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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 254 - v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
Wednesday 2 March 2005 MR IAN MCGARRY, MR HARRY LANDIS, MS CHRISTINE PAYNE, MR OLIVER FORD DAVIES, MR WILLY DONAGHY and MR HORACE TRUBRIDGE MS JOAN BAKEWELL CBE, MS VICTORIA TODD, MR GILES CROFT, SIR PETER HALL and SUANDI OBE SIR CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING, MS KIM EVANS, MS NICOLA THOROLD and MS CAROLE SOUTER RT HON ESTELLE MORRIS MP and MS GRACE CARLEY Evidence heard in Public Questions 439 - 534
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Wednesday 2 March 2005 Members present Sir Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair Chris Bryant Mr Frank Doran Michael Fabricant Mr Adrian Flook Alan Keen Derek Wyatt
________________ Witnesses: Mr Ian McGarry, General Secretary, Equity, Mr Harry Landis, President, Equity, Ms Christine Payne, Assistant General Secretary (Theatre & Variety), Equity, Mr Oliver Ford Davies, Council Member, Equity, Mr Willy Donaghy, Supervisor, Arts & Entertainment Division, BECTU and Mr Horace Trubridge, Assistant General Secretary, The Musicians' Union, examined. Chairman: Good morning and welcome. This is the final evidence session of this inquiry and I am going to ask Alan Keen to open the questions. Q439 Alan Keen: Good morning. I have been following a theme of questions because I was a little disturbed that those representing amateur dramatics felt a bit shut out of the professional theatres and had few links. I accept that those with often reducing budgets have a struggle to run the theatres within budget, and we do not want them to do anything other than be pretty hard-nosed - they have to be nowadays. I am asking the questions because we want to enthuse people, we want that gap closed between kids at school involved in drama and in youth groups, who then fall between that and getting involved in the theatre, unless they go into it professionally. First of all, is there any problem with the Trade Unions and amateurs being involved with the professional theatre or encouraged? Do you see any problems? Mr McGarry: I think in the depths of history there was a degree of tension between the professional theatre and the amateur theatre, as it would be called. I think that has largely disappeared and they coexists reasonably well. I think our only concern would be if money was diverted away from professional theatre, which is itself already under-funded, to support the amateur theatre, which appears to thrive on its own fairly well. On your point about bringing people into the profession and so on, whilst the amateur route is one route of course the major route is still through training, drama school and dance school, and we are very anxious to see training developed and strengthened and supported in the sector so that it can reach out to people who hitherto have not had that opportunity of developing an interest at school into the professional theatre. We are also very keen to see theatre and education, whatever one might want to call it, re-established, because it has been very largely damaged by cuts over the last few decades and virtually disappeared, because we think that is a very good way of using training in education as part of the curriculum, and engendering an interest in the form of drama itself, that young people can take into their adults lives. Q440 Alan Keen: I was concerned because I know that where the budgets have been a problem in some areas - and I can take my own area of Hounslow, where we have two theatres, the Watermans Arts Centre and the Robeson Theatre - there are gaps which cannot be filled because of reduced budgets, and what I am trying to get at is other ways of using facilities that are not being used fully at the moment. Obviously we could use them fully if the budget were increased - we are all pushing for that, certainly on this Committee, and you are - but that was one of the concerns I had. Also, if you take my own Watermans Art Centre - I live quite close to it - we used to have free music every night of the week, but with reduced budgets and a downward spiral of funding the music stopped, so that did not therefore give the same encouragement to people to come into the Arts Centre and use the bar and other facilities. Is it possible to encourage amateur musicians to come and play? Again, what would be the Unions' attitudes to that? What problems do you see or have you seen in similar circumstances? Mr Trubridge: Obviously we have about 30,000 members in the Musicians' Union and only 4000 of them are actually salaried musicians - the vast majority are freelance musicians - and some of them I suppose you could class as semi-professional. As Ian has already said, I do not think there is any problem in encouraging amateurs to think about taking up a career as a musician or a career as an actor, but we are concerned of course that the rates of pay are not driven down too low. The Watermans is a good venue and the free music facility was welcomed by the Union and welcomed by the communities, I know, and I think it is a shame that it has had to go by the bye, as I think it is part of a theatre's rounded existence that it has a variety of different things going on at all times of the day wherever possible. So I suppose we would not have a problem provided that the amateurs are being paid properly and that the level of professionalism about them is good enough. Alan Keen: Can I ask a general question on this? My concern, as I said, is that we have some facilities which, because of the lack of funding, are not being used properly. There is a problem. The drama schools are brilliant, of course they are, and the Youth Music Theatre I am sometimes involved with is also wonderful at encouraging kids to reach their full potential. But what else can we do to try to fill those gaps, which there definitely are? In some places we have more facilities than we have people performing in them because of lack of funding, but what can we do to make things better? Do you, for instance, get together with theatre people to look at this sort of thing? This is what disturbed me slightly, that I felt that because of reducing budgets people were then having to focus on their own problems and not looking at it overall; that is really what I am asking. Q441 Chairman: Before you answer, Mr Ford Davies, I ought to have said earlier on, please any of you feel free to answer any questions which you regard as relevant to your own interests. Mr Ford Davies: I am a professional actor and like most professional actors I started in the amateur theatre, in the Questors Theatre in Ealing, which is a very thriving theatre and has received quite a lot of Lottery money to rebuild its theatre. There is a good contact between certain professional actors and the Questors Theatre, and I go in there and do workshops and give talks and that kind of thing. I was surprised about the Robeson Theatre, which I know. Do amateur groups not use the Robeson Theatre, because on the whole we have a good record of theatres being shared, of amateur groups coming into local theatres and using them? Q442 Alan Keen: I am aware that there are gaps there and it seems to have a facility which is not 100 per cent used. Mr Ford Davies: One of the gaps there, for example, is filled by the Isleworth Players, which I know about, which is professional actors who cannot pay themselves anything; they have done shows at the Robeson Theatre on a so-called profit-share basis, which usually results in nothing. So there are layers of people using theatres. I am sure more can be done. I do think Ian is right that the antipathy, if you like, between professional and amateur theatre has broken down quite a lot in the last 30 years, although I am sure it still has a way to go. Q443 Alan Keen: Is there any way that we can ensure people are getting together, on a national basis, to encourage more linking between schools and whatever? Mr McGarry: I think that is happening; I do believe that is happening. But you keep saying, and I agree with you, that the major problem is that of funding. If we have a single message that we want to get across to this inquiry it is the need for a sustained growth in expenditure in our theatres, in the funding of our theatres, and we would hope that a large part of those gaps would be filled by the employment of professional performers because we do, after all, represent people who see themselves as working in a profession and trying to make a living out of it, difficult and insecure as it is, and we would like to see the very welcome decisions which were taken some years ago in the spending round, which injected additional funds into our theatres, to see that continue rather than to be set back by the most recent spending round, which will undoubtedly prevent those attempts which are being made to take the theatre into the communities and bring the communities into the theatres. If you look at a lot of regional theatres they do see themselves as a centre as well as simply a theatre; they have bookshops in them, they have restaurants and cafes, and they bring people in, and there are all kinds of other activities there, exhibitions and so on. I think that should be encouraged because they are a very considerable resource and as buildings soak up quite a lot of money, and I am sure your Committee would want to see that money well spent and the whole community benefiting from it. Chairman: Chris Bryant. Q444 Chris Bryant: Mr Ford Davies, I have seen several of your performances in the theatre, as I am sure have many of the others in the Committee, and you are a very fine actor. Thank you. Mr Ford Davies: Thank you. Q445 Chris Bryant: In particular I liked Racing Demon, but that is partly because I used to be a vicar, so I could see all the problems of the church laid bare before us! Which takes me to Sundays because we were told earlier in our inquiry that one of the things that might change some of the prospects of the British theatre, in particular the West End theatre, is if we were to adopt the policy that many other countries now have of performances on a Sunday rather than a Monday, and we were told that the Unions were the problem. Mr Ford Davies: We already have Sunday performances, Sunday matinees of a number of shows in the West End, and Equity have shown themselves open to this provided there is proper payment for it. But the problem, as I am sure you understand, is that if you are in the West End you are undoubtedly doing two shows on Saturday, so if you are also performing on Sunday that makes it difficult to see your family, children, friends, et cetera, et cetera. There is a big audience for a Sunday matinee, but not for a Sunday evening. I have played in America where I have done two shows on Saturday and two on Sunday, and the Sunday evening is usually badly attended. So I think we are really looking at a four o'clock matinee in the West End, and we have already set that in being, have we not? Mr McGarry: Yes, indeed. We were surprised to see the comments made at an earlier session, indicating that we were somehow being obstructive in that regard. Far from it. Both BECTU - and Willy might want to say something about this in a moment - and ourselves took the initiative - we, the Unions took the initiative - of putting the issue of Sunday opening to the producers and asked them to agree terms and conditions under which it would happen and, as far as Equity is concerned, we are still awaiting a response from them. So we were a bit hurt and offended by the suggestion that we were being difficult about it. Mr Donaghy: Equally, following on from that, BECTU had a meeting with the Society of London Theatres yesterday, at which we were discussing the Unions' proposal for Sunday working. We understand that we want a progressive agenda with the employers, but it is not just about Sunday because, as your colleague says, Sunday is a special day, and it is a special day for our members also, and whether that is for religious or family reasons that has to be taken into account. So as well as getting the satisfactory financial arrangements we also want to ensure that there is adequate time off for families to actually meet on the only day that they currently can. So it is about getting the balance between the two. Mr Trubridge: On behalf of the Musicians' Union I would say that we have been happy to talk to the producers about Sunday opening. We came to an arrangement with Disney over the Lion King, we came to an arrangement with RUG over Bombay Dreams and it has never been a problem for us. We sit down with the Society of London Theatre every two years and they have chosen not to open talks about formal arrangements for Sundays; we do not know why, we would be more than happy to put something formally in the agreement, but nevertheless when a request is made for Sunday opening we are always happy to deal with it. But I would just echo what my colleagues have said, that there is a concern about family friendly working hours, proper pay, and those are things that we want to see addressed. Q446 Chris Bryant: On a different issue, I guess there is a perception that many people would have, because they see the few famous actors who make millions of dollars in American movies, that actors and musicians are wealthy, but my guess is that that is probably a long way from the truth and the vast majority of actors and performers, even ones who have quite established careers but maybe are not working every week of the year, have a pretty rough time financially. What is your perception of how performers are doing now compared with, say, 20 years ago, and what level of help is there for performers in all your different trades to make sure that they have good financial management? Mr Landis: Can I just say that people think that anyone who walks across a television screen is a millionaire, and I can assure you that apart from a handful of people who earn a lot of money it is poverty. The minima for the West End, Repertory Theatre, subsidised Rep touring is ridiculous. Q447 Chris Bryant: What is it? Ms Payne: In the West End the minimum is about £350; in subsidised theatres the minimum is £309; in small-scale theatre it is £310. Mr McGarry: That is in the weeks when you are working and you also have to work away from home quite a lot as well. Your assumption is correct that it is an industry, if one could call it that, which is characterised by low pay, insecurity of employment, casual employment and bad working conditions, and one of the reasons why we were pressing for increase in funding was to try to address that. We also wanted to have larger cast plays, more new productions, more co-productions, more touring, but as part of that as well we wanted to address it because there was a time when Peter Boyden was asked to do his report about the English Regional Producing Theatres, where there was a real crisis and actors simply could not afford to go and work in regional theatres. For actors to turn down work? They could not afford it; they were often worse off at the end of an engagement than they were at the beginning of it because they had the cost of maintaining a home in London but working away from home on salaries that they felt, and still feel that they are in fact the largest group of people subsidising our theatre in this country by accepting earnings and salaries well below those which the average white collar worker would expect, and they rarely get that and rarely get it for any length of time. In terms of help for them individually, if I understood your question correctly, we do of course try to help them and give them advice on benefit rights, entitlements on tax and all of those kinds of issues that they are confronted with, and we try to do that on an individual basis as a Union. But the only long-term solution is proper funding for the vitally important theatre in this country and for the actors to be able to earn a decent living from that. Q448 Chris Bryant: Is that kind of penury that you have described the same the whole world over or is it a peculiarly British phenomenon? Mr McGarry: It is replicated elsewhere. When the Screen Actors' Guild and Actors Equity in the United States did a survey of their members they found that the average earnings of their members from the profession was broadly the same as ours, and that is about £5000 a year, when we have conducted a survey. So you will see that the professional performer has to supplement those earnings from other kinds of employment that they can fit in with their chosen profession. So, yes, in some other countries there is a pattern of more permanent employment in theatre, in Scandinavian countries and so on, and the countries of the former Easter Bloc where people work on a 12-month contract in an ensemble company, but that is a dying experience now; that is disappearing and they too are now facing the prospects and difficulties of a series of casual engagements, and quite often long periods of resting in between. Chairman: