Examination of Witnesses (Questions 442-473)
Chair: Good morning. This
is the sixth session of the Committee's inquiry into funding of
the arts and heritage. We are focusing particularly this morning
on authors and the public lending right, and I would like to welcome
Barbara Hayes, the Deputy Chief Executive of ALCS (Authors' Licensing
and Collecting Service), Richard Combes, the Head of Rights and
Licensing at ALCS, Jim Parker from Public Lending Right and Stella
Duffy, who is representing the writers' community.
Stella Duffy: All of them.
Chair: Absolutely. David
Cairns, to start us off.
Q442 David Cairns:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The first question is for
Mr Parker. We have heard as part of this inquiry from various
organisations that are being abolished as part of the bonfire
of the quangos that there wasn't an enormous amount of consultation
or prior discussion with them before the axe fell. Can you tell
us what discussion you had leading up to the announcement of your
abolition?
Jim Parker: To be truthful, there
wasn't a lot of discussion. It is more or less as you described.
We knew that arm's length bodies were under review, and being
the smallest of the arm's length bodies that are funded by the
department, we knew that we would be looked at. But other than
knowing the review was going on, we were not asked anything about
our own fate. It coincided, of course, with the Comprehensive
Spending Review, and I did put in some proposals myself, knowing
that the review was ongoing, proposing a public/private partnership
with colleagues here from ALCS, which I thought was an interesting
idea. I think that was well received by Ministers, and we thought
that might have been acceptable. You will know that we were not
mentioned in the first round of abolitions announced in July,
covering the Film Council and the MLA, and it was fairly late
in the day when I was told that we were to be abolished. I can't
say that we were consulted specifically on the abolition.
Q443 David Cairns:
How did you hear?
Jim Parker: I was rung up by one
of the senior civil servants of the department and it was explained
to me that, as part of the arm's length review, Ministers had
come to the decision that, with a view to streamlining Government,
our organisation would be abolished and our functions would be
transferred to another publicly funded body.
Q444 David Cairns:
So between July, when you were not immediately for the chop, and
14 October, when you did get the chop, your only involvement was
submitting proposals of your own?
Jim Parker: Yes.
David Cairns: Nobody came to you and
said, "You're clearly under consideration for this. Let's
have a talk about what you think". You sent in evidence,
essentially?
Jim Parker: That is true.
Q445 David Cairns:
So you sent in evidence about how the function could be reformed—some
colleagues might want to pick up on that in a minute—but
in the immediate aftermath of the decision to abolish you, did
they then come and say, "Now, you have submitted this interesting
paper. Let's discuss where this function could be transferred
to"? What has been the process since 14 October?
Jim Parker: The initial phone
call was to say that we were to be abolished and the name of a
body was given to me as the body that the department had in mind
that we should be transferred to. I think that it is public knowledge
now that it was the Arts Council. But the Arts Council is having
a number of other functions transferred to it, and it eventually
transpired that for whatever reason that wasn't going to work.
Therefore, Ministers and officials looked around for another body
within the department that would be best suited to take on our
functions. Other than being kept up to date from time to time,
saying, "Well, we haven't decided yet" or, "We're
making an approach", I have not been consulted on the choice
of body—I think that is the direction of your question.
Q446 David Cairns:
I realise we are in the realms of conjecture here, Mr Chairman,
but from the conversations you had, did you gather that it was
the preferred outcome of either officials or Ministers that the
Arts Council be the repository of this function? Is that what
they wanted to do?
Jim Parker: I think so, yes. I
think there had been quite a lot of thought given to it, and the
feeling was that we would be a good fit—I think was the
expression used—with the Arts Council, given that we are
working with authors and paying out public funds in support of
authors. I think there are distinct differences between what we
do and what the Arts Council does, but given that a decision had
been made to wind us up and move us somewhere else, I could see
the logic of what they were saying.
Q447 David Cairns:
Did you get the impression that the pushback came from the Arts
Council saying, "We have got too many other things; we can't
be taking this on"?
Jim Parker: That is difficult
for me to answer. I'm not sure of the answer to that.
Q448 David Cairns:
But given that your evidence wasn't suggesting a partnership with
the Arts Council, it was suggesting a partnership with colleagues
here, one assumes that it would not have been your preferred option
to see these functions transferred to the Arts Council?
