Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 100-119)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CULTURE, MEDIA
AND SPORT,
SPORT ENGLAND,
ENGLISH HERITAGE,
ARTS COUNCIL
AND BIG
LOTTERY FUND
MONDAY 2 JUNE
2008
Q100 Mr Bacon: Mr Davey, Grants for the
Arts for Individuals and the 35p. Can you tell me first of all
how many grants there were? £1.79 million was the cost of
awarding those grants; is that correct?
Mr Davey: Yes.
Q101 Mr Bacon: How many grants were
made altogether?
Mr Davey: 1,666.
Q102 Mr Bacon: I worked it out at
1,665. That is fine. I am surprised that we are funding novelists.
How many novelists are we funding?
Mr Davey: I do not have the answer
to that question but we do give grants to quite a few in terms
of emerging novelists who are developing their writing. I can
write to you with the exact number.
Q103 Mr Bacon: What I would be interested
in is if you could send us the details of the 1,666. Presumably,
in order to have compiled this information to the National Audit
Office and to have worked out the cost, this information is already
there, it already exists, what the 1,666 grants were for and to
whom they were made.
Mr Davey: Yes. It is on our website.
Q104 Mr Bacon: Is it possible that
you could send that to us broken down by category so that we can
see how many novelists, how many—what are they? Sculptors,
painters?[3]
Mr Davey: It could be sculptors,
painters, photographers.
Q105 Mr Bacon: If you could send
us a list that would be very helpful.
Mr Davey: I will see in what way
we can break it down.
Q106 Mr Bacon: I would expect the
costs for small amounts for individuals to be higher than for
large grants to professional organisations; that is just obvious.
Nonetheless, 35% is startling and it does make you wonder. I think
you did say in your earlier answer to a colleague in relation
to the novelist that you were helping him with working out what
he was going to do. Was it in relation to a different applicant
or was it the novelist?
Mr Davey: That was a choreographer,
as an example.
Q107 Mr Bacon: Yes, so you were going
to help the choreographer work out what he was going to apply
for the money for?
Mr Davey: Yes.
Mr Mitchell: What steps to take.
Q108 Mr Bacon: Yes, indeed, what
steps to take. If they have so little idea of why it is they are
applying for the money that you have to spend 35% of the money
that you are giving to them helping them work out what it is that
they are applying to you for then why are you doing it? I can
understand it if it was Dr Thurley and a 700-year old church building
that was Grade I listed but for a choreographer or a novelist,
why?
Mr Davey: Often an emerging artist
will have a very general idea of the kind of thing that they are
wanting to do and they might work with specialist Arts Council
officers to refine that proposal and come up with something that
is much more likely to find an audience, for example, or that
is more likely to succeed. Sometimes artists might have a very
general idea. Under our Royal Charter we are an arts development
organisation and it is our duty, I think, to help those artists
who do not have a very clear idea of what the end point will be
to try and work out what that is.
Q109 Mr Bacon: That is a good answer.
If that is what your Royal Charter says I am all for that. Can
I move on to page 31? I would like to ask one more question and
that is concerning the Community Investment Fund, which I think,
Jennie Price, is a Sport England body. Why do you think that the
satisfaction level for that is lowest compared with any of the
other bodies in that chart on figure 17?
Ms Price: We were certainly concerned
to see that, and in fact we are asking the NAO for more details
of what that particular batch of applicants felt about the scheme.
Q110 Mr Bacon: These are the successful
applicants.
Ms Price: That is right.
Q111 Mr Bacon: Three out of 10 of
the successful applicants are happy. I would expect the unsuccessful
applicants to be unhappy; it goes without saying. One wonders
why only four out of 10 of the unsuccessful applicants are unhappy,
but three out of 10 are the successful ones.