Derek Wyatt. Q449 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. Do you think that theatre would be better served if it was not anything to do with the Arts Council? Mr McGarry: No, I do not. I hope I am responding on behalf of everyone else. We have had our criticisms of the Arts Council - it is an occupational hazard, I think, of being a body like the Arts Council, that everybody feels that they could do their job better - but by and large we are in favour of the arm's length principle of funding. We do not approve of the decision that has been taken in Wales, for example, where many of the major decisions on funding have been taken away from the Welsh Arts Council. Of course it could be improved, and you will have seen from our submission that we were critical of them in the run-up to this most recent spending review because we do not think that the Arts Council has ever properly addressed its role as an advocate of the arts. It has its two main functions, distributing monies but also being an advocate for arts' policy, and I do not think it has been as effective as it should have been in that area. We thought there should have been a stronger and more public case made for increased funding in theatre in advance of this funding round and we said that. Nonetheless we do think that the Arts Council is the best way for Government to fund monies through to the actual practitioners on the ground. Q450 Derek Wyatt: Those of us who do not have Welsh constituencies, how is it different in Wales? Mr McGarry: Recently the Welsh Assembly decided initially to abolish the Welsh Arts Council altogether, as a process of eliminating quangoes, as they are sometimes called generally. They retreated from that but took to the Assembly itself the funding of the major clients of the Welsh Arts Council, the Welsh National Opera, Theatre Cymru and so on, and so those decisions about funding are determined by the politicians in the Assembly rather than the Arts Council, and we think that is a dangerous precedent and would not want to see it happen in England, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Q451 Chris Bryant: Does anyone else want to say anything about the Arts Council's role? Mr Donaghy: I think it is almost one of these organisations or institutions where it is a bit like the curate's egg; I think it does some good work and there is other work it could be doing a lot better. They had an initiative a couple of years ago trying to improve diversity within the theatre industry and I do not think they have delivered on that, so I think that is one area where it could be imposing itself more on the organisations that receive funding. Mr Trubridge: As the invitation was extended, I would also like to say on behalf of the MU that we become unhappy when the Arts Council funded dance projects that are using recorded music, which has happened recently. We believe that the public expect dance, ballet to be performed to live music. Q452 Derek Wyatt: The Government has a quest to create specialist schools, secondary schools which will be in (some) arts and music and theatre. What contact have you had with any of the specialist schools which have acting, drama or theatre or ballet in them? Mr McGarry: I think the honest answer to that is not very much, and we have probably been remiss in that and we probably ought to make those kinds of contacts. We do have very well established contacts with students who have moved into drama school; we have a former student membership, we contact them and we give them advice and so on about the profession and afford them student membership and then they come on into full membership once they graduate from their courses, so we have that kind of contact. But with the schools, other than through the work of our members, where there are outreach theatre and education groups going into those schools, I think the honest answer is that we have not had enough contact there and we should perhaps have more. Ms Payne: Can I add to that, to say that where we have traditionally had the best contact is through the National Campaign for Drama Training, and the schools that provide vocational drama training where Equity is one of the three founding members of that. So with those schools we have very direct input into the professional training of actors and stage managers. Q453 Derek Wyatt: My poorest school, Sittingbourne Community College, in my patch, has just won drama and theatre status; maybe you would like to use it as a pilot to understand how you can work? Mr Ford Davies: Yes. Q454 Derek Wyatt: It sure does need a lot of help. For kids who cannot read and write the only thing they can do is talk and act and play because they can get their dignity that way, and they need help, and you may consider how you can help them. Mr McGarry: We will do precisely that. Q455 Derek Wyatt: Let me just ask one more question. When we are comparing this scheme - and you answered Chris's question about arts, and you answered it in terms of America - in terms European funding by other countries, are they always more generous? Is it just because the culture seems to be more important in some - and I am thinking of France, Germany and Italy? Are your experiences that they are better or worse or about the same in funding? Mr Landis: My experience is on tour in Germany, that the theatre in Hamburg got as much money for the year as the whole of the British theatre got, so it tells us that some countries in Europe truly appreciate the arts. Mr McGarry: The pattern is very diverse, however. We have very strong links with the Unions in the rest of Europe and the rest of the world and, for example, you will see that in Spain there has been a very considerable cutback on funding of theatre and in Portugal the same, and in Greece - Greece of all places - there have been cutbacks in the public funding of theatre there, and even in Germany - Harry is right - although the overall level of funding is much greater a lot of that has been clawed back now and there is not the same level of funding there once was; but nevertheless most of them, Scandinavian countries included, do provide per head much higher investment in their theatre than we do in this country. Chairman: Frank Doran. Q456 Mr Doran: One of the big issues we have been looking at in relation to the London theatre is the bid by the independent theatres for about £125m of public money to repair the fabric of the London commercial theatres, and one of the key arguments that they are making is the state of backstage facilities. Can you say a little about that, first about the idea of public money going into the commercial theatre, particularly given the points that you are making about Government support for the theatre generally, and also the general state of backstage facilities? Mr McGarry: Perhaps the actors could say and the MU could say something about backstage conditions. I understand your inquiry has made some visits to theatres and so on, but the backstage conditions are, frankly, quite appalling; there are not many other professional workers who would accept the conditions that even leading members of the profession have to experience behind the scenes, and if there is going to be investment in the refurbishing of theatres then that should be a priority. In the past it has not always been so; the front of house and the auditorium have been improved but backstage conditions have sadly been left alone on the assumption that the performers will tolerate those sort of circumstances. On the general issue of funding for the refurbishment of the privately owned theatres, I think we want to say things about that. Firstly, we would not want to see any such funding come from existing sources, we would not want to see the money currently going to the core activity of our publicly supported theatres being taken away in order to be used to enhance and improve West End theatres. That is the first thing. The second thing is that we would want to see as a condition of that granting that backstage conditions were improved. We would also like to see the industry itself take some initiatives. Cameron Mackintosh and others have demonstrated that it is possible to plough back some of your profits into refurbishing theatres and we would like to see that happen. I think we would be in favour of tax incentives to encourage the refurbishment because there is undoubtedly a great need. If you look across London, the West End in particular, a lot of those theatres were built about the same time and do need to be improved. Audiences quite often are expected to endure circumstances and conditions which are not the best for them as an audience and that does need to be addressed. But the first thing is that we would not want to see any investment going in that direction having been diverted away from the core funding of the publicly funded theatres. Mr Ford Davies: At the same time I do feel very strongly that the West End theatres are a kind of national treasure and that they are in some ways comparable to the National Gallery and the Tate and even to Westminster Abbey, if you like. Certainly as a tourist attraction, the West End theatres are one of the main reasons why people want to come to this country. The second point I would like to make is that the larger theatres which are being refurbished are for musicals which can make a lot of money. The smaller theatres, or the theatres seating 700 or 800, let us say Wyndhams, next to Leicester Square Tube, would be a very good example, is not a theatre that can make a great deal of money; there is not a great deal of money to be made out of putting on straight plays. About one in ten makes a huge profit, two or three do quite well and six probably lose money. So the managements who run those smaller theatres do not have the money to refurbish them; I do think that is quite genuinely true, and I would certainly be in favour of seeing some public money being put in. Q457 Mr Doran: One of the difficulties for me is that there does not seem to be any shortage of people wanting to buy these theatres, and where you are sitting now we had a row of theatre owners, all of whom said, "The problem is we did not know the extent of the problem when we bought the theatre," but if I said that when I bought my house and I had not had a proper survey done, I would be pretty foolish. Mr Ford Davies: The problem with backstage at a lot of these theatres of course is endemic from the way they were built. You only have to look at the ground plans of these 1900 theatres and you can see how much space was given to the front of the house and how little space for the back of the house. So it is not an easy solution as to how much you are going to improve backstage facilities. We have had rats going across orchestra pits. Mr Trubridge: I was the London official for the Musicians' Union for quite a long time and I did a lot of health and safety visits to backstage facilities looking at the band rooms. The thing is, particularly with modern musical theatre, the technical requirements are so much greater than they were ten or 15 years ago even that people have to outdo themselves all the time. Willy's members, for instance, have a lot of equipment, a lot of stuff that has to be stored backstage and often when you go down to visit the band the band are not in the band room because the band room is being used as a storage room and the band are being housed somewhere else, a long way from any wash facilities, in very poor conditions. It is a bit of a cliché, but orchestra pits are appropriately named - pit is a good word for it because it is a horrible place to work, and mice running across the floor during a performance is not a rare thing. They do work in the very worst of conditions - terribly hot during the summer months with no proper air conditioning or anything like that, and it can also be extremely cold during the winter as well. It is the last place you would want to work, basically, and it is our experience that when these theatres are renovated that it is the backstage facilities and the orchestra pit that is given the least consideration. Finally, I would like to say that when we are looking at renovating theatres we do want to make sure that there is no downsizing of the orchestra pits because this is something else that we have seen happening - "Let us make the auditorium a bit bigger, let us make the stage a bit bigger," and it is at the expense of the pit. Then Cameron wants to go in and move Les Mis there or whatever and he wants to use a virtual orchestra instead of a proper orchestra because he says the pit is not big enough. So these are things that we want to see borne in mind. Q458 Derek Wyatt: As Unions are you involved in any discussions at all with the theatres about the negotiations they are having with the Lottery Fund and the DCMS or the Arts Council; are you involved at all? Mr McGarry: On this particular issue, do you mean? Q459 Derek Wyatt: Yes. Mr McGarry: No, we have not been invited to participate in those discussions, no. Mr Donaghy: Not really. Generally they want our support, but they want our support very rarely. Q460 Derek Wyatt: Keep your distance. Mr Donaghy: Keep our distance, absolutely; but when the begging bowl is out they want our support, there is a strong case to be made for public investment, but I would be looking at what do the public get back. If you get money out of the public purse through way of grants, tax incentives or whatever, what is in it for the public? Certainly as far as our employees are concerned backstage we would be wanting to ensure that a health and safety audit is done before and after any work to make sure that the working conditions are hauled out of the 20th century because, as Horace said, they are disgraceful and most other people would not put up with it. Chairman: Adrian Flook. Q461 Mr Flook: We heard earlier your huge enthusiasm to work on Sundays! That is the impression I got! I am told that the figure that is required for working on Sunday, the extra per diem rate is one and a half times what would otherwise be the daily rate Monday to Saturday; is that true? Mr Trubridge: It is certainly not true of the musicians. Q462 Mr Flook: So it would be for about the same rate as it would be for a performance on a Friday or a Thursday? Mr McGarry: Christine can describe the arrangements we currently have. As I said earlier, we have put some proposals now to the Society of London Theatre and are awaiting their response, so we have not got to an across the board agreement but we have made individual arrangements up until now which have facilitated Sunday opening. Ms Payne: To give you a little background, in commercial theatre outside of the West End Sunday is a normal working day and there is no additional payment in commercial theatre outside the West End for working on Sunday. In subsidised theatre there is an additional payment and that is one-eighth of the actor's weekly rate. For the West End it is slightly complicated. Our claim at the moment is that there should be an additional payment and that additional payment should be one-eighth, but at the moment what we have is a higher minimum for working on a Sunday. So instead of the minimum being £358 it is £448. So that means that the actors working in the West End, where they know that there is going to be a Sunday performance, will negotiate from a higher minimum of £448. What that often means is that those actors, particularly in the ensemble who would be working at or near the minimum will get an enhanced rate when they are working on the Sunday. But for those actors who traditionally work above the minimum it is open to negotiation and very often their fee is not actually increased for working on a Sunday. That is what we want to change; we want there to be a separate identifiable fee for working on a Sunday. Q463 Mr Flook: For the record, I can see why the increased costs mean that SOLT cannot cope with them. Mr Donaghy: Could I just make a point on that as far as increased costs are concerned? Certainly as far as BECTU is concerned, in the West End we have a number of Sunday opening agreements, and we have never failed to reach an agreement on Sunday opening, and there will be an additional cost, certainly for our members, who would expect to get paid at double the normal daily rate. That is the situation that has existed for time immemorial in the West End. So the benefit to the employers, yes, there is an additional cost, there is also a significantly increased income which more than covers that additional cost. Mr Trubridge: I would like to make a point as well on behalf of the musicians that the rates of pay that we negotiate with the Society are minimum rates of pay, and if somebody is opening a blockbuster musical they want the best musicians and those musicians very often will not work for the minimum rates of pay. So the fees that are being paid are considerably above our minimum and sufficient to buy Sunday opening as well, if they wanted it. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed; most grateful to you.