Jim Parker: To be quite candid,
I thought we had a good proposition in front of us, but I'm always
of course prepared to be guided by Ministers, and if Ministers
could see advantages in us being transferred to another body within
the department, that is fine. Of course, we like to think that
we do a good job and are efficient and give a good service to
authors, but we are very small—there's just me and nine
others—so I think in any wider review of arm's length bodies,
people are going to say that it is difficult to justify the existence
of such a small body. So there could well be economies of scale
were we to be taken over by another body, but you are right: it
wouldn't have been my first choice.
Q449 David Cairns:
Do you think that the ALCS is probably the best place to fulfil
these functions now?
Jim Parker: Yes. Given that I'm
responsible to the Minister and will always be guided by him,
if the Minister feels we would be better working with another
body, I'll accept that. But it was always my proposal that we
would form a public/private partnership with ALCS. When I came
up with that proposal, it was on the basis that we would continue
as an independent body, and we had some quite exciting ideas on
what we would do together. But since then, I know that ALCS themselves
have put forward a proposal that they would take over PLR, and
I would be perfectly happy with that as a proposition, given our
track record over the years.
Q450 Chair: How much
is the abolition of your body going to save?
Jim Parker: Well, I've no figures,
Chairman.
Q451 Chair: What are
your administrative costs?
Jim Parker: Our administrative
costs are £750,000 a year. Let me make it clear that Public
Lending Right as a right will continue, and the funding has been
decided upon, which you will know anyway through the Comprehensive
Spending Review, and is to be ring-fenced. So the operation will
be handed over to another organisation. Until I find out, of course,
who is taking us over, it is difficult to know what the new chief
executive will plan for us. But there may be scope for economies
of scale, as they say.
Chair: But that would suggest that we're
talking at the most a couple of hundred thousand pounds?
Jim Parker: Yes. We only employ
nine people.
Q452 Chair: You were
very clear that you will be guided by Ministers—and that
is only right—but Stella, as a representative of the writing
community, how would you feel about the Arts Council taking over
responsibility?
Stella Duffy: As someone who also
works in theatre, I am going to be very kind about the Arts Council,
but—and I'm sure Louise can back me up on this—when
you ring PLR, because there are nine people there, you get through
straight away. The same is true for ALCS—for all that they
are a private organisation, they are a small and easily understood
organisation. To me, as a person who works by myself and for myself,
it seems slightly absurd to take two things that are working already
really well and happy to work with each other and then stick this
one in a much larger organisation, where it is going to get lost
and where the people don't already know how to run it, as these
people are already doing very successfully. As you have already
said, the money is still coming to the writers; it has been ring-fenced.
So then to give it to some people who already don't know how to
administer it as well as these guys do seems a bit absurd to me.
Q453 Ms Bagshawe:
Mr Chairman, I'm going to start by declaring an interest. I am
an author and I have the right to benefit from PLR, although as
a matter of fact, I have never claimed it in my entire writing
career; nevertheless I am eligible to receive it. This is principally
because I have never got my act together to claim it, rather than
any high-minded thoughts—as it's several thousand pounds,
it doesn't say very much for my organisational skills. Stella,
speaking as an author, do you find it as surprising as I do to
hear Mr Parker say that he considered the Arts Council? When we
think of the Arts Council, we think of it as a patron of the visual
arts, rather than arts in their broadest sense, including music
and literature. It seems to me that since PLR had already been
working with ALCS and there are already economies of scale that
have already been put in practice that the natural and obvious
choice was ALCS to administer PLR's functions. I am slightly surprised
that the Arts Council was ever mooted, because they seem to be
working in a totally different field of the arts, doing a completely
different job. Do you think that this is a natural fit? Barbara,
could you chime in on that? You've worked with PLR before; do
you perceive an ability for economies of scale? You are already
used to dealing with writers and used to dealing with this particular
slice of our creative community.
Stella Duffy: I am somebody who
writes in a slightly different field to Louise, and therefore
has really needed the PLR money. I would like to just say about
the PLR money, there are writers who, like Louise, are very successful
commercially, but that isn't the bulk of writers. The bulk of
British writers are earning a third less than the average wage,
and we really want to keep a wide range of types of writing, not
just very commercial, not just very high-end commercial, but the
entire wide range, and PLR is very valuable for that. So I know
the money is ring-fenced, but I think it's worth saying it is
very valuable, particularly for older and midlist writers, people
who are getting into their 60s and 70s—as I hope we all
will be—and still publishing, and who aren't able to do
that great sort of publicity thing that the young writers or the
celebrities can do.
