Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Written Evidence


Memorandum submitted by Yorkshire Film Archive

  We are writing to you in response to your second call for evidence to set before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on the subject of the nation's heritage.

  We write to highlight the issues associated with a particular aspect of our heritage—that preserved in moving image form and which is of direct relevance to regional communities throughout the UK. This is an extremely powerful and increasingly important historical resource that is currently in crisis because of the absence of a relatively modest level of funding that would sustain the eight regional film archives.

  Evidence outlining the case for such funding has also been submitted to you from the UK Film Archive Forum. The purpose of our communication is to provide a case study of a highly regarded regional film archive which, despite considerable investment from bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Regional Development Agency over the past few years, and despite careful management and forward planning, finds itself in a precarious position because of the lack of core revenue funding streams.

  Our contention is that the current situation where organisations such as ours receive insufficient core funding and are forced to rely almost entirely on project funding leads to instability, the inefficient use of resources, both human and financial, and threatens to squander the investment that has already been put in place. A relatively small level of central support would produce stability and unlock a range of social benefits that would be highly cost-effective.

BACKGROUND

  The Yorkshire Film Archive is one of eight public access regional film archives in the UK. It holds collections of around 7,000 titles, along with 8,000 items of regional news from the BBC collection. Material held in the collections dates from 1896 to the present day, illustrating over one hundred years of life in the region. They show the industries that shaped our landscape and working lives; the communities that have grown and changed; the cultures and traditions that have been celebrated over decades, and the way generations of Yorkshire people have grown up, gone to school, lived, worked and played.

  These collections are in constant use by communities, by museums and libraries, by the wider as well as formal curriculum education sector, and in the commercial sector by broadcasters.

  The Yorkshire Film Archive is an independent incorporated charity, founded in 1986. It is housed in purpose-built premises in the centre of York. These premises, opened in 2003, were built with funds from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency: an investment of nearly £1 million. The Archive currently employs eight members of staff, who provide a region of over 5.4 million people with a creative, efficient and long-term resource.

  Each year the YFA delivers programmes directly to audiences of over 6,000, and provides indirect access to tens of thousands through its displays and installations in museums and galleries. In addition, it reaches far wider audiences through its partnership television programmes such as the ITV Yorkshire series The Way We Were which attract audiences averaging 700,000 weekly over eight week periods. The YFA is currently in production of the fifth The Way We Were series, to be broadcast from January 2007.

  All of these audiences evidence the clear interest shown in film archive footage which relates directly back to the communities of the region. The breadth of users also demonstrates how the content of moving image collections can be widely utilised across the cultural and creative industries sectors.

  It costs in the region of £300k per year to maintain this service, which includes the long term care and conservation of the collections, the maintenance of the building, the facilities and the staff, and the delivery of pro-active access programmes such as those noted above, We believe that this provides clear value for money in terms of long term preservation of the collections, and providing access to our moving image heritage.

  On the face of it, the Yorkshire Film Archive is seen as a success story and has been quoted as such by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the UK Film Council, Yorkshire Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and Screen Yorkshire. However, its success in attracting major project funding, despite its benefits, masks the reality that the Archive cannot continue to deliver at its present level, let alone develop, unless clear and sustainable levels of core revenue funding are agreed. Currently the Yorkshire Film Archive only receives £45,000 annually from the UK Film Council's Regional Investment Fund for England. The entire regional film archive sector received only £256,000 in 2003-04.

  It is clear that no organisation can deliver or hope to be sustained on such pitiful levels of funding, and in response to the inquiry we would like to make the following points on the issues you have raised:

What should DCMS identify as priorities in the forthcoming White Paper?

  Access to heritage and the position of heritage as a cultural asset in the community

  Regional collections should be given parity of esteem with national collections. The regions collectively serve a population of over 39 million people and, because regional organisations are smaller and clearly focussed, they are often better placed to deliver effectively to their own communities, enhancing both the film archive sector's objectives, and the DCMS's objectives:

Children and Young People: increasing access to cultural and educational opportunities

  The Yorkshire Film Archive has developed a comprehensive Learning and Access strategy, and is already delivering to a range of education providers, from curriculum based packages, to taught HE modules, from after-school workshops to children's film festivals.

Communities: enriching individual lives and strengthening communities—particularly by encouraging cultural participation from diverse and socially excluded groups

  In terms of national and regional identity, the use of the moving image is probably one of the most resonant and powerful contributors to an understanding of how people's identities develop. The Yorkshire Film Archive is already aware of how much their regional audiences value their work, and the demand for community film shows and events continues to grow. People have an almost universal desire to see their lives—more accurately, the lives of their parents and grandparents—as captured on moving images. Seeing towns and villages fifty or eighty years ago, people's workplaces, their homes, their sports, weddings, and holidays—there simply is no more powerful medium than the moving image to convey collective and individual memories.