Witnesses: Ms Joan Bakewell CBE, Chair, National Campaign for the Arts, Ms Victoria Todd, Director, National Campaign for the Arts, Mr Giles Croft, Artistic Director, Nottingham Playhouse, Sir Peter Hall, Theatre, Film and Opera Director, Kingston Theatre and SuAndi OBE, Cultural Director, Black Arts Alliance, examined. Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you very much indeed this morning. We have some old friends who have given evidence today and I am going to ask Alan Keen to start the questioning. Q464 Alan Keen: Sometimes this Committee tends to interrogate people who come as witnesses but I think on this occasion we are all on the same side, we want the theatre to flourish. We are not the ones who have to make the decisions on priorities, where the money goes to. So could I ask you to tell us, if you could write part of the report what would you like to go in it? Ms Bakewell: That is quite a question. I am delighted that we are here and that we are, as you say, all on the same side and we want the theatre to flourish - we take that as a given - and I have been following the situation in the theatre for something like 20 years as part of the NCA. It seems to me that the theatre is in a very strong position in terms of its creativity now. We have wonderful theatre, great actors, marvellous directors and great stage skills. We have also had the backing of this Government since it came to power in funding a great deal that was needed. What the theatre lacks is a genuine sense that it has a continuing, sustained security of existence, and that the variables in financing - which are many, and which you may want to discuss - create a sense of perpetual anxiety which deprives highly creative people of time and energy which should be more and more devoted to the enormous potential of the theatre at this moment, its cultural potential, its community potential, its potential in the economy, all of which is set about by anxieties about either/or funding - is it buildings or actors, is it companies? - and all the small infrastructures that have to take priority in order to keep the theatres going. Sir Peter Hall: I would like to endorse what Joan has said, very much, and I must register how appalled and disappointed the profession is at the news of the new grant because the theatre was in a very parlous state a few years ago, particularly the regional theatre, and it is out of the regional theatre obviously that we get the next generation of actors, the next generation of playwrights and, most of all, the next generation of audiences. And at the eleventh hour the Government saved the regional theatre and in the last two years there has been an enormous increase in activity, in creativity and in results throughout the regions. Now it is going to stop; we are on stop-go, and that is a terrible thing. I heard this morning, because I was sitting at the back, the fact that our live theatre is subsidised by our actors, and, believe me, that is true, even at the highest level. I was talking to a young man the other day, who is in the RSC playing leading parts in the group doing those Spanish plays. He is the only married man with children in that group of 25 young actors because no young actor can afford to be in that group and pay his digs at Stratford for the season, and that is the Royal Shakespeare Company - it is supposed to be the top of the tree. So I think it is recognition, need, celebration, but, above all, it is security. I am sure all professions want security but people are amazed at an actor's life and the misery of their earnings. Q465 Alan Keen: As you may be asked direct questions from other colleagues you have the chance now, while I am in control, to say exactly what you want to say without having to avoid questions. SuAndi: May I say that my concern as a black woman is that there have been great initiatives around the arts, around cultural diversity, positive action, yet the struggle and the limitations the funding is now putting on the arts will also prevent that expansion. Theatre needs to entertain, educate, take people forward, open their eyes, and it should also reflect society, society being everybody. Those of us who were born in this country who consider ourselves to be black British want to see our stories on those stages. The limitations of funding means that directors, producers are really in a difficult position of wanting to show great work of dead playwrights who have their place, contemporary work, but enabled to be positive and proactive in that programming. The funding restricts that greatly. Therefore theatres are losing a whole generation of diverse, in its greatest sense, disability, female, black, all of that, within the programming because they are so limited in what they are able to produce and put on the stage. That excludes a greater extension of our society today. That exclusions means that we are losing audiences, actors, playwrights that are coming forward because they are not prepared to be hungry. Ms Todd: I want to add to SuAndi's point in relation to the provision of training for young ethnic minorities. There has to be a question of how these vocational schools that exist in this country, whilst at the top of the league they have to open up their doors more to these young individuals who find it very difficult to get into training schools here in this country. Mr Croft: Of course I echo what has already been said, but I suppose I would want to add that I would like to see a recognition of theatre for theatre's sake; that it should not just be seen as a utilitarian opportunity. Also, in a way I would like to redress what I see as an imbalance, which is that Sir Peter Hall has already mentioned that its audiences, actors, producers, directors, writers are the future, but actually it is the same of today; it is people working today. I think also one can now see that around the countries in theatres such as Nottingham Playhouse, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Birmingham, Bristol, that some of the best work is being produced, irrespective of where it is. It is not a London regions thing any more, the very best people are working across the country and that needs to be recognised. Chairman: Thank you, Alan. Derek Wyatt. Q466 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. I do not have a theatre. I have a population of about 25,000. I have two tiny amateur reception areas that double up for theatrical space. Is there any research anywhere in Britain that says if the local authority invests in theatre or drama that it actually improves the well being of everybody? Ms Bakewell: I do not think there is enough. If any exists it is not enough because one of the great funders of theatre are of course local authorities; some of them own theatres, some of them give huge amounts, particularly in the metropolitan areas, to theatres in which they take great pride, and which represent a real economic plus. For example, if a company is moving its workforce out of London one of the great pluses offered to the workforce is that there is a community and cultural life there. I therefore think that it is enormously important to engage Regional Development Agencies and local authorities in a sense of where theatre is in the community. I do not want a national plan and I do not want everything set out in a prescriptive sense, but I think that the wealth of advantage is probably not appreciated by some local authorities, and I do not think that the Regional Development Agencies have begun to see that they have a blossoming, flourishing industry. Q467 Derek Wyatt: Forgive me, but not all RDAs are as good as you might suggest and, besides, where do they go to find the information? Which centre of excellence is there in a university that holds the work of drama and theatre? Which is the best that holds this? Is there a Professor of Theatre or a Professor of Regeneration of theatre? Where is it in Britain? SuAndi: May I say that if you consider theatre to be a tree and from that tree are branches, there are different art forms that feed into that final piece called theatre. There is work going on in schools and communities that is led by video artists, poets, writers, dancers that actually impact on the individual and increase their interest in the performing arts per se. There is not a documentation of the link between the two and research into that, but it is definitely happening. If you go into the school and run a couple of workshops with young people and enable them to explore their creativity that sparks their interest. The link has to be from the building based theatre with the individual artists and with the schools for the relationship to be built from there. Q468 Derek Wyatt: We have in planning law a thing called Section 106, which is basically a bribe to the developer to develop the house or whatever housing and in return he will bring a village hall or bring a pub or bring something. It hardly ever happens. To what extent have you been talking to the Offices of the Deputy Prime Minister to look at extending the concept of a Section 106 that could actually either fund a new theatre or could actually fund a current theatre? Ms Bakewell: We have not been doing that, but I think what is interesting in the way that the direction for the arts is moving very much now, and is part of the NCA's election manifesto for the arts, is that all Government departments have to be brought to an awareness of what theatre can offer their communities and their particular constituencies. It is moving very much in education; education in its relationship to the theatre has been long-established, but it is now far beyond school visits and occasional workshops, it is beginning to be right into the communities that have been spoken about. Local government really needs to understand that. There is an opportunity here. It does not exist; it is an opportunity. Sir Peter Hall: I should just register that I am involved with Kingston upon Thames, with a theatre which is the result of a planning game, and the Royal Borough of Kingston has made the shell. We are looking, though, for money to finish it, and one of the problems is that although the Lottery was designed, as I understand, as an incentive to funding, getting other people to raise money, if you are outside the pale, which we are at Kingston because we do not seem to be a desirable residence for the Lottery, there is very little we can do. There is one thing in terms of new theatres around the country, and I think the point is worth making that it is all very well trying to raise money from outside sources, from private sources, from individual sources, but it is very fickle and you need the kind of base, you need the security of something like the Lottery. It does seem to me - and excuse me if I am speaking out of turn - that one of the problems you are facing and we are facing is that the theatre is so diverse. I can make a case for the moneymaker, if you look at the huge West End theatres running their 17th, 18th year of a show, of course. I can make a case for the misery of the tiny group trying to develop itself artistically and being ignored by the Arts Council, because I do believe that in the old days, when I was a young man, the Arts Council responded to creativity. Now they make plans, which is rather different. You cannot plan art into existence; you can only create and then encourage the creator. It is a very, very different thing. So it is a hugely diverse thing. Everything I heard this morning, sitting at the back, about actors subsidising the profession: true; about the difference between different forms of theatre: true; about the difference between the regions and London: true; about the need for Sunday: true. It all comes down to the fact that we are just short of money all the time. I have been in this game for 50 years and for 50 years I have been coming to things like this and what is the answer? A bit more money, please, properly applied. It is not about philosophy, it is not about aesthetics, it is about money. If the Government feel that the arts are not important and do not want to give them money that is their decision, and we can only just do what we can at the ballot box. But if they do not make us walk tall as artists they will never get anything. We have the best theatre in the world, no question. We also have a backlog of extraordinary plays. The humanist heritage plays do not encourage you to murder, they do not encourage you to cheat, they are actually moral statements even if they deal with the immoral. That is terrific for our young. Why are we not proud of it? Because we are not, we are not proud of it. Look at the next spending round. Chairman: Great credos for Peter! Chris Bryant. Q469 Chris Bryant: I think it was an apologia! Sir Peter Hall: No, it was a protest. Q470 Chairman: Also a bit of a threat actually! Sir Peter Hall: I have no way of threatening. Q471 Chris Bryant: Not a very veiled one. We saw Two Gentlemen of Verona last week, and I think maybe there are elements of that play which are not entirely in tune with modern moral sympathies. Sir Peter Hall: I do not know! Q472 Chris Bryant: Proteus does treat her pretty badly, but anyway! Sir Peter Hall: So do a lot of young people growing up, that is what the play is about. Q473 Chris Bryant: We are back to the apologia now. The point I was going to make was that we have had the Old Vic before us. You have worked at the Old Vic and I wondered what you think is the answer to a theatre such as the Old Vic? Sir Peter Hall: The Old Vic historically only works with a policy. It is not like The Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue or the Wyndhams in Charing Cross Road, it is not a theatre that just shops in plays. What is at the Old Vic is a particular policy and a particular identity, then it works; it worked when it was doing duty for the National Theatre and it certainly worked years and years ago when Lilian Bayliss ran it in the same way. It had its own handwriting. That is why people go there; it is a beautiful theatre. If it has a policy it succeeds. But I think we also have to understand that one of the reasons we are having this meeting at all is because theatre is not, generally speaking, economic; it just is not. Why not? Because people want to be paid more than they did 100 years ago, they want better conditions than they had 100 years ago, but that applies to the rest of society. The sensible economic thing to do with theatre, as things stand, is, apart from the big musicals, shut it down. No question about that. That is economic sense. But what about the spiritual sense, the educational sense, the artistic sense? Ms Bakewell: You can see that we are all driven by a conviction that we have from the evidence, day to day in all our lives of the work being done, the outreach, the ethnic theatres, the new writers, the youngsters, all of these things, theatre in prison, theatre in schools, theatre in communities, we know it is all there and it needs an act of faith from Government to take this huge point - it is almost a tipping point into a new area - in which with more money consistently pledged people could begin to drive further into the community all these initiatives which will have a transforming effect on the life of this country. Q474 Chris Bryant: I think we are all with you on this element. The question is, in the last few years Government policy has been to make museum and gallery entry free and it has been enormously successful, thousands of extra people going through the doors, which is great of itself regardless of any other utilitarian policy you may want to put behind it. I just wonder what the theatre version of that is? Sir Peter Hall: Could I answer that because it seems to me that we have forgotten in the theatre, under the pressure of the years, what subsidy was originally for. Subsidy was for accessibility, subsidy was for cheap prices so that people who wanted it could go to it, and ever since a Prime Minister who decreed to us in the arts that we must get what the market would bear, the whole thing has been distorted. I find it dreadful to go and pay £175 at Covent Garden, which I love, when I regard it as my state subsidised primary opera theatre. That is too much. What is that about? Mr Croft: Could I add something and return to an earlier question, if I may? On the earlier question, there are plenty of universities which have specialist theatre departments, but you will notice in the submission it makes to the Economic Impact Study of UK Theatre in 2004 from the University of Sheffield, and I would suggest that might be a place to start looking. There is a second thing, which is about buildings. It seems to me that the investment in buildings in recent years, via the Lottery and other sources, has been quite significant and the problem is that there has not been any investment in work, so