But to speak to PLR and ALCS, yes, of course
it makes much more sense to have two bodies that know each other
and are already working well together, particularly when the Arts
Council has already been asked to make massive cuts and is very
confused about where those cuts are going to be made. As a theatre
worker as well, I do see the Arts Council as working for visual
arts and theatre. Although I know of possibly one writer who has
ever received any funding from the Arts Council directly, I know
lots of theatre practitioners and visual artists who have. These
two bodies seem to me much more adept to work together than any
other large organisation that might want to take over PLR, including
those that are more about the product than about the writer.
Q454 Ms Bagshawe:
Thank you. Barbara, your thoughts?
Barbara Hayes: Well, my
thoughts are initially obviously to congratulate Jim on such a
tight ship at Public Lending Right, and I think perhaps that is
what has caused where we are now—it is as lean as it can
get. It is a very effective and very well thought of organisation,
and our preference of course is to keep PLR exactly where it is
now. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the way that the current
situation is demanding.
With regard to the types of work that we do,
we have certainly had joined-up writing together with regards
to membership recruitment strategies. Things that we were talking
about as a business joint venture included communications and
tracing authors for whom we are holding funds. So it's that type
of work that we could do together, and there are a great number
of synergies going on here. We do not want to be duplicating effort,
so there seemed to be a natural partnership that could develop.
Q455 Ms Bagshawe:
Mr Combes?
Richard Combes: Just to add to
that, another area of overlap that we have had for some years
with PLR is in the international PLR arena, where the UK operation
that Jim has run is open to claimants from anywhere within the
European Economic Area, and ALCS effectively offers the reciprocal
arrangement, whereby UK writers whose works are lent in the various
overseas PLR schemes claim their money through ALCS. So we are
effectively running parallel operations of a sort already, and
I think Jim has done a very important job over the years as an
advocate for PLR. There are schemes growing up over Europe constantly.
European law requires it, but it still takes a while to get the
political traction to actually have the schemes and the adequate
funding in place. I think Jim has done very important and significant
work over the years to hold up the UK PLR model as a sort of blueprint
for best practice, and UK writers then benefit through the collections
that ALCS makes on their behalf. So I think we see that international
angle as another important area where we can continue to build
our joint efforts.
Q456 Ms Bagshawe:
Mr Parker, one thing I consoled myself with when thinking that
I was never getting my PLR cheques was my understanding is they
go back into a fund if they are not claimed and they help writers
who will have more need of them than I do lower down the list.
As Stella has quite rightly said, most authors don't make very
much money, and with the way in which publishers are driving the
industry at the moment, the midlist, as we all know, is under
great threat. So to maintain the diversity of the UK's publishing
industry, PLR is really important for sustaining writers. Given
that, I am interested in your earlier evidence as to why you would
have felt that the Arts Council would be a better fit than ALCS,
which after all is an organisation that specialises in writers
and has the expertise in writers. We are such a small community,
such a small but precious fragment of the creative community in
this country, and it would seem to me to be the overarchingly
obvious choice in the first place. What made you think that the
Arts Council, with its specialisation in the visual arts, might
be more suitable?
Jim Parker: Well, I wasn't presented
with a choice. At that stage, I was told that Ministers were minded
to abolish the PLR organisation and for our responsibilities to
be transferred to another publicly-funded body within the DCMS
family. The question of a possible privatisation, if you could
call it that, did not come up. It seemed to me that were we to
be taken over by another body within the DCMS family, the Arts
Council seemed at that point as reasonable as any other bodies
within the department. Had it been a wider discussion and had
I been asked, "What about a possible partnership or responsibilities
being transferred to a private sector body?", then of course
I would have been most interested in the ALCS option. That only
emerged in later months, I think it is fair to say, because it
just didn't seem to be an option when I was first told that we
were being abolished.
Q457 David Cairns:
I'm very keen to ask this question, as you know. Obviously there's
been a campaign for a while on PLR on audio books and e-books,
which seems to have been the victim of the spending cuts. If PLR
was extended to audio and e-books what would be the additional
quantum of cash that would be available to writers?