Ms Price: We have some anecdotal
evidence. When we talk to users about the Community Investment
Fund process it indicates that one of the parts of the process
they find quite onerous is that when they put in an application
to us we will challenge the quality of that application and, for
example, we are often revenue funding to develop the sport and
we will try to improve the quality of the sport development plan
that is put forward and they find that going backwards and forwards
quite frustrating sometimes. The benefit for us in doing it and
the benefit for sport in doing it is that you end up with a more
robust plan.
Q112 Mr Bacon: And presumably a sustainable
plan when you cut the funding?
Ms Price: Yes, a sustainable plan
in the long term. What we are doing though is looking at possibly
replacing the Community Investment Fund with a different type
of fund to support a new strategy we are developing and in the
consultation leading up to that possible replacement we were asking
very explicitly what aspects of the application process people
would like us to retain and the areas that they really would like
changed or improved, so we will get very good evidence in the
next few months that will make sure that if we do replace the
fund it is going to be a better experience for the applicants.
Q113 Mr Bacon: Dr Thurley, eight
out of 10 of your applicants who get the money are happy and two
out of 10 are not. You have just given somebody £50,000 or
£100,000 to repair their church and they are still not happy.
Are they just a bunch of ingrates?
Dr Thurley: No. I think that some
of them do feel that the hoops that they have to jump through
are quite bamboozling and they feel that very often because they
have not come across the experience of taking public money. Public
money always comes with conditions and many of them find the fact
that we impose on a church a condition that they have to be open
to the public so that people can walk in for a certain number
of days a year in exchange for the money a bit difficult sometimes.
I think there is sometimes some dissatisfaction, but when it is
all done and finished and the re-consecration takes place I think
most people are happy.[4]
Q114 Chairman: I do not understand, Mr
Davey, this question about novelists. There are 50,000 books published
every year and most of them sell very few copies. There are hundreds
of novels submitted to publishers every week, most of which are
put into the trash can after a couple of minutes' reading. How
can you possibly know whether a novel is any good and worth publishing
and why should the taxpayer be involved in this, and if it is
any good, if there is a track record, why the need to do it in
the first place?
Mr Davey: We employ officers who
are specialists in nurtured literature in our regional offices
and in our national office, and one of our duties as an arts development
organisation is to increase the opportunities for artists to practise
their art as far as possible. Indeed, recent reports from this
Committee have urged us to encourage funding amongst communities
which do not traditionally get funding. Sometimes the path to
getting a thing published is quite knotty and difficult and sometimes
a would-be novelist and writers of various kinds are seeking space
and additional help in which to make their artistic statement
and that is what we provide with Grants for the Arts for Individuals.
Q115 Chairman: You have had success,
have you? You have discovered hidden talents, have you?
Mr Davey: Yes, we have.
Q116 Chairman: Which have sold well
in the market place?
Mr Davey: Yes.
Q117 Chairman: As a result of your
efforts who would not have sold otherwise?
Mr Davey: Yes.
Q118 Chairman: Give us some examples.
Mr Davey: The example that I just
gave you of the novelist from Hull, the Shark Fin Tales(?),
which is a best-selling book.
Chairman: What worries me about this
is the dead hand of the state descending on a pure art form. If
Leon Tolstoy had to rely on you would we ever have ended up with
War and Peace?
Mr Bacon: He owned an estate.
Q119 Chairman: If he owned an estate
that would help, I agree.
Mr Davey: I do not think it is
the dead hand of the state landing on a pure art form. It is to
help people at the beginning of their careers make a breakthrough.
It is not on an individual scale.
Mr Holgate: Indeed. Your own figures,
Chairman, suggest that all we are doing is providing a possibility
of success to quite a small number of people compared to a very
large number overall. It is a minor additional possibility. It
is not really a large handout or a large number of handouts.
3 Ev 21 Back
4
Note by witness: To be eligible, we require the places of worship
we fund to be in active use. They will not therefore be formally
de-consecrated, requiring re-consecration when the works are complete
(although occasionally will go through a re-consecration service).
They will be brought back into full use, in some cases re-opening
after an enforced temporary closure where they have been deemed
unsafe for public access. Back
| 
