Memorandum submitted by Aldeburgh Music
I am writing in response to your enquiry into
the effectiveness of RDAs. I do not know much about the general
area of RDAs, however, I can share Aldeburgh Music's experience
of working with the East of England Development Agency (EEDA),
which may help to answer some of the areas of your investigation.
By way of background, Aldeburgh Music is an
international music organisation providing performances, professional
development for musicians and education work. We are based in
a rural area on the Suffolk coast. We are in the latter stages
of a £16m development to create new rehearsal and performance
facilities. An independent economic impact study before the project
calculated that this project will create 50 direct and indirect
jobs and an increase in net household income in the area of over
£1,000,000 per annum. The early signs are that these targets
will be exceeded.
EEDA have played a crucial role in enabling
this project to happen. As a major infrastructure project in a
rural area, early on in the project, we lacked credibility in
terms of being able to raise money, as there is a pre-disposition
that somehow non-metropolitan projects are cheaper and worthy
of less support than similar urban- based schemes.
In conjunction with Arts Council England, EEDA
realised that a strategy of targetted investment in key regional
arts projects could bring significant economic gains to the region.
This strategy led to EEDA becoming an early investor in our project,
at the critical moment when we needed money to pump prime the
project and win us the credibiity we needed to fundraise from
the private sector.
This meant two cruical things for our project,
without which we wouldn't have got off the ground
1. we were able to acquire the land required
for our development, before we had to launch a general campaign
2. that EEDA's imprematur on our project
was a catalyst for support from the private sector. This has been
instrumental in our raising £9.5 million of support from
the private sector—an unprecedented amount for a non-metropolitan
arts project.
This is only one example but I do believe that
when well run, as EEDA is, with a clear focus on priorities and
where to invest, RDAs can make a significant difference—in
our case the difference between a project happening or not. To
my mind this seems to justify the investment that central government
makes to the RDAs.
1 October 2008
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