Jim Parker: We did some work on
this, if you're asking how much more money we would need to include
the writers involved with audio books and e-books. It was fairly
straightforward to work out audio books, because we had statistics;
e-books are still quite new and it was less easy, but I had a
ballpark figure of something like £600,000.[1]
But I have to say that included provision to develop the software
that we needed to put in the libraries to collect the information.
As you know, we collect details of book loans from libraries across
the country, and we have specific software to do that, which we
have developed for several years. E-books are slightly different,
so we made some estimates, and the ballpark figure was around
£600,000. Does that answer your question?
Q458 David Cairns:
Yes, and I was going to ask about what percentage of library lending
is audio. I wasn't aware that you could borrow an e-book.
Jim Parker: Yes.
David Cairns: How does that work?
Jim Parker: It is early days and
something like 40 library authorities across England are, let
us say, dabbling with e-books and one or two of the larger ones,
like Essex, make them available in a variety of formats. If you
are a library user, you can access a virtual library of e-books
from your home with a choice of whatever you want to download,
or an alternative is to go into the library with your Sony reader
or your Kindle and to download an e-book on to that and take it
away in a more traditional format.
Chair: Does it disappear after 30 days
or something?
Jim Parker: It has a two-week
period, yes.
Chair: Two weeks. It's a Mission Impossible
library loan.
Jim Parker: But I have to say
there have recently been some problems, and the publishing community
is very worried about the format that allows people to download
at home. They are worried about security and copying and a number
of publishers have withdrawn that privilege, and you will be aware
as a Committee that there is quite a tough debate going on at
the moment between the library community and the publishing community
about those sorts of home downloads.
David Cairns: Yes, we are familiar with
download debates, which we will not reopen here. You say that
e-books are still in its infancy and there are only 40 libraries
doing it. In terms of audio books then, which have been going
for much longer, what percentage of overall lending is actually
done via audio books as opposed to books?
Jim Parker: There is something
like 310 million book loans a year and 8 million audio book loans,
so that gives you a sense of how many are being used. It is something
of a long-running sore for authors and the narrators—of
course, the people who narrate the audio books would have been
covered by this extension, and I feel saddest for them in a way,
because they are not getting anything at the moment for the physical
loan of an audio book.
Q459 David Cairns:
But to pick up on Louise's point—forgive my ignorance here,
and I am happy to be corrected for being very wrong—is it
the case that the books that are turned into audio books of their
nature tend to be at the slightly more popular end of the market
in any case, and if you are midlist or whatever the phrase for
bottom of the list is, it's not likely that your book is going
be an audio book. So that is going to, or could, benefit the people
at the upper end? Is it the case that this would mainly benefit
more popular writers, like Tony Blair?
Chair: I am currently listening to Peter
Mandelson reading his book in my car, so I don't know whether
that qualifies as more popular.
Stella Duffy: Can I jump in on
this? Yes, that is true. By midlist, we actually tend to mean
authors who are in the middle of their career, rather than the
books that are selling middle way—
David Cairns: Sorry, I apologise.
Stella Duffy: —as opposed
to bottom of the list as well, but in terms of speaking for the
narrators, an ordinary person doing a voiceover as a performer
would get either a buyout or residuals. What is happening with
the audio books is that they're not getting what are in effect
residuals, so by taking away the audio books we are doing the
narrators—who are sometimes the writer, but generally a
performer—out of money in what is, in every other way, a
normal acting contract. The same goes for the writers. But certainly,
to speak for the narrators, they are losing out.
Q460 Chair: That is
interesting. If the writer was getting only 6.25p for a published
written book, how would that divide between a narrator and a writer?
Stella Duffy: I don't know what
per cent they make.
Chair: Had you got that far?
Jim Parker: We were poised to
discuss that, but we have a precedent, because within the existing
scheme, we make payments to writers, illustrators, editors and
translators and we have a number of precedents for shares of PLRs
and intellectual property rights. For example, for a classic children's
book the illustrator gets 50% and the writer gets 50%, so I would
think we would do something similar with the narrators and the
authors—a 50:50 split or something of that nature.
Q461 David Cairns:
I realise this is relatively academic, because it is not going
to happen, but—perhaps this is a kind of redistributive
social democratic point—if you had an extra £600,000
to go into the overall pot of money, would it be the best use
of it to give that money to writers who are already doing quite
well, because they are up in the top PLR, or would it not be better
to use that money either to increase the PLR to 6.5p, or to use
it in some other way for writers who are less borrowed, to take
up Louise's point, and who need a bit more support? If this proposal
were to be taken up, would it not just feather the nests of people
who are already doing quite well?