what we have been left with are very attractive imaginatively designed buildings but nothing to put in them, and I think that is the real issue: how do you sustain the work which carries on to what we are talking about now? Just on the question of the Old Vic, it seems to me that the problems of the Old Vic are the same of any theatre, which is, to echo what has already been said, how do you find the money to run a consistently intelligent, inviting, invigorating policy? It seems to me that although there are question marks over some of the plays that have been chosen that what is happening there at the moment is proving that you can do it, you can get people to come to new work, whether the critics like it or not, and continue to support a remarkable institution. Sir Peter Hall: It will need sponsorship or subsidy or something if it is going to do plays because plays are not economic, even when they are successful. Ms Todd: You were talking about wish lists and the equivalent of free for all. I will quote your Leader, "Education, education, education." One of the most important things we have to do in relation to drama in this country is to support drama within the curriculum and get teachers trained to teach drama in schools. Sir Peter Hall: Hear, hear. Ms Todd: Go back to the 60s, 70s, when in teacher training that is exactly what they were taught to do, and somehow or other it has been marginalized. That is one of the most important things we have to look at. Equally, there have been some fantastic initiatives. There was Kids Week that TMA and SOLT did. It got loads and loads of people who could not normally afford to take their children to the theatre. You have to encourage young people to go there and to see what a wonderful and brilliant experience it is to look at the British theatre, which it has been said is top of the world, and what this country can offer. So you have to be able to have the money to provide facilities to get young people into the theatre, and that also means getting young people from schools to theatre in the regions. It is not just the case of already impoverished theatres opening up their doors to schools. Yes, they do it and they do it at their cost, but then you have to look at the Department for Education and Skills and look at ways that transport could be made cheaper for the schools to be able to get the young people there. Until you start nurturing the theatre, at three and a half, you are not going to get the encouragement, you are not going to get the backing and support for people to continue to enjoy this rich culture which we provide. SuAndi: I want to go back to this thing about self esteem and the individual. There are two roles to be played in theatre on this: the passive, the audience, and one is the proactive, actually up there on the stage. I am concerned about giving people the opportunity to be on the stage maybe once in their life, and then take that seat in the audience and enjoy from a different angle. My experience in the Black Arts Alliance is that to take people, give them opportunities to perform, they might not be any good at it, but actually you have taken them into the building, you have taken them behind the spotlight, they have had an opportunity see what happens back stage and that increases their ability to sit in that audience and to look into a greater sphere of life, and that is really important, but, in order to join that the audience, they have to be able to afford the ticket price. To support what Peter was saying, even in the regions ticket prices are extreme when you are talking about taking yourself and maybe two or three children to the theatre, before we get to group trips from schools. The shortfall in income in our general population has a negative impact on attending the theatre. Ticket prices do need to come down. In order to come down - again to support Peter - we need more money. Sir Peter Hall: We need ticket prices to come down and salaries to go up. I think we should not be ashamed to say that because it is absolutely crucial, and think it also impacts on‑‑‑. If you said to me: "What is theatre going to be like in 100 years' time?", I would say, "If it has been cherished, if it has been looked after, it will be the most important art form", because increasingly the screen media is becoming more and more industrialised, computerised; the need for actors on screen is getting less and less and the one thing that the theatre has which it can never lose is that it is live. It is one of those things and a truism I know when we all get together and become rather more intelligent, rather more emotional, rather more alert than we are as separate individuals. Q475 Chris Bryant: A bit like the House of Commons then? Sir Peter Hall: Yes, very actually, press theatre. That is why it is so popular in America. Q476 Chris Bryant: As Glenda Jackson once said, "Badly lit, under rehearsed"! SuAndi: Uganda has more theatre companies than any country in the world and Africa generally has used theatre for many years for many goals, from health education to family reunion, everything like that. That theatre is free. In Ghana we have the Pan African Festival. You cannot actually get a ticket as a visitor because the seats are already filled by local people. They see theatre as a tool of expression, as a tool of learning. It is the same over here, except that we cannot get through the doors. Mr Croft: I would happily make all tickets at Nottingham Playhouse free if somebody would give me another £2 million a year. Just on the issue of education, there is quite a lot of free access already in the sense that lot of work is taken out into schools and provided for children. Somebody has to pay for it, of course, but at Nottingham, for example, we give 200 performances a year in schools as well as running 200 workshops and 20,000 people a year see our work for free already. The issue, of course, is for people coming into the building and seeing the work. The last thing I will say about that is again at Nottingham Playhouse, obviously a theatre I know about best, it is possible for a family of four to come on any night of the week and see a production for £22.00 for the lot of them. Sir Peter Hall: That is not possible in the West End? Mr Croft: I know, come to Nottingham! Sir Peter Hall: It is not possible at the National Theatre. SuAndi: Also at what prices? Be it your accounts or your playwrights, to keep those prices low it keeps their income low as well. Mr Croft: No, not at all. Q477 Chairman: Over this period that we have conducted inquiries into various aspects of the performing arts one thing that has made a big impact on me is that if you are looking at actors, as Sir Peter has been talking about, if you are looking at orchestral players, if you are looking at opera choruses, if you are looking at dancers in the corps de ballet, all of them are poorly paid and all of them are traded upon because of their dedication and love of their craft. The question to which I would be interested to have answer from our visitors today is this. Accepting that the Arts Council or the Government through other means were to provide more money for all of these performing arts, which I think certainly around this table we would advocate, how can we be sure that it would filter down to the performers rather than to other production values which are all part of these artistic endeavours? Sir Peter Hall: I think that is a very difficult question. You could say that to any organisation about any expansion. I think that the problem is not using extra money on physical production; the problem is using the money for more people in a bureaucratic sense. I think all the subsidised theatres tend to get a plague of assistance, and I think it is understandable but I think it is very undesirable. The dedication that the actor has, I think, has to extend to the management as well. How do you enforce that? That is a problem for the Arts Council. How can you enforce anything? I do know, though, that if you can plan you are healthy; if you know where you are going you are healthier, and all this makes for better theatre and better management. There is always a tendency, I think, with theatre for people to say, "Can you not get in some modern managers and really look into this?" I have had experience of that, I think, four times in my life, and it is always catastrophic because businessmen think that theatre is always the same, and the problem with managing the theatre is that every play is a different problem, economically and in every other way, and it is very hard to make management plans and tendencies; but on the other hand the theatre has to meet deadlines, it has to meet budgets, it cannot postpone, it cannot fail, it has to succeed. I think management in theatre is pretty good, and I certainly think we could handle the extra money without abusing it. Ms Bakewell: I think in terms of the question that you are asking about how can you be sure that the money reaches down, there are already considerably developed monitoring processes by fund givers to look at outcomes. They are certainly very keen on audience numbers and the ratio of cost to audience, and so on. I cannot see that the expectations of waste structures could not be built in also to such monitoring bodies so that when they survey what are called the outcomes the level of payment to the performers should not be a considerable part of that. Sir Peter Hall: I think alongside that, I would personally advocate that the Arts Council is encouraged to grow more teeth, because I think it ought to be more rigorous. Mr Doran: They are sitting behind you at the moment. Q478 Chris Bryant: And they might be in the back of your neck! Ms Bakewell: No, no, alright, but I think they ought to disencourage that which is not succeeding and encourage that which is being creative, and I think they are rather nervous of doing that. Mr Croft: Since 2002, which is when the uplift came, actors' salaries have increased by 30 per cent and BECTU staff by 18 per cent, so there is already a recognition that those staff are underpaid and, were more money to come, I think that is a trend that would continue. The other thing to say is that one also has to recognise that it is not just performers, directors, designers who are underpaid. It is also the staff across the organisation. Pretty much anybody in the theatre could work in the commercial sector for significantly more money. They are every bit as skilled as many of those people and they, like performers, have made the choice to work in an environment where they value their way of life over their income, and so I think one should not just see it in terms of performers against management. It seems to me it is across the organisations that these things have to be addressed. SuAndi: One thing that would be important as well in any increase is if there was a remit in it that said no consultants get involved, because by the time we have paid the consultants there will not be any money left, and that is one problem we do have in the arts. There are too many consultants. Normally ex‑officers who resign from their position and come back as consultants earn far more money. I would resign tomorrow if I was an officer. We need the money to come down to us rather than being spent on deciding how it is going to come down to us. Q479 Mr Doran: This has been a fascinating session and I have enjoyed it. I have got a list of technical questions I was going to ask you, but I have decided to throw them away. I thought I could either start canvassing Peter Hall, but I think I would fail miserably. Let me throw you some challenges, because the two issues that have come across for me are the need for stability and sustainability in the theatre are crucially important. I think we would certainly agree with that. Whether you do that by more money, I am not expert enough to say, but I think if you look at it from the public's point of view, just the raw figures, just over £27 million is what the theatre got in revenue funding in 1998 and it is now over 95.5 million in this current year. That is an awful lot of money, and I think the public would find it difficult to understand the comments that you made on Monday. We understand it because we understand the problems of theatre, or at least I hope we do, but in this inquiry, which has been a relatively short one as our inquiries go, we have heard a diverse range of views. You have expressed a lot of strong opinions and it is good for us to hear them. We have heard from actors, we have heard from the unions, we have heard from endless numbers of people representing the large theatre groups, small subsidised theatres, large subsidised theatres, but what I think is missing is a voice for theatre as a whole, some focus for all of the issues that all of these diverse interested groups have brought to us, and in some respects you have articulated some of the general concerns that there are much better than any of the individuals have, but if I look at one of the issues that we have considered - and I am sorry if this sounds like a monologue, but I am trying to make a serious point - we have all been told that there is a huge economic benefit to the theatre, and when we ask people how they have tried to quantify that, we have got a national report, the Wyndham Report, which has tried to do that, but you try and break that down. We were in Birmingham last week and I asked somebody from Birmingham City Council, "You bring a lot of money into the local theatre. What have you done to quantify locally the impact this has had?" "Not a lot. We are starting on it." I think that is the problem. I think we go through the educational benefits, cultural benefits, the economic benefit of theatres, but who is pooling all of that together? Who is putting the pressure on us as politicians and the Arts Council as funding to do what you want to do? Ms Bakewell: I can speak for a very small organisation, which is the National Campaign for the Arts. It is tiny. It has its heart in the right place and its remit is to address problems as they arise, and the staff of the NCA, that is their job, to operate across the board about issues as they arise. It is such a small organisation they do not have the opportunity or the funding to take a broader view or indeed to commission it, or you might even say call in consultants, but the need is there, and while we are busy alerting our members to licensing law, and so on, which is our day to day function, we do not have the scope to take on board just exactly what you are suggesting. We are aware of different enterprises going forward, often within universities, councils and so on, but it is very thin on the ground. Q480 Mr Doran: You can argue for something like that? Ms Bakewell: I think so certainly. I think it would be highly persuasive at a point where treasury criteria are very exacting, and it would be something that the Treasury would have to take note of because it would be in their vocabulary? Sir Peter Hall: I think the confusion, if I may say so, is what usually comes out of these surveys is a general increase in revenue and turnover for the whole area around the theatre and people, I think, do confuse that with the theatre itself. If you start making a case for making money for the town, you start saying well the theatre is making money, and very few theatres, as we know, do make money. To me the most difficult point of all is how do you make theatre important when it is as important as it is, because it is not publicly recognised as important? For me it goes back to the days ‑ from about 1979 onwards ‑ when there was a definite frost on the arts, we all know, we all suffered miserably, and there was a sense that if you asked for money for the arts you were a welfare state beggar. I was called it by a minister, I remember. I think that still has stuck to some degree, and that is why the increase three years ago, two years ago, was so welcome that one felt that the theatre was being recognised. I would put the question back to you. How can we get government recognition for the theatre as one of the most important things we do spiritually and educationally? Q481 Mr Doran: I would throw that back at you and say that is your job and not mine? Sir Peter Hall: I think it has to be yours too. Q482 Mr Doran: It is my job to listen; it is your job to make the case. Sir Peter Hall: I have done my soap box. Q483 Chairman: It is my job to move on, I am afraid. Ms Bakewell: There is another problem, of course, which is that the inspirational element of the arts is unquantifiable. It is impossible to measure the value of a poem - a speech of Shakespeare's. How can you do it? Chairman: I think that was hugely stimulating. I am very sorry we have to curtail it, but we have a statement on the BBC at 12.30 and we are all working towards that. Thank you very much indeed.
