much
as it applies to you; namely the problem that you face, and that
is faced by your would-be recipients, by large projects which
by definition have to be located somewhere. I was looking at the
statistics with which we were provided for lottery recipients
or, rather, total lottery receipts within Parliamentary constituencies.
In my constituency it is something over £8 million. As I
recall, in the neighbouring constituency of Manchester Central
it is nearly £300 million. There are two problems, it seems
to me, about that. One problem is that if any Manchester constituency—and,
of course, it is the same for other large cities—contains
an application to you or to Sport England which is deserving of
itself, the answer may be, and I fear that the answer was in the
case of the old English Sports Council, "Well, Manchester
are getting so much anyhow, we cannot spare this for you."
So there is a question of distorted distribution within an area,
but there is also the problem that within a constituency, when
one looks at that, really £300 million has gone to Manchester
Central, how much of it has gone to local causes in Manchester
Central, how many, in your case, has gone to big arts projects
which are inevitably at the centre of the great City and how much
has gone to sporting projects? The question then further arises
to what extent is the additionality principle being approached
in those circumstances? Because the lottery is a very convenient
repository for the disposition of funds which might well have
had to be given out. It could be argued, could it not, that if
Sport England did not exist, if the lottery did not exist, the
Government would have had to find some channel for the generously
large sums of money which it handed out to the Commonwealth Games.
Mr Hewitt: If I can answer your
last point first, I think it is obviously a very challenging question.
I think if we look back over what the lottery has done for the
arts landscape in this country over the last nearly 10 years,
it is absolutely staggering; and when I talk to people outside
England about our lottery and what our lottery has done for culture,
and when I imagine back to what the landscape looked like in 1995,
it is truly astonishing what has happened, and this links into
what I said earlier, that I think we should be promoting the good
things about the lottery a lot more than we have done. That is
the case. Obviously the question is how much of that would have
happened through public governmental support in any case. To me
that is the key question that needs to be answered in addressing
the additionality point. My fear, my feeling, is not very much
of it would have happened. I agree there would have been a pressure
on the Government to do some of it, and it would have done some
of it, but my guess is that that landscape would be no more than
10 or 15% improved in comparison with the 100% improvement that
the lottery has delivered. In terms of the question of Manchester
in relation to the other Manchester authorities, again I agree
it is a very difficult issue. I am quite sure there are times
when at regional level, in considering applications with regard
to the big conurbations, account is taken to some extent of the
levels of benefit that have been enjoyed by some of the major
conurbations, and there is always a danger that very good local
smaller scale activity might be squeezed out. We try very hard
to ensure that is not the case and to take into account the inherent
value of the project itself, but it is something which—you
are quite right—we do find ourselves considering. In terms
of the benefit to the broader community, because I lived and worked
there for many years, I know Tyneside the best of all the Metropolitan
conurbations. If you look at what has happened in Newcastle Gateshead
over the last five to 10 years—first stimulated by the Angel,
which obviously has become a symbol with huge value, and then
leading to the transformation of the riverscape in Newcastle Gateshead—I
would suggest that you could argue that the benefit of all that
to the local communities of Newcastle and Gateshead is very substantial
in terms of jobs, in terms of the whole lifting of that part of
Tyneside; and there are lots and lots of knock-on positive effects
that have occurred, but one does have to put that alongside the
fact that the people of Newcastle and Gateshead do need to go
to the riverside to go to the Sage or to go to the Baltic, to
go over the bridge and to do those things—live theatre,
whatever it might be. So it is a valid point you raise.
Mrs Tambling: Without the lottery
we probably would have had a huge amount of pressure for renovation
and we probably would have seen the renovation of some of our
established arts organisations. It is inconceivable, I think,
that we would have seen an Ocean Centre in Hackney, or an art
gallery in Walsall, or the development in Newcastle Gateshead,
or the Lowry Centre, or the Sage. Those things are actually—they
could never be possible without the lottery. People would not
have thought of putting those buildings in most of those places.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
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