  The Yorkshire Film Archive has ongoing programmes of community outreach work; its collections illustrate the shared identities at both local and regional level and have real meaning to the people who live there. Every week, the YFA gives presentations, or supplies material, often to groups that have little or no other access to film provision—for example, in rural communities, for elderly people, or in community centres on housing estates.

Economy: maximising the economic contribution and productivity of the creative industries

  The Yorkshire Film Archive is now in its fourth year of partnership working with the broadcast community, delivering its fifth series based on archive footage, which, despite the cuts in regional programmes, continues to be commissioned, as it attracts high viewing figures.

Funding, with particular reference to the adequacy of the budget for English Heritage and for museums and galleries, the impact of London 2012 on Lottery funding for heritage projects

  For the film archive sector, there are specific difficulties with the current funding structure. The regional film archives are funded by the UK Film Council whose major commitment to the preservation of moving image heritage is their grant to the British Film Institute, which operates the National Film and Television Archive. The UK Film Council, the BFI and the regional film archives wish to pursue a National Strategy that delivers on preserving and providing access nationally, and operates efficiently. But this is not possible without adequate core funding to the regions, and if these funding levels are not addressed quickly, none of this will be possible. Without additional investment, the opportunity for a true national sector, which gives everyone the chance to learn from and enjoy their own moving image heritage, will be lost.

  Currently the regional archives receive an average of £32,000 each. They simply cannot develop or deliver from this base. Several, including the Yorkshire Film Archive, face closure from March 2007.

  But there is a real moment to change the current landscape. All the sector partners—the UK Film Council, the BFI and the regional film archives are working towards a clear national strategy. The regions need stabilising quickly in order to deliver on this strategy.

  The amount needed to do this - for the whole English Regional Film Archive sector, is only £1.4 million per year, to deliver a first class, joined-up sector.

  The Yorkshire Film Archive has drawn down a total of £2 million additional investment over the last three years to construct its new premises, build its collections, develop strong regional partnerships and deliver to new audiences, and to work strategically regional and national priorities and agendas. Most of this has been achieved through project funding of one kind or another that comes to an end in March 2007.

  A significant proportion of the Director's energies are directed towards securing funding to enable the Yorkshire Film Archive to continue. The Archive finds it particularly difficult to secure funding for certain key activities, such as day-to-day administration and financial control, including the increasing level of statutory obligation, which can be rarely covered by project funding.

  A modest level of core funding for Yorkshire in the region of £150,000-£200,000 per annum would enable the Archive to deliver effectively on all the key DCMS objectives, and give it the opportunity to develop new pan-regional and national initiatives with real potential for drawing down significant new investment into the sector, for example from European funding streams, joint commercial ventures, lottery funding etc.

  Whether there is an adequate supply of professionals with conservation skills; the priority placed by planning authorities on conservation; and means of making conservation expertise more accessible to planning officers, councillors and the general public.

  As it stands, the current situation leads to a waste of resources, financial and human. The Yorkshire Film Archive, along with regional colleagues, finds it almost impossible to plan any CPD programmes for staff, as most are on short term one-year contracts. Without security for the core staff, the archive itself experiences difficulties in planning long term conservation programmes for the care of its collections—the basis of its work.

  The Archive, like others in the UK, employs people who have trained at University level for some years, investing their own time and money, and with substantial investment from government. Such well-trained specialists should surely be able to operate in an environment that makes the best and most cost-effective use of their hard-earned skills and provides a realistic career structure that professionals in other fields expect and enjoy. If there are no suitable openings for such people then inevitably the supply will diminish, the training courses disappear and the expertise in preserving, documenting and interpreting the moving image in the UK will be increasingly hard to source.

  The provision of adequate funding would provide security within a sector that by its very nature is there to preserve an increasingly important aspect of our national heritage in perpetuity. Without it, it is highly likely that it will be lost forever.

  The remit and effectiveness of DCMS, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and other relevant organisations in representing cultural interests inside and outside Government.

  The regional film archives currently sit within the Film Unit of DCMS. Yet much of their core work—conservation, preservation, curation, is more closely aligned to museums, libraries and archives colleagues. This can be addressed at operational levels through good professional exchange of strategic agendas and information at both national and regional level—for example the UK Film Council invited both MLA and NCA on to the UK Film Heritage Group, where they play an active role. MLA Yorkshire sits as advisers to the Yorkshire Film Archive Board of Trustees.

  However, in terms of funding, regional film archives have not been a priority within the film sector and, because of this, the problems of sustainability have been much more difficult to address. We would ask the DCMS to give due attention to a sector, which, for just a small amount of investment, can deliver effectively across all the objectives of the Department.

19 September 2006





 
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