Memorandum submitted by The Heritage Lottery Fund Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Sir‑Christopher‑Frayling, Chair, Ms Kim Evans, Acting Chief Executive, Ms Nicola Thorold, Acting Executive Director (Arts), Arts Council England, and Ms Carole Souter, Director, Heritage Lottery Fund, examined.
Chairman: Welcome. It is very good to see you. I will call on Michael Fabricant to open the questioning. Q484 Michael Fabricant: Thank you, Chairman. I want to explore funding in two areas. First of all, the amount of funding that is being made available by the Arts Council for theatres in general and then how you actually allocate that funding. You will have heard Sir Peter's polemic. He said that he was appalled at the new grant. It is now stop/go. Could you clarify precisely what is now the position for funding of theatres? Is there an increase, is it static, or has there actually been a cut? Sir Christopher Frayling: Over the next three years, 2005/6, 2006/7, 2007/8, there is stand-still funding; so the bench mark of 2005/6 will remain constant, which we estimate is a real terms cut across the piece, not just the theatre, across the piece of £33.8 million. Q485 Michael Fabricant: What is that as a percentage? Sir Christopher Frayling: Over three years. Q486 Michael Fabricant: So based on inflation that would be, I would imagine, about six or seven per cent, something like that, over three years? Ms Thorold: Yes. Q487 Michael Fabricant: You said that is right across the whole area of Arts Council funding. Are you going to concentrate on that cut, if you want to call it that, in some areas more than others? How will theatres come out of it? Ms Evans: If I can say something about the process that we are going through. First of all, the stand-still funding was a real disappointment for all of us, and I know you have heard that from the people who have come to speak to you. Secondly, we have been working in a really responsible way with government to see how we can mitigate what will be a serious impact on the arts and we have behaved very responsibly through that process. We have done things like look at every area of our budget, our own administration which we are keeping at a standstill over the next three years, which will be tough but we are doing it. Our job is to get as much money as possible to the arts. We are then going through and coming close to the conclusion of ‑ if we were meeting in three weeks time we would be able to give you the results of that process ‑ a very thorough process for how we allocate money to the organisations that we fund for the next three years. They have got a good increase, many of them, in 2005/6 because that is the tail end of the last spending review, which was good news. In 2006/7 and 2007/8 the impact of this stand-still settlement will begin to bite. What we have done is go through for the first time a really coherent process which is the same process for every organisation in our portfolio, and we have currently got 1,288 organisations in that portfolio of regularly funded organisations. So we have gone through a process of assessment of each of those, and we will be making our allocations based on that assessment and on the national picture and the national narrative. We cannot tell you I am afraid at this stage what the impact will be for theatres specifically, but we are very minded that when we got settlement which enabled us at the end of the theatre review to really empower theatre to take a major step forward we were very clear that the job had not been finished. One of the great disappointments for us and for the theatre practitioners you have heard from is that we are not able to finish the job in the way that we would have wanted to. We have got to try and maintain the benefit as much as we can, but we are working in a situation which is not going to enable us to do that in a way that we wanted, but we are not doing equal misery for all ‑ that would be extremely old fashioned and unproductive ‑ we are going to make real choices based on individual need and we are committed to rewarding the excellent whilst recognising that sometimes those who are failing need support to the get to the next stage. Q488 Michael Fabricant: I know you were pre-empting my next question, because you also heard Peter Hall saying that the Arts Council should discourage that which has not succeeded and encourage that which shall, and that ties in with evidence that we heard earlier on from the Independent Theatres Council, who suggested to us very robustly that the Arts Council understandably, of course, supports those organisations; and you have mentioned more than 2,000 organisations with which you already have close links in terms of funding, but it actually prevents the new, the innovative, the exciting, from getting a look in. How would you counter that? Sir Christopher Frayling: In two ways. Peter Hall referred to the fact that we do a lot of planning, and obviously our national policy for theatre and theatre review and the 25 million that emerged from that is an example, I think, of the Arts Council at its best when it takes a planning view on this. As a result of that, a number of new organisations entered the regularly funded portfolio ‑ I think it was 34 ‑ after the theatre review. So in terms of the ebb and flow of organisations, there is much more going on than people realise. In terms of how do you get on the ladder, there is a ladder. There are one‑off grants, our project grants, our grants for the arts, there are our managed funds, there are our regularly funded organisations. Not everyone who gets to the bottom of the ladder wants to become a regularly funded organisation; some that do eventually become so, but I do not think it is an issue of innovative versus non‑innovative, it is a more open system than I think the publicity would suggest. Q489 Michael Fabricant: Can you be open on this question. Adrian Flook, my colleague who had to leave just now because he has some visitors, was asking Councillor Colin Ablett at a session we had in Birmingham last week about funding of the Lichfield Garrick Theatre and Councillor Ablett answered (and I am taking this from Hansard), "Certainly it has been said to me that we have an issue in that we are locally authority owned." This is the Lichfield Garrick. "As to a reason, I do not know, but whether it is suspected that effectively grants to a local authority owned theatre is purely subsidising the rate I do not know but there is an unwritten preference against funding locally authority owned venues." Is that true? Sir Christopher Frayling: I will turn to Nicola on the detail, if I might, because she is the ex‑director of theatre in the Arts Council, but just a general point: there is no identikit way of funding theatres. There are partnership arrangements of different kinds and different balances and, of course, theatres have different scales of building, of staff, more permanent staff and so on and so forth, and so there is sometimes an assumption in those sorts of questions that there is a one size fits all, so let us compare one theatre directly with another. There are different balances and everything is dealt with on a case by case basis. In some cases there is more local authority funding the partnership, in some cases there is less, in some there is none at all, but that is fine, it is a diverse sector, but if the assumption is that one is penalising people for having local authority that is not true at all, but everything is dealt with on a case by case basis. Ms Thorold: The example of Lichfield is an interesting one. Lichfield was a civic venue, which is often what we call the local authority owned venues, and was therefore presenting work rather than producing its own work. When the theatre was rebuilt the local authority continued to want it to be a civic venue and I understand there was no discussion of that changing. There is a new artistic director in post who is very able, who has discussed whether it could become a producing venue. That comes into the issue of do we have the resources for another producing venue, because that is not just another £50,000, that is several hundred thousand pounds when you get into that. I do not believe, I do not know the detail in Lichfield's case but I do not believe the local authority has got the resources there to do the kind of matched funding that we have seen in other producing venues, which is in fact the only way to make them sustainable. Q490 Michael Fabricant: That is an interesting point you raise. I was going to about chicken and egg here, but you are saying that providing there is max funding and providing the Arts Council has the money in the first place to distribute that is the sort of target you are looking for? Ms Thorold: As director of theatre, I have to say that the more theatre for the pot the better, but we have to be reasonable and realistic about the resources that are there. Local authority partnerships are essential for maintaining and developing theatres in their communities and we could not be where we are without that local authority investment. It would be a debate with a local authority that probably we would want the local authority to lead at this point if they wanted to transform a venue from presenting work to producing work. As you say, we are not in a position at the moment to have that kind of dialogue, particularly with a stand still setting. Sir Christopher Frayling: Can I add something on local authorities. There has been much publicity rightly about the settlement where the Arts Council is concerned because local authorities themselves are under great pressure. This is not a statutory responsibility for them. Some have been excellent in their investment into the theatre sector, some less so, but that is also a factor for instability at the moment. We are under pressure. They are under pressure. It is very important that we support each other in this. Q491 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. It is rather amateurish that these things are not statutory, that the whole purpose of culture, which is such a profound thing for our people, that living today, here we are, sixty odd years after the second World War, still arguing about the most basic things which are the sticking things that make a community. Is this not the fundamental flaw in this whole argument? Sir Christopher Frayling: It would be nice if it was statutory. It would be nice if one did not have to depend on the extreme flexibility of leisure and tourism budgets for arts provision, but we do not see any sign of that changing. Q492 Derek Wyatt: It will have to come in the review of local tax or local council, or whatever. I do not want to go there. Can you confirm that the reduction that you have announced is because of the impact of the Olympics, or is it nothing to do with the Olympic fund? Ms Evans: We certainly cannot confirm that it is as a result of the Olympics. Q493 Derek Wyatt: If £750 million for the Olympics is in the lottery and, if we do not get that, that money becomes re-available? Ms Evans: That may well be the case. You may know more about that than we do at this stage. We are focusing here on our grant in aid budget largely rather than the lottery budgets, but, you are right, the lottery economy, as far as we are concerned, is one that is reducing, our lottery budget is going down, and I am sure we all want London to win the Olympic bid ‑ that would be great for culture in many ways ‑ but if that money came back into the lottery budget that could also serve culture well. Sir Christopher Frayling: Can I just say on the lottery as well, of course it raises another issue about the Arts Council as lottery distributor about which post 2006 we do not know anything at the moment; so we are in this slightly strange position of not being able to make forward commitments beyond that period, and, indeed, having to be very, very prudent about how much we spend up to 2006 because we have no inkling at the moment about how that cake is going to be sliced where the lottery is concerned. That is a cause of some frustration. Q494 Derek Wyatt: Perhaps Miss Souter could just tell me whether the £750 that is allocated for the Olympics will come back into all the good causes of the lottery if we do not get it? Ms Souter: Were we not to win the Olympics, then our budget would not reduce in the line that is currently being forecast by the Department, but I think we should say that up until 2009, the end of the current guarantee of lottery shares, it is not expected that there will be a significant impact on the individual distributors; it is likely to be after that in the run up to 2012. Q495 Derek Wyatt: In your evidence you have Appendix D. It just gives the major lottery awards to theatres. I have counted quickly 54. Do you actually sit down and say, "For the South East of England we want the Playhouse at Oxford and the Marlow in Canterbury, and, I do not know, there must be one in Hampshire, they are going to be our centres of excellence regionally and that is it"? In other words, what strategy has there been to decide where the money goes? Is it just first in the door or best in the door? Ms Evans: I think this is where what Peter Hall helpfully referred to as our plan has become quite useful, because I believe planning can be very good for theatre. Theatre practitioners themselves are extraordinarily creative. Our job is to have plans that enable them to be creative, and that includes having good venues to work in. We do have a national policy for theatre. That has been a really valuable tramline and framework that has enabled us to have an overview of how theatre is developing in this country and where those needs are. In our assessment processes we have both regional priorities and national priorities as part of a matrix that enables us to best assess where our money can work hardest for arts and for the audiences for the arts; so it is absolutely not first in the door. One of the things that I very much hope you will feel when you hear our budget announcements at the end of March is that we have been able to really make sure that where we have been able to support new buildings for the arts we are now also able to support the art that is going to take place in those buildings. I think the lottery has been a very big learning curve for all of us, practitioners and funders, and what we really know now is that buildings without the budgets to perform in those are not doing anybody a service, and so one or our priorities in our current spending round is to make sure that we finish what we refer to as the capital tails, the tail end of the capital project, there is a strategy and it look across the country. Q496 Derek Wyatt: I have noticed that in the most deprived areas of Britain they struggle to get an art gallery, a museum, a theatre, or anything. Will you be addressing that? Ms Evans: We have addressed it to some extent in that we are obviously aware of where there are areas of deprivation that is where we really need to look at how provision can really go in to support those areas, and in the last part of our capital programme, the arts capital programme, we specifically have priorities to address deprived areas, but what is happening now is our lottery budgets are going down and there is still work undone. What we need to look act is it is not buildings alone, of course, that allow the arts to thrive, and we tend to focus rightly on our building base theatres, but we also support a large number of touring organisations, not all of which have to tour in a traditional theatre space, and we are aware of the importance of rural communities, and we are working with those communities to make sure that they have a chance to experience the arts in their schools, in their community buildings as well as in the purpose built theatres. Sir Christopher Frayling: In our creative partnerships scheme which pairs professional artists with schools, professional theatre companies, or visual artists, or whatever, we have, in fact, emphasised the areas of severest deprivation in England for that scheme, and it has had quite an impact, schools with art. Q497 Derek Wyatt: Each time I try to get a theatre group to come down to my constituency, no matter what they say here, they say, "Yes, we are going to come", when it comes down to it, they never come. I come back to them time and time again; they never come. In your plans I have got a specialist school that has just been, as you heard in my evidence, yet I have got a £10 million scheme to build a white elephant that will be a theatre. I cannot believe that you cannot put the theatre in the school. Special schools now are moving to 18 hours a day opening, so they take on a different management staff at six o'clock. It is slightly mad to have different schemes for art in our community that do not talk to each other. So when you say you have done this