Jim Parker: I was thinking more
about your original point, of who are the people who are borrowed
in audio book form, and they are not all the bestsellers. Books
that are popular, such as the vet books in North Yorkshire and
those sorts of books, are written by people who are not necessarily
bestsellers or who are not writing books now they have retired,
as Stella was saying. But I try not to make judgments. We tend
to think of PLR as a right, and if you have a right to receive
a payment for the loan of a printed book, it's difficult to say
why you should not have a payment for the loan of your audio book,
even though you may or you may not be doing better than colleagues.
There would still be a maximum payment that kicks in—which,
as you know, is £6,600—and that frees up £1 million
each year for redistribution for people further down the list.
Stella Duffy: The other thing
to say about that is that, looking at it the other way, people
taking out audio books tend to be older and less literate, so
by giving—even though it's only academic—money to
the audio book we are respecting the book "reading",
and the book use of people who don't normally read or who may
not be able to read now because they are older and their sight
is not as good. That is a really important acknowledgement, I
think, that we keep book availability to everybody, not just—
Q462 Dr Coffey: How
do you know that to be true?
Stella Duffy: How do I know that
to be true?
Dr Coffey: Because that's a major statement.
Stella Duffy: What, that people
who use audio books tend to be older?
Dr Coffey: Yes.
Stella Duffy: My publishers say
so, all the publishers I know say so—I'm sure Louise's publishers
would say so—and the librarians say so. It is common sense,
isn't it?
Dr Coffey: Not necessarily, no.
Stella Duffy: Okay. I think it
is. I think that all—
Dr Coffey: I'd agree with you about large
print books.
Stella Duffy: No, but I can assure
you from Lambeth libraries anyway, who I do a lot of work with—
Chair: I would observe that—I may
be exceptional—that the great virtue of audio books is that
I spend huge amounts of time in my car.
Stella Duffy: Yes, sure.
David Cairns: But do you borrow them
from libraries? If you buy them, there might be a difference between
people who buy them and people who borrow them from libraries.
Chair: That may be so. I buy them.
Q463 Dr Coffey: Barbara
Hayes, in your evidence you say that PLR forms an important part
of secondary rights income, and you refer to people who are no
longer in commercial circulation, but given the relatively low
level of the PLR payout, are writers really reliant on it, or
is it a bit of a pension?
Barbara Hayes: A little bit of
both, I would suggest. Certainly when PLR was threatened with
cuts—we heard various rumours of 40%, 50% cuts and the like—we
spoke with the writers' unions, the Society of Authors, the Royal
Society of Literature and together we did a petition to go to,
dare I say it, Jeremy Hunt, and we had 4,775 writers sign up to
it. It is very well thought of. We have a huge membership of about
80,000 writers, many of whom are registered for Public Lending
Right. It is very well thought of, and we are assured by these
writers that, for many of them, it forms a very substantial part
of their income.
Q464 Ms Bagshawe:
Would you agree with me, Barbara, that authors have a right to
be paid for their work, in whatever sense it's written and whatever
format it is distributed? I do think it is important to go back
to Jim's point about public lending right being a right. It's
true that I never chose to exercise my right to be paid for the
many thousands of borrowings of my work, but I do have that right
and surely it would be establishing an unfortunate precedent if
the only part of the UK's creative community that was denied the
right to be paid for their work were writers. As a corollary question,
would you comment on the fact that if the average writer is earning
a small wage for their work, because sales are not great—and
they aren't for the vast majority of books that are published—it
is vitally important for those writers to be able to maximise
whatever income they can from whatever stream is available to
them, including the use of their work in libraries.
Barbara Hayes: I can only say
the word absolutely to both comments that you've made there. Back
in 2007, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society commissioned
some research into authors' earnings, and I have a booklet here
that obviously I can leave with the Select Committee. It says:
"The top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of the total income,
while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of the total income".
Certainly our experience in the Authors' Licensing and Collecting
Society is that we have a lot of writers who are not novelists.
They are business writers, or medical writers—there is a
whole breadth of different types of writers—and they all
rely on the secondary income from their works. Quite often this
may be some time down the road. It might not be in the first year
of publication; it could be eight or ten years later. It could
be once they have retired, and these cheques that come in are
an absolute lifeline for them. That covers both the secondary
royalties that we collect at ALCS as well as Public Lending Right.
Q465 Ms Bagshawe:
Dr Coffey asked the question, "Is it a really important part
of writers' income or is a bit of a pension?" I would say
that I don't really see the distinction, because those writers
who have worked for a long time and are no longer publishing,
but who have established a corpus of work that is in our libraries
and are receiving income on it, have every much a right to be
paid and derive income from the ongoing use of their works, whether
they continue to publish or not. Would you agree with that?
Barbara Hayes: That's exactly
right. It is a right. People should have the—
Dr Coffey: Is that a leading question?
Ms Bagshawe: It might be. I have declared
my interest.
Barbara Hayes: As a writers' organisation,
what we are seeking to do is to make sure that our writers benefit
as far as is reasonably possible under the schemes available to
them to receive money for the use and the reuse of their work.
Stella Duffy: Where we see writers'
rights in our intellectual property and then our copyright going
all over the place, across the board, not least with Google basically
taking our work and digitising it—which has now resulted
in the Google Class Settlement Act—it's really important
that we acknowledge it is a right. This is my work, your work,
all of our work—anyone who has published in this room. Our
work goes out there and if we don't want people to pay to enter
a library, which I am sure none of us does, we need to allow those
writers to be paid in some way.
Ms Bagshawe: Yes.
Q466 Chair: It is
a right, is it?
Stella Duffy: Yes.
Chair: Why then it is artificially capped
at £6,600? Surely if your books are being borrowed, you should
be rewarded for every loan?
Ms Bagshawe: That is a very good question.
It ought not to be capped.
Stella Duffy: Would you sign up
if it wasn't capped?
Ms Bagshawe: Personally, I voluntarily
do not claim my PLR. As a matter of fact, I think the Chairman's
question is extremely relevant. Based on the fact that PLR is
a right, is it not somewhat contradictory then for collecting
societies on the one hand to be arguing that it is a right which
ought to be exploited for our work, and on the other saying that
it is maximally capped? Is not Sophie Kinsella, for example, entitled
to receive all the income that she chooses, and might it not be
better for collecting societies to offer bestselling authors a
voluntary cap, but not to make it mandatory, because that takes
away their right to be paid for the exploitation of their work.
Surely the positions are inherently contradictory?
Stella Duffy: There are a lot
of those bestselling writers who put the money back in, famously,
and quite often say so in public.
Ms Bagshawe: But surely that should be
voluntary on behalf of the people who own the copyright of the
works that are being exploited in public libraries? Why is the
cap mandatory?
Stella Duffy: I don't know.
Q467 Chair: Who imposed
the cap? Did you impose the cap or did the Government impose the
cap?
Jim Parker: Chairman, perhaps
I can help you. It's always been part of the legislation and all
I can say is that Parliament felt it was fair in the early discussions.
It is perhaps difficult to picture now, but in the 1970s when
Maureen Duffy and the authors were fighting for PLR—it took
30 years—it was quite a controversial piece of legislation
and it was the tenth bill that got through finally in 1979. So
a lot of compromises, if I can describe them in that way, were
built in and in the end it was a rough and ready scheme. I wouldn't
claim it was any more than that. It is now part of European law,
but there are rough and ready aspects to it that most people seem
to accept, although they may seem slightly contradictory.
Dr Coffey: Do you think there will be
more money available? I think libraries are not allowed to buy
from Amazon and similar to stock their shelves; they have to buy
from publishers at full list price. Do you think more money would
be made available if they could decide where and how they bought
their books?
Jim Parker: I wasn't aware that
they couldn't buy from Amazon. I thought that they could.
Dr Coffey: I'd better check my facts,
but I think they are not allowed to.
Jim Parker: I thought they could
buy from anywhere, so you have me at a disadvantage, I'm afraid.
Q468 Chair: Can I
just come back to the main question, which is the future of PLR?
We have heard from Jim and Stella, but can I just ask Barbara
and Richard: are you confident that ALCS can take on the role,
and do you believe that you can deliver it at a saving to the
taxpayer, even if it is only a small amount?