assessment, it seems to me you have not done it too well in my community? Ms Evans: I take your point about your community, but I think you have given us a real incentive to make sure next time we need you will be able to say to me, "Yes, they have been to visit me", and I can certainly make sure that we have those discussions at our end; but I think you are right about looking at the arts in a more pluralistic way. You have mentioned the extended school day. That is something that we are talking hard with various government departments about at the moment; that offers an enormous number of opportunities for children wanting to take part in the arts. You will have heard from a number of arts organisations, theatres, about how they engage way beyond the stage. Nothing can complete the experience of sitting in a theatre and feeling a play as a member of the audience, but having a theatre come to your school to engage with you on your terms, not just on their terms, can be one of the most transformational experiences, which is my we are all in this business. Many of us have that experience in a different generation. We are working to ensure that children of this generation and generations to come have that experience? Ms Thorold: I think the extended school day is a great opportunity for theatre practitioners and the kids themselves. We very much want to be able to enable youth theatre participation to build up so it has the capacity to meet its potential time during the school day to actually engage with children. It will be difficult to do because of the number of professionals that will be required to deliver that, but it is possible and it is something we are focusing on over the next few three years. Q498 Alan Keen: Arts funding is fragmented, is it not? Sir Christopher mentioned the struggle that local authorities have had. I can illustrate it with my own local authority, Hounslow, where the Government has put massive increases into the health service and into education. If I can mention health quickly. Sport is really part of health education, and I think a little bit of money from the health service in sport will improve people's health. In the same way, I think that very rigid education funding, which goes through into Hounslow and straightaway is passported through to schools, the theatre is such a great part of education but more difficult to define when it comes to describing the benefits, evaluating the benefits. Would you agree with me that the Government is really in its very heavy funding of those two main areas, health and education, have not really seen the value of the arts and could we not have a go at them to raise awareness? Sir Christopher Frayling: You raise two very important issues; one of them is the role of the arts across government. We have this partnership with the DfES for our creative partnerships with schools, we are beginning to talk to the Home Office about youth crime and young offenders in relation to the arts, we are beginning to talk to the health people about hospitals and the arts. There are big subjects there to be dealt with, and I think we need to beef up that argument across government much more than has been the case in the past. The second point I think is really interesting, because we are meeting in the same fortnight that the latest issue of our Arts in England Statistical Survey comes out ‑ we do a periodic statistical survey ‑ and I think some people feel that maybe there is not a democratic will to support public subsidy of the arts; there is a kind of upward cadence in the voice when they talk about arts which you do not get with other areas of social policy. Our latest statistics show, and I think it is a remarkable statistic that 79 per cent of people in England agree that the arts should receive public funding, and that is an increase of five per cent on 2001, 79 per cent. That is almost the same figure as you get when you poll people on education and on health, astonishingly. So there is a democratic will, and I am beginning to wonder whether that argument is not the argument we should put more strongly that, yes, we can talk about the arts, we can talk about how transforming they are and, of course, we all believe in that passionately, but the argument that cuts ice is: is there a democratic will to do this, are there votes in it and do people care if there is not public subsidy? And we are beginning to discover that that is the case, so I think that is an important indicator for us. Q499 Alan Keen: Derek Wyatt has just mentioned his not being able to get a theatre group to come down to his constituency, and he touched on in a way the issue I was raising earlier on this morning and in previous weeks that there are some links that should be strengthened between schools and there are facilities in areas which have not been fully used because of cuts in budget. It was interesting, a few weeks ago that there was a gentleman from Wales and he said that, although I am not happy that the Welsh Arts Council, or whatever it was, called before they decided not to go ahead with it, I am not happy with that, but he did say that the Welsh Assembly is encouraging arts forums in every area or region where different sorts of art groups can link together and look at facilities. That is what the I interpret from what he was saying. Have you thought about encouraging arts forums in local authorities to bring people together? Sir Christopher Frayling: It is interesting. There have been two references earlier this morning to would it not be great if someone took a bird's eye view ‑ I think it was you ‑ of arts provision, and, secondly, the importance or not of planning in the arts. I believe the Arts Council is uniquely placed to engage in both activities. There are various examples over the last few years of that in action. We did a bird's eye view study of dance across England ‑ in fact it was the UK in those days ‑ as a result of which all these dance agencies were set up in various regions. Then came the theatre review which looks at provision nationally ‑ where are the holes, where are the gaps where are the regions, or the cities or the rural areas where things are not that well provided? Should we deal with that through touring? Should we deal with that through direct investment? How should we deal with it? We are just starting one on the visual arts. I think those sorts of exercises are the Arts Council at its best, that stepping out of the individual voices and taking a bird's eye view of an entire sector and then in a rational way looking what sort of public investment should be used. That is not just about individual art forms. It is about bringing art forms together and looking at local authorities, business sponsorship and public investment so everything is put into the cocktail. I think we are the only body that is in a position to take that bird's eye view with the Chairs of all the regional arts councils sitting round a table with art form people. I completely agree that is the approach to arts funding, and I think it is a good one. Q500 Chris Bryant: Sir Peter Hall was saying earlier that one of the major issues is about security of funding, and it felt a bit as if the theatre is always relying on the kindness of strangers. I wonder how you can enhance it. If people have now got a three‑year settlement rather than a one‑year settlement, obviously that is an improvement but it is not much of an improvement if it is an announcement of three years of bad news. How can you provide security without at the same time falling into that trap of only looking after the 1,288 clients that you have got, especially when some arts organisations maybe have a natural life and they may have started founded around the great inspiration of an individual person, that person has moved on ‑ your organisation might have developed a bit of artistic sclerosis and needed to die? Ms Evans: People are always encouraging the Arts Council to make hard choices and to close organisations. Q501 Chris Bryant: We would be the first to run away! Ms Evans: Except when you tell them that it is theirs, and then, of course, everybody says, "Yes, you can cut, but not me." I think we have to have a really clear process so that organisations can go on that journey with us. Now that we are a single organisation for the arts in this country we have the ability to have a process in place which can take organisations on that journey. Interestingly, some organisations do come to us now, particularly founder member organisations, and say, "We have reached the end of our natural life cycle." I can think of a number of examples ‑ the ones I am thinking of are not actually in theatre ‑ where a founder member will say, "I want to do something else." That is a good example of reaching closure on the life of an organisation, and that allows us to disinvest in a mutual way. There are some cases where organisations are failing, but we know that what we describe as failure is often due to leadership, and when you get new leadership that organisation can suddenly flourish again. Giving people a chance to move from failure back to success, I think, is also really important; so this is a process that can take time, but there are other instances where we do need to take hard decisions, where perhaps an organisational has not been thriving for some time and we have given it our best shot in terms of support and we are now, and, again, I am sorry to be rather tantalising, but when we make our budget announcements in March I think you will see the result of our having made choices, and those choices will be at both ends of the spectrum. Despite the tight circumstances, we will be bringing in new organisations and there will be some organisations that are likely to be disinvested in. Q502 Chris Bryant: That is an Arts Council version of downsizing, is it? Sir Christopher Frayling: Disinvesting. Ms Evans: Yes. Sorry, is that a new word to you? It is a delicate word. Q503 Chris Bryant: A euphemism in fact? Sir Christopher Frayling: But you are right. From 1997 through to 2004 we thought that an era of stability and sustainability and coherence was with us. Hence the theatre review and hence the restructuring of the Arts Council within that period. It does make what has happened since December particularly irksome, because, as you rightly say, arts organisations have quite a long planning period. If you are planning repertory, if you are planning a cycle of plays, or whatever, sometimes you are two, three years ahead, so you need to know. It is not just a matter of stability. For the organisation to run you have to make forward commitments in that way. We are doing our best to have a stable ecology of the theatre, but it is not easy when you have stop/go funding. Q504 Chris Bryant: Let me just ask you about youth theatre. I declare a very minor one hand interest in that I am an associate of the National Youth Theatre. It took many, many decades to get any funding from the Arts Council to the National Youth Theatre, so it is glad that it gets some, but I just wonder how well integrated the whole business of building new audiences, building new acting talent and creative talent through not just the National Youth Theatre, but other youth theatre in the country? Ms Thorold: It is absolutely vital. We know that many of the people you have met as part of this inquiry will have started through youth theatre experience. Historically the Arts Council's funding youth theatre has been through many of the regional theatres almost all of whom have youth theatres as part of their remit. We are now looking beyond that precisely because of this issue. It feeds the professional sector and it provides unparalleled opportunities for young people when they are in there, and as we increasingly engage with issues around participation, youth theatre becomes centre stage. Q505 Chris Bryant: A very important question that I ought to ask differently ‑ it is one of the issues that has been raised with many of us ‑ is about the £125 million for West End theatres which were described earlier as a national treasure. What do you want to say about it? Ms Souter: We are talking to the group that the Department has brought together with the Society of West End Theatres and the Theatres Trust. We are able to fund privately owned facilities, but they are regarded as a low priority for our trustees as a general rule. What we are talking to the group about at the moment is whether there are mechanisms which would make it more of a priority in our trustees' terms, but I think we would need to be clear that we are looking at a situation where our level of commitment is going to decrease from next year until the year after, and it would be a new area for us to be looking at specifically funding privately owned. Q506 Chris Bryant: You sound much more hesitant about this than we had I think heard from other people, who seem to be pretty certain you are about to hand over £125 million. Ms Souter: I am grateful that we are personally not being asked for £125 million. The approach is to look at that level of public funding, and I think it is very important that we, the Arts Council and the LDA, who are the three partners involved in this exercise, are able to look at this together. I am sorry, I am not intending to sound hesitant, but equally I do not want to suggest that as of tomorrow there will be a signed cheque because we are not at that point. There is an awful lot of work to do to be clear about the mechanics of how these would work. It would be a relatively new area for us to fund in this way, and I think we also need to talk to the theatres themselves about whether they are comfortable with the requirements which we would have for access, involvement and public benefit to demonstrate that the public gain waives any potential privately. Q507 Chris Bryant: I think the issue of accessibility, which again we heard earlier, is absolutely vital to any funding? Sir Christopher Frayling: Can I reiterate that. Where the Arts Council is concerned we have a long history of the relationship between the public sector and the private sector. You have heard about the crucible of young actors, many shows that are running in the West End started life as publicly funded shows, etcetera, so, in principle, there is no problem at all about this kind of cross over. The practical issues are access, as you rightly mentioned. What goes on on the stage? What sort of stage? And there may be discussions to be had between the conservation aspect of these buildings and building a stage for the twenty‑first century, which may not look like an Edwardian stage ‑ those sorts of issues come into it ‑ but, above all, whether we are to be lottery providers after 2006. There is no question of making commitments ‑ forget about £125 million ‑ of any kind until we have some sort of guidance on that because we simply do not have the money. It is wrong moment, in a sense, to be talking about it, and a lot of newspapers are rather jumping the gun from that point of view, I feel, but access and what is on the stage are very much the Arts Council's thing, and that is what we put in the pot. Q508 Mr Doran: I hope you would add to that the facilities for the performers? Sir Christopher Frayling: Yes, of course, I included that in the stage, back stage and so on. Q509 Mr Doran: That is a wee bit worrying. Like Chris Bryant, I got the impression that things were moving on a little bit faster, working hard to produce the report some time in the spring. We are almost there? Ms Souter: We have certainly been working at it very sensibly and comfortably with this group that has been set up. It will be a matter for our trustees, and our strategic planning process for the period after 2007 will begin this autumn when we will be consulting on a whole range of things. I think that one of the things that the trustees want to look at as we prepare for that process is what sort of engagement do we have with assets which are in private ownership but which have tremendous public good and add value. We will be doing that as part of that process, and I think the proposition that the Society of West End Theatres has put together is a really interesting way for our trustees of testing the issues about what is it that really would make the case for putting lottery players' money into what is ultimately a commercial venture? Q510 Mr Doran: Have you got a view on the proposal to establish a trust, for example? Ms Souter: We have been talking about the options for doing that. Obviously a trust that is established and regulated by the Charity Commission removes an obstacle, if you like, a technical obstacle in terms of the applicant. Q511 Mr Doran: It probably creates a few more of them? Ms Souter: If it can be achieved, that may be great, but I think there is a step or two to go beyond that, to say, "Let's remove one obstacle." It does not necessarily automatically make