Barbara Hayes: As Richard said
earlier, clearly we are already administering public lending right
from overseas, so one would only assume from that there would
be no issue of us continuing to work with PLR to keep the money
coming into writers in the UK. With regard to cost savings, I
think, in all fairness, when we originally did the four-year joint
venture business plan, for want of better words, we were looking
at costs then with regard to how we could make savings between
the two organisations. On communications, for instance, we could
take over or work together on that to reduce costs. So we believed
that there would be cost savings over a given period of time.
We were asked to submit a proposal to DCMS as to how we would
work with PLR in partnership going forward. We have not dug down
into great depths on costs, but there are synergies involved.
Currently, whilst we have a headline rate of 9.5%, our commission
rates over the last three years have been 8%, 5% and then 8% again
this year respectively. So I think we would be pretty confident
that we manage costs as tightly as anybody. Richard, do you have
anything to add?
Richard Combes: As well as the
costs point, I think from the—if we could use the phrase—user
end, the writers, at the moment there are two systems running
in parallel, PLR and the money they get from ALCS. Part of the
thinking behind the work we did with Jim on cost savings was also
to make the whole process less complicated for the writers, because
we hear often in Intellectual Property policy debates that the
system appears to be inherently complicated and it is very difficult
to navigate and understand. Part of our thinking, aside from where
we could make economic savings, was to make the system more user
friendly, with one payment from one organisation. That of itself
should lead to a position where the overheads are cut and the
payment is larger, because, as Barbara said, you are actually
charging a lower administrative fee on the payments.
Q469 Chair: So, although
this wasn't the original intention of the Government, the place
we eventually arrive at might turn out to be better for authors?
Richard Combes: We would hope
so. That is our hope.
Stella Duffy: As someone who has
been an advocate for both ALCS and PLR with other writers, encouraging
writers to sign up for both, people often ask, "Why are there
two?" While they work brilliantly separately, if we are going
to look at cost cutting, as everyone is having to, that certainly
seems like the most sensible combination.
Q470 Chair: Just before
we finish, as you know, our inquiry has focused on the general
question of funding for arts and heritage. Can I just ask you
a couple of broader questions? The first is about private sponsorship.
There is obviously quite a lot of sponsorship from the private
sector in terms of prizes and awards and so on. How important
is that, do you think, to the writing community?
Stella Duffy: For prizes, absolutely.
We had the Costa, we had the Orange, and we had the Whitbread
which became the Costa. Every year I have done events at the Times
Cheltenham Literary Festival. So that is happening. I think for
individual writers, though, it's pretty difficult. We are very
small compared to the bigger bodies. We are, by our nature, generally
individuals. It is like comparing fringe theatre with, you know,
the National. The National can say, "We will rename the Cottesloe",
but a small fringe company can't say, "We'll rename us"
because no one is going to buy into that. It just doesn't work.
Perhaps companies like Improbable, who I work
with, and who are now directing at the Met, now have this opportunity,
but certainly 10 years ago they wouldn't have. Fay Weldon did
it with Bulgari, but then it was widely derided and even though
the book was very good, she still was mocked for it. It is certainly
possible in certain types of literature to name-check and do some
product placement, but as an individual writer trying to go for
those things, that is the hard part. The bigger organisations,
absolutely. Most of the major festivals are already doing it,
as far as I can tell. All of the major prizes are sponsored in
some way.
Q471 Chair: ALCS has
expressed disappointment at Arts Council funding for literature.
Would you like to say a little bit about any discussions you have
had with them on that subject?
Barbara Hayes: From our point
of view we just wanted to make a notation that some of the information
that we obtained from the Arts Council shows that the funding
that they give towards literature is very minute. Our concern,
which we probably had more at the time that it was bandied around
that PLR might come under the Arts Council heading, was about
how little funding towards literature the Arts Council gives,
so there could potentially have been less of a focus for them
on public lending right. The information that we have from them
with regard to the value of regular funding by art form in the
year 2010/11 is £6,028,016 for literature out of a total
of £356,725,517. So you can see percentage-wise it is actually
quite small. So we had some concerns. Also, with any shortfalls
in funding, we are very concerned about some of the small presses
that Stella spoke about earlier, which deal with poetry, short
stories and translation.
Stella Duffy: Places like Comma
Press, Salt Press, Arcadia, who do books in translation; the main
commercial publishers don't do that. There are very few poetry
publishers left in Britain and it's what we're famous for—it's
what this country is known for—and it is particularly hard
for poets to make a living. It is not at all surprising that most
poets are also teaching, but funding is not going to them from
the Arts Council. If they do not keep the small subsidies that
those presses are getting at current levels, not depreciating,
these small presses are going to go under in the next five to
10 years, and that will be a major loss for British literature.