it something that we can do. I am not intending to be hesitant in that we are not interested or that we do not want to talk about it, but I would not want you to have the impression, as some press reports have suggested, that it is about to happen, because it will not happen instantly. Q512 Mr Doran: Another issue was the accuracy of the figure of £250 million, because we had evidence from the Old Vic, and they are not included, I gather, and they clearly have a very expensive prepared project that they have got to go through? Ms Souter: Absolutely, and I think from our general experience working with historic buildings, there is no doubt that once you start your project it is quite often the case that you find that there is something that you had not seen, you took the roof off or you took the back off, or whatever, and it does tend to get more complicated. I think, given our general funding patterns, it would be very unlikely ‑ I speak only for the Heritage Lottery Fund ‑ that we would sign up to a 15‑year programme full stop without any periods in which we looked again, or whatever. Even if there were an agreement in principle that that was something we were working towards, we would have to look at it on a slightly more short‑term basis and roll‑over, I think, and I suspect that would be saying to the Arts Council were they to agree that that was something they wanted to do. Sir Christopher Frayling: The figure is probably the first word, not the last. Q513 Mr Doran: We will get to 2022 when all this work is supposed to be done and I think we will probably have discovered a few more problems. Ms Souter: As with all buildings, and I know this is very much easier said than done, and it is an observation, not a criticism, ensuring that work once done is then properly maintained and looked after for the future is absolutely crucial so that we do not in any area put into money into a terrific renovation project only to find that ten years later it has been downhill all the way since then. Q514 Mr Doran: The thin end of wedge, I think we call that. On to another area and one that has been raised by a few colleagues, and that is what some of our witnesses have called the sclerosis that affects the Arts Council funding of theatre groups. Once you are in the door you are fine, but it is very difficult to get in as a new organisational, and we had a number of examples of the problems that that creates. It is interesting to hear your response to that, but I was particularly troubled more in Birmingham and listening to the RSC and the situation that we had there where obviously one of the jewels in the crown of culture, not just theatre, in the UK but they have messed up pretty badly over the last few years, and it does not seem to have affected their situation in terms of funding at all. They were very defensive and they did not give us a lot of detail when I pressed them on the point, but I am interesting to hear what the Arts Council's view of that is? Ms Evans: That is a good example, I think. The RSC, as you say, is a flagship organisation and one, whatever happens to it, which will have far wider coverage than what happens in many organisations, but it is a good example of how we do work with them. First of all, a number of organisations come into our stabilisation programme when they recognise that they have a model which does not work, and the RSC is one of those. Let us not pretend that the RSC was a model that was working well. It was it. It recognised that it had falling audiences, its art was less attractive to artists, actors were not coming to work with it in the way that they once had in earlier times and the RSC recognised it had to do something. It came to us and worked through a model, which was not one ‑ you are right ‑ that initial model ‑ that really was going to deliver for them, but that is often the case with organisations. They come in and develop a plan and the first plan is not necessarily the one that is going to see them through. What has happened now to the RSC, and this may be why the current team that you talked to were not able to give you as much information as you wanted, is that the team now in the RSC have established a model which has got the art back as the story that is being talked about with that company. They have a deficit which has been wiped, and they have a model which is delivering for the future and plans for a redevelopment in Stratford which are, as far as we are on that journey with them at the moment, robust. I think that is a good example of an organisation that has turned itself around, but, you are right, there were two stages to that turn around and the journey that it went on was a very public one. The Arts Council went on that journey with the RSC. We put some finance to in support them, but they are a company which is rich in their own assets as well, so they were able to do a certain amount of that turn around themselves, and they are now in very good health. I can assure you that, as with many organisations, the dialogue we had with them was very robust. We do not choose to hold that dialogue in the pages of the press, but we do have a dialogue which I think if you talk to many arts organisations they would say was pretty plain speaking, and where you have a mature relationship with an organisation, that dialogue can actually have a very productive outcome. Sir Christopher Frayling: I do not think they have recognised the line about teeth that was mentioned earlier. Ms Evans: Most people do see our teeth. Sir Christopher Frayling: Also, as a general point, and it is an interesting chicken and egg one, sometimes when flagship organisations are in difficulty, that is precisely the time they need the most support from the Arts Council in terms of advice and staff time and shoring things up, because we recognise they are part of the landscape. So it is a tricky one. Q515 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. That was extremely valuable. One of the things I note with pleasure, as sometimes happens on our inquiries, is that previous witnesses stay on to listen to the rest of the evidence, and that is always very encouraging. Thank you. Sir Christopher Frayling: Chairman, can I make a one second valedictory remark to you? We gather this is your second to last inquiry before you step down. We would like to put on record our gratitude for everything you have done for the arts and their public profile over the last thirteen years. Chairman: Thank you very much.
Memorandum submitted by Department of Culture, Media and Sport
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rt Hon Estelle Morris, a Member of the House, Minister for the Arts, and Ms Grace Carley, Head of Arts Funding, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, examined. Chairman: Minister, I would like to welcome you and Ms Carley here today to wind up our inquiry into theatre and I am going to ask Michael Fabricant to start the questioning. Q516 Michael Fabricant: Minister, we had Sir Peter Hall before us and he spoke very robustly about funding. He said that he was appalled at the new grant; it was stop-go. Just now we have had Sir Christopher Frayling of the Arts Council and we were asking him exactly what the impact will be on funding for theatre, and although they have not decided precisely where the chop will appear, it appears that overall over the next three years there will be a six or seven per cent real terms cut because it is going to be kept at the same monetary levels. Where does the DCMS see the future of the theatre and how has the funding got to this state? Is it DCMS holding back the funding or was it DCMS's inability to get the funding it needed for the arts from the Treasury? Estelle Morris: Thank you very much, Mr Fabricant. I will answer the questions not necessarily in that order. First of all, the DCMS, and indeed the government, sees theatre as an incredibly important part of our life. It is part of our cultural identity and I could not imagine a county, city or town where there was not access to theatre. It would be a much impoverished existence. The government also sees it as an essential part of the economy, not just because it attracts visitors but because at the end of the day it pays into the Treasury, and therefore it will do all it can to support theatre but acknowledges that it does not control it. I am not sure I recognise the figures which you have just given, Mr Fabricant. Maybe I can put it into a bit of context. It is true that the amount of money that we have made available to the Arts Council for the next spending review is at level pegging; it stays at £412 million in years two and three of the settlement. However, I have to say that I think it is disingenuous not to acknowledge the increase in money that has gone to the theatre over recent years. The figure is £90 million now. That is a 70 per cent increase over the last three years. I have to say that in any area of ministerial responsibility I have ever held I am not sure there has been a portfolio that has seen a 70 per cent increase in funding over three years. What I do understand though, and I think this perhaps comes back to past experience in recent decades, is that when ACE were arguing for increased funding as part of the spending review of course they wanted to see that increase and the line continue to grow. Of course I accept that, having made that money available to them, they would have continued to do good work, and of course I accept that the evidence they were able to show for the extra £25 million they got is a powerful argument for us to take to the Treasury. I think we secured a good settlement this year from the Treasury in the light of the general increases that were allocated to government departments but equally Mr Fabricant will probably know that had we been doing a select committee report on museums, for example, I would not have been able to tell the same story about increased funding. I felt that to be able to provide for theatres this year an increase of 4.6 and 3.5 over the two years of the spending review was good. Therefore, although I say yes, the amount of money is the same, it is not going to be true that many of our RFOs will not see a real return to increase in spending over the next two years. We just need to get those figures separately. I do not make an apology for ACE having to tighten up on their administration and make sure that more of the money goes to RFOs. It might not be as good as last year. It is certainly not a bad settlement. It is certainly not a cut. It is certainly not rising and falling and I think that many RFOs may be pleasantly surprised when ACE announce the funding measures whenever they do. Q517 Michael Fabricant: In fairness to Sir Peter Hall, the Arts Council recognised the big increase that took place a few years back but they are concerned, and I am sure you can understand that, that there will be a real terms cut and these things over three years. Estelle Morris: I do not accept that there will be a real terms cut. There is if you look at ACE's budget in total because it is a standstill budget of £412 million, but what ACE have managed to do and what reassurance they have given is that their central core will take most of the cut, the administration, and indeed the money from the creative partnerships has been freed up, so in terms of the nature of this inquiry I accept that it is level pegging, it is a real terms cut for ACE. What I do not accept is that at the end of the day when the theatres know what their individual funding settlements will be all of them will get a real terms cut. Some may; many will not. Q518 Michael Fabricant: You may just wish to check the transcript, when we get it through, of the evidence that was given just prior to this particular session. Tell me: does DCMS have a policy regarding the direction that it gives ACE in the way it applies funding? Estelle Morris: It is always a difficult one, that. I am always conscious that in this field perhaps more than many (or even any) other of government activity, government's hands should be off it. The notion of running our theatres or our cultural life from central government is a recipe for not doing it very well but it is also particularly dangerous in the wider sense and the wider debate. I am equally conscious that there is an awful lot of taxpayers' money going into the arts and I do feel an obligation to make sure that that is spent efficiently and that will be part of our accounting arrangements with ACE. I do not shirk that fact and we are entitled on behalf of the taxpayer to indicate some directions of travel. I do not think we are entitled to tell them how to spend the money. I think we have got that balance about right. Again, if I may just compare different ministerial departments, I never felt as few levers of control as I do in this job in terms of money. It tends to go to the funding agreement at the start of the spending round and then I have to say that all the work that I have done with ACE since then has been by agreement, by discussion and by debate, which I think is a proper role for a minister. I think it is right that we say what the government's priorities are, and if I may give two examples, one is our wish to have more access for more people, and you do actually need to spend some money to create that sometimes, and, secondly, for arts organisations to take on an education role. If somebody says that that is government control I would not deny that that is what we say but I do not think it is too much government control. I do not think it is control at all. I think it is a proper debate between government and ACE. Q519 Michael Fabricant: I am sure you are very wise to say that it would be wrong for government to be involved with the direct leaders of power. The thing that has been concerning me, I think, during the whole course of the inquiry, partly because I have a constituency in trust but also because the Independent Theatres Council have raised this, has been often a difficulty for newcomers to access funding for various artistic projects. I was just wondering whether DCMS takes a view on this at all, recognising, of course, that the Arts Council has to continue to fund many of its existing commitments. Another thing Peter Hall said today was that the trouble with the Arts Council is that it should discourage that which is not succeeding and encourage that which does succeed or might succeed. Estelle Morris: I might be on Sir Peter Hall's side on this one. It is really easy because I am about to say something I am not making the decisions for and am not taking the flak for at the end of the day. Unless the list of regularly funded organisations is going to be static and is never going to change, either lots and lots more money has to go in or somebody has to fall off the list. That is a truism. I suspect that in the past, and I do understand this, it has been very difficult to remove funding from a theatre once it has got used to getting it. There is always a reason why you might give it another year or another two or three years. I am of the view that ACE ought to vigorously look at their lists and make decisions to remove people as RFOs if they think it appropriate. I would never talk to them about an individual theatre, I would never intervene. I would never even actually say, "You ought to do that", but if as part of this allocation round they had taken some people off their list and added some to it I would think that that was vibrant, that was right, that was looking forward. To answer the way you introduced the question, it would give other theatres a chance of getting on the list. Otherwise I do not know how things change. What then becomes interesting is the criteria you use for putting people off the list. Is it success because they can stand on their own feet or is it failure because they cannot stand on their own feet? That is the difficult nature of the job. I think we do need a mature discussion about that and I for one am for pruning the list now and again to make sure that the ACE funding is responding to the reality out there. Q520 Alan Keen: Can I put the same point to you as I put to Sir Christopher Frayling? You as a former Secretary of State for Education will know better this than most people and perhaps I can illustrate it by talking about my own local authority. The government has put a tremendous amount of money into health and education, and I gave the example to Sir Christopher that putting money into sport helps the health of the nation and putting money into the arts, the theatre particularly, helps to educate children. My local authority found it extremely difficult on this last round because a massive amount of money was passported straight through to education. Being allowed to spend some shavings off that on theatre, for instance, in the local authority would I think have benefited the children much more than just letting it all go straight through to schools. Do you think we have put too much into education and health and could have used part of that for theatres? I know that education does fund the arts in an indirect way. Could not some of that money be taken so that it could be funded more directly? Estelle Morris: I do not think we have put too much money into education but I do recognise what you say. I think sometimes, if I might say so, we have not always won the debate as a nation or as a DCMS with local authorities about the importance of arts. Too often some local authorities think that it is the thing that they can save money on. There is a debate to be had. Interestingly, when we put the money into Renaissance in the Regions through the museums it actually levered more money out of local authorities rather than less, so there are good examples of local authorities who continue to support theatre. I worry like you do that with all of the mechanisms in local authorities now it is not up to us; it is up to them, but we do not see as much local authority money going into arts as we would sometimes hope. In particular I think what has happened in the past is that the criteria by which local authorities are judged have often not asked them to show how much money they spend on arts and creativity and culture. Some of them have been able to get away without spending money on arts and culture without there being a consequence. I hope that that changes and I do think that that is partly about the wider debate of us as a nation understanding what you have just said, that if you take local authority money out of arts and culture we suffer. I ought to put on record that local authorities are probably the biggest funder ----- Ms Carley: They are about half as much as the Arts Council. Estelle Morris: They are not insignificant. I would not like to give the impression that they do not spend on much but I recognise that scenario which you pointed out. Just on education very quickly, I think where we have got to get to with education is that they operate now with freedom to spend money as they wish in that it is not ring-fenced. I am trying within DC|MS to get to a state where schools choose to spend their money on our sector. For a long time that has not happened, but if arts and creativity are important to schools what we do, whether it is our orchestras or our theatres or whatever, does not come free to schools. It costs and, given all the money that is going into education, I would like to see some more schools saying, "We are going to spend part of our annual budget on making links with our local theatres" in the same way that they say, "We are going to spend some of our money on employing a maths teacher". That is legitimate, it should happen more than it does, and I very much hope that over the next few years we will see that transition and maybe that will help a bit to allay your original fears. Q521 Alan Keen: Instead of asking another question perhaps the Chairman will allow me to say that when you were Secretary of State for Education and now in this job it has been obvious to me - and it is not me praising you; it is people that I have spoken to and listened to - that people never stop saying what a great job you did in education. They trusted you more than I think any other politician, and so do the people in the arts. Thank you. I am so sorry we are going to lose you. Estelle Morris: Thank you very much. Chairman: That is lovely! Q522 Chris Bryant: You made an important point about the arm's length principle. Have you had that discussion with the Welsh Assembly? Estelle Morris: No. Q523 Chris Bryant: Do you think you should? Estelle Morris: I am trying to get the point you are making. Q524 Chris Bryant: The point is that they are taking large chunks of arts funding directly into the Assembly and it is going to be done directly by ministers rather than by the Arts Council. Estelle Morris: As colleagues and comrades obviously we are entitled to have discussions but it is not a conversation I have had with them. Q525 Chris Bryant: One of the things that I get told regularly by employers in my area is that one of the things that they are looking for from young people but often do not get is good communications skills. It seems to me that the theatre in schools can be one of the absolutely vital ways of enhancing those skills and for some people who are less academically gifted it is a different way of finding expression and self-value and all of that. How confident are you that we have a strong enough policy to enable schools to advance that? Estelle Morris: I think we are only at the beginning. There are lots of good things that have happened over the last few years - arts and arts-created partnerships, money given to the whole of arts and culture for education. They have got an education element. I have just come this morning from St Luke's, the LSA centre in Islington, which is absolutely brilliant. If you were to ask me am I happy with the nature of the structures to bring together the worlds of education and art, I would say not quite but that progress is being made. Creative Partnerships will never be a national programme. It was never intended to be that and yet we want a national structure. The structure that they have now got between the world of sport and the world of schools is actually very good and over time will deliver a national sports strategy and sports entitlement. That is a huge cultural shift for teachers and for artists, but I really do think that within five years we will have made that change. Q526 Chris Bryant: One other thing: in the last few years it has been very exciting; we have seen some great new theatre buildings, we have seen some great renovations of theatre buildings - Cardiff has got a fabulous Millennium Theatre - but sometimes one worries, with all this capital expenditure, about what is going to go on in it and is it really going to be sustainable. Do you think we have got that balance right between capital and revenue? Estelle Morris: I think we are getting better but, I agree with you, sometimes you see problems in funding when talking to ACE, and it is the revenue consequences of earlier capital expenditure. From my conversations with the Arts Council England, as they have been letting me know what their plans are for this spending round, I think they are on top of that now; I have noticed in their comments to me that in the early stages of their planning they are well aware of the revenue consequences of capital projects that are currently taking place, and have made plans for them. It is an issue. I am not sure I know the answer; I just know, as a politician, it is easier to get capital money than it is revenue money. It is really tempting to go ahead with a capital project and not think it through. I think part of this was at the time of the Millennium. I was not there but my impression is that the revenue consequences of some of the Millennium-funded arts projects were not always thought through. Q527 Chris Bryant: When will the Arts Council England know whether it is going to be a Lottery distributor after 2006? Estelle Morris: I do appreciate the difficulty that this is putting them in. I may be able to drop you a note before you complete your deliberations, but I cannot say today. We are just trying, within Government, to agree the timetable for making those announcements, but it has not actually been agreed yet. I do acknowledge the problems that that gives them and I think we owe it to them to do it as soon as possible. Q528 Derek Wyatt: Good morning, Minister. I am quite interested in the debate that is going on in Wales. Do you think, as a Minister, you make the policy on theatre or do you think the Arts Council makes it on our behalf? Estelle Morris: I think probably it is, sort of, at the top and headings underneath. We contribute to the policy. Even securing the extra funding for theatre is a policy, in actual fact; it is the Government saying theatre is important. So, in terms of the strategic headlines, I do feel that I have got an involvement but, beyond that, no. So in terms of how they allocate their money or how they prioritise who they want to fund, I have never felt that that was part of my business. However, I do feel entitled to ask them, when they come in, for an explanation and a discussion with them. Q529 Derek Wyatt: When you compare when you were Secretary of State for Education, do you think it rather odd that you had companies and organisations almost doing all this for you? What is the purpose of having a department, then, if we do not actually control the divas? Estelle Morris: I think you have to do your politics in a different way. I think it is more subtle. I actually think it is more difficult but it is very interesting. I would suspect, if I can put it round the other way, that without Government action I do not think we would have seen the progress we have made on access right across DCMS' responsibility; I do not think we would have seen the progress that has been made with arts and cultural institutions making partnerships and working with each other. We certainly would not have seen the bringing together of education and arts, and I do not think the sector would have had the confidence to do, for example, some of the more risky work they are doing at the moment, encouraging new writers. So I think we both create an environment and set a framework in which that takes place. I do not feel powerless, but if you compare this job with my previous job I do not feel as though I am in control of it in the sense of exercising the levers of control that are there, for example, in education or health. Q530 Derek Wyatt: Given you are retiring and given you are probably going to write something about ---- Estelle Morris: Stepping down rather than retiring. I have resisted that ---- Q531 Derek Wyatt: I am sorry. You can almost say what you like here. So would your instinct be that it would be much better for the department to take back all this authority, so the Welsh development is a good development? Estelle Morris: No, I do not, actually. I think the vibrancy is there. Our relationship with ACE is good and positive, and I enjoy our debates. I have never, ever felt from them that they feel controlled by us; they have never indicated to me personally that the arm of government is too short or that it has got shorter. I have never had that conversation - and I meet with them on a regular basis. I think it is difficult, but, equally, when I look at arts and the theatre I can see the influence of government. I think that is about right. Put it this way: I would not have taken this job on had that been the case; I would not have felt that I had the skills or the background to do it, but I do feel I have the skills and the background to contribute the political element of the relationship that there is. Derek Wyatt: I did not know that ministers had to have necessary skills, but there we are, Chairman. Q532 Mr Doran: I am going to try and avoid sounding too demob happy, but one of the features of the time that I have spent on this Committee in looking at the work of the DCMS is how often the department is dependent on other departments. When you came to the inquiry we had into dance, for example, there were large issues about the role of health and education and how difficult it was to get these two departments in behind the idea of promoting dance as a healthy pursuit etc. We have recently looked at libraries, and we have not finished our deliberations yet, but, clearly, the role of ODPM and education is extremely crucial. One of the things that strikes about theatres is just how important it is to have the education department running alongside, and on each of the occasions when we have had these discussions I have felt very strongly that the DCMS did not seem to me to be operating very effectively as a champion for dance, for theatre, for libraries, and I am interested to hear your views on that. I am more interested in what you can say about how we can improve and how we can get more pressure applied to these other departments. A key issue, I think, in theatres is the number of people who are now saying that theatres is a key part of regeneration, that there are huge economic benefits from successful theatres, and that we should be pushing local authorities, the Arts Council, and everyone else - particularly RDAs - to be focusing on theatres as part of regeneration and yet there seems to be very, very little groundwork having been done in this area. Estelle Morris: Yet it is happening. Most of our major urban areas now have regenerated on the backs of art or culture, so it is happening. I think you are being a bit harsh. Maybe I can give an example: I remember, as Secretary of State for Education, allocating a sizeable amount of money - £70 million - straight out of the education budget for creative partnerships. I would not have done that unless DCMS had lobbied me at that time. I would not have made that decision; it was not my priority, there were other things on my plate. So I actually think DCMS is getting better; I think it is a skill that it needs to learn. I have come to the conclusion that DCMS' role, in part, is to make sure that the area of arts and creativity does get up other people's agendas, because by itself it has not got the resource to actually fund the sector in the way that it does. So I think it has influenced; there is money coming out of the education budget that would not have come out of that budget had DCMS not been a lobbyist. I constantly have meetings with ODPM, the Home Office and Health as well. When I got this job I set up regular meetings because - I think you are right - it is our influence on those budgets that will actually make the difference. I really could not see a circumstance now where we did what we did in the 60s, in terms of urban regeneration, and built communities without arts and culture. That is progress. When ODPM does the development of the new towns, they will have arts and cultural facilities. DCMS might not get the credit but, honestly, DCMS has been there on the shoulder of ODPM making sure that that happens. I think part of our job, in some ways, is changing the culture within Whitehall to make sure it understands the importance of culture and creativity. I find that none of our ministerial colleagues are against arts/culture creativity but sometimes they are not sufficiently for it to actually make the decision to spend their money on it. It is my job to make them more for it rather than just not against it. Q533 Mr Doran: That is very helpful. On a completely different tack, we have been discussing the issue of the fabric of the London theatres, and we know a working group has been set up and we expect that to report quite soon. Can you give us some indication of where the working group is and where you are on the deliberations in that area? Estelle Morris: As you know, when the West End Theatre report came out they, obviously, came to see us and it would not have been proper - neither did we have the resource - to help, but it seemed to be one of those moments in time where if we did not respond in some way nothing would happen and, in the medium to long-term, we would potentially jeopardise the success of the West End Theatre, so we perhaps needed to find an innovative way of going forward. What we decided to do was to call all the parties together and try and see if, between us, we could come up with some sort of a solution. I think you are aware that what has happened, at the moment, is that the theatre owners themselves have agreed to put some money in, and they will submit applications to Lottery distributors in the same way that they normally would. I do not know what will happen there; (it is a golden rule) I have not had conversations other than fairly superficial ones. That is wrong; I have had conversations with both ACE and HLF about this, but I have not had conversations about the detailed applications, so we have to wait. However, I think that partnership is actually a very important one; it need not continue for a very long time but I really do hope that everybody who has got their hands on the cash, as far as this is concerned, does do something to enable this to go ahead. This is probably a bit demob happy: I personally would be disappointed if the efforts we had put in to the West End Theatre forum came to naught, but I just do not know - the Lottery distributors have a lot of pressures on their resource. Mr Doran: That is very helpful, thank you. Q534 Chairman: Minister, that concludes an inquiry which, in terms of the quality of the evidence that we have received, is one of the best inquiries we have had. We are grateful to you for rounding it off in the way that you have. It is now up to us to see if we can respond in a parallel way. Thank you very much indeed. Estelle Morris: Thank you very much. |