Across the board, the Arts Council tends to perceive writers as
playwrights, not as writers in general, and it is really a different
mindset. We do need to be very careful of these small presses,
because they are easily lost, and they're actually not even asking
for huge amounts of money.
Barbara Hayes: Now there is also
a request that they go back each year and compete for the funding,
and I think our concern here is that society as a whole will lose
out if some of these genres are reduced.
Stella Duffy: I'm published by
Virago, who are owned by Little, Brown, who are owned by Hachette.
The big publishers are all owned by the big people. We are one
of the few countries left in the world that have really exciting
independent presses, and I started with an independent press.
I started with Serpent's Tail. It is exactly the same as our great
theatre practitioner, Stephen Daldry, starting at The Gate and
now being internationally successful. We need to really protect
those small ones, because otherwise it's all going to look the
way the high street does already. The high street looks utterly
homogeneous already and we need to be very careful that our literature
doesn't go the same way.
Q472 Ms Bagshawe:
I have a couple of short questions on that. First of all, I think
that this Committee has had many things to say about the Arts
Council during the course of this inquiry, but would you not agree
that it is slightly unfair to tag the Arts Council with this one,
because word "arts" has two connotations in the first
place: there's the honorific, under which literature falls, and
there's arts meaning the visual arts. I think we would all agree
that when we think of the Arts Council, we primarily think of
the visual arts in their various forms. So it would perhaps not
be expected of the Arts Council to put great amounts of funding
into literature. It is not primarily what most people would see
as its function.
As a corollary though, I'm very worried to hear
you talk about the small literary presses, because as Stella says,
poetry has always been one of this country's greatest strengths.
It costs very little. I don't know if Bloodaxe are still going,
but before I went to the dark side, when I was 18, I was Young
Poet of the Year, and I initially wanted to be a poet until I
discovered that it was completely impossible to make a living
at it. Would it not be a very great shame if, for want of a tiny
amount of funding, which is all it would take, our poetry presses
were not supported? They are not commercially viable. They are
an art that needs subsidy, and if the funding is not to come from
the Arts Council because it concentrates on the visual arts, there
is a need for Government to find a place whence it can come, because
otherwise we are going to lose something which we could save for
a minute investment in the overall scheme of arts and heritage.
Stella Duffy: Absolutely. I think
the figures show that it's like 28 or 30 individual small presses,
and that is all they are, but they are the only ones that are
publishing poetry in this country at all at the moment on a regular
basis. Yes, occasionally some of the larger presses will do an
anthology, but not on a regular basis, and they are not finding
the new poets either. By that we don't always mean young, or people
under 25. Sometimes a new poet may be in their 50s or 60s. Some
of the people in this room may end up becoming poets, but we need
to support that vitally. We are people who are making writing
and art. It is not the Arts Council's fault that they have concentrated
on these other things, but we need to support the Arts Council
in supporting the small presses and reminding them that we are
grateful for it.
Ms Bagshawe: I would only add that if
you go in and look at those few bookshops that do have poetry
sections, a good 95% of them are anthologies.
Stella Duffy: Yes.
Q473 Ms Bagshawe:
So it is incredibly difficult to find the Geoffrey Hills, the
Seamus Heaneys, the Ted Hughes of the future, which this country
has always been so brilliant in producing. We see some initiatives,
like poems on the Tube, which have been incredibly popular. Is
there not a case for you at ALCS, if you take over PLR as a body
for writers, to add to your function of collecting and distributing
income, lobbying on behalf of writers and lobbying for this kind
of subsidy to be directed to our poetry presses from the Arts
Council and so on?
Barbara Hayes: ALCS very much
have the writers' interests at heart and the lobbying that we
have done in the past, which on many occasions has been to do
with public lending right, there will be no reason to suggest
that we wouldn't have the writers' interests at heart, and these
are areas that we could look at to lobby further, yes.
Chair: I think that is all we have for
you. Thank you very much.
1 Witness correction: From memory £600,000 was
the first estimate that I gave DCMS when the proposal to extend
PLR in this way first came up. This was subsequently reduced by
DCMS to £337,000 in the supporting information provided at
the time of the Digital Economy Act. Back
| 
