Written evidence submitted by Exeter City
Council (arts 62)
SUMMARY
— Exeter City Council believes that cultural
services play an important part in shaping the identity and role
of the city.
— Cuts to local government services, possibly
branded as reductions in local bureaucracy, will reduce real services
promoting grass roots participation.
— Strategic organisations such as Primary
Care Trusts and Children's Trusts should play an active role in
commissioning physical activity and education services from local
authority specialists.
— Lack of trust in local authorities on
the part of national funding bodies has led to a deadening of
innovation and initiative, substantial extra costs to micro-manage
projects at each respective hierarchical level, and a loss of
value from potentially good ideas.
STRATEGIC
1. Exeter City Council has been for a long
time a supporter of the arts and heritage, both in a direct form,
through the provision of services, and indirectly through the
financial support of key cultural institutions in the city. The
City Council believes that such support is an important part of
making the city a pleasant and desirable place to live and work.
Both forms of support benefit a much wider catchment than the
residents of the city, but that is seen as an important element
of what being a city, with a hinterland, means.
THE IMPORTANCE
OF GRASS
ROOTS CULTURAL
SERVICES
2. There has been a great deal of concern
nationally at the proposed cuts in cultural funding at national
level. It is important to note however that a substantial proportion
of funding to the arts, the heritage and to physical activity
and sport comes not from DCMS and the national agencies but from
councils of every type; cuts to local government in the future,
which may be branded as being cuts to bureaucracy, red tape and
non-essential administration, will actually result in a severe
diminution of the ability of both councils and their local voluntary
sector to provide real practical support for those grass roots.
It is at the grass roots where the real contributions of the cultural
sector to health, to education, to social cohesion and the general
quality of life are made, and by and large only councils and the
voluntary sector (itself receiving funding from councils very
often) are doing that work. Moreover most councils support culture
and sport not mainly for their own sake, but for the positive
impact participation has on the individual and the community,
especially in respect to young people. It will be increasingly
important therefore that as we go into a period of stringency,
that the agencies responsible for health, education, and the other
social priorities work with local government in a way they have
failed to do hitherto, through commissioning and partnership to
reach outcomes which both sides value.
3. A little money goes a long way at local
level. To quote an Exeter example, the City Council is at the
moment considering whether it should cut the entirety of two of
its leisure-related services. These are generally considered to
be of excellent quality, they are almost the only services of
their kind left in Devon already and they reach thousands of young
people every year, many of them on a regular basis. Removing these
services altogether will save only £180,000, and yet the
position is such that even a sum this small may well be required
for the City Council to balance the books. The work these teams
are doing however, at minimal cost, feeds directly into the desired
outcomes of the Primary Care Trust and the Children's Trust, who
make little or no contribution. A small change in the attitude
of these very large bodies will easily save the important work
which local councils are doing in the fields of health and education.
4. If this type of locally based service
which meets local needs disappears during the next two years,
its loss will be obscured on the one hand by the attention generated
by high profile national cuts to cultural services and on the
other by universal cuts to all local services. The result however
will be national in scale.
TRUST, INNOVATION
AND EFFICIENCY
4. Exeter has in the past been lucky enough
to be the recipient of a great deal of capital grant and project
funding from many sources, from very large Heritage Lottery grants
to a wide range of revenue funding streams. All funders naturally
have their own requirements in respect of detailed applications,
planning the work, reporting on outcomes and demonstrating accountability.
However we have noticed an accelerating tendency in recent years
towards more detailed conditions, procedures and reporting. It
has almost become a joke that the lottery distributors, each time
they publish a new three or four year strategy, comment on the
need to simplify applications and make access to lottery funds
easier. Nevertheless each newly simplified application form becomes
gradually more onerous, usually requiring applicant organisations
to commit more of their own funding and time, before being certain
of any support from the distributor. However it seems that once
a lottery distributor has made a grant, it is more likely to monitor
lightly and check key performance indicators only—trusting
the recipient to deliver.
5. Such trust is less and less the case
with treasury funding channelled through the non-departmental
public bodies however. Renaissance in the Regions for example,
at the beginning a shining example of how a national money could
be used at local and regional level, has become more and more
restricted by the need to plan projects, and then report quarterly
in minute detail, to a series of regulations and rules of procedure
which change frequently and at short notice. Needless to say this
strangles innovation, destroys trust and sucks value out of genuinely
groundbreaking projects. Museums in the South West hub have to
employ staff, at Renaissance cost, and therefore reducing what
is available to improve the service, just to compile figures and
report to the hub, which reports to MLA, which no doubt reports
to DCMS. This stranglehold on initiative has become increasingly
tighter, leading some smaller museum services to wonder whether
being part of the scheme is actually beneficial at all. Exeter's
museum service Renaissance operation was recently audited three
times within a two month period—once by its own internal
audit, once by an MLA team and once by another team which was
actually auditing MLA's performance through Renaissance.
6. It is notable in all such cases that
the museum's own, probably local authority, budget is larger than
the Renaissance contribution, and yet the burdens of accounting
for Renaissance income far outweigh those of the normal operation.
We must question whether the auditing and monitoring requirement
isn't costing a good deal more than can possibly be saved by trying
to squeeze out all risk. The costs of damping down ingenuity and
initiative under oppressive bureaucratic systems can never be
truly assessed, but the actual cost of staff needed to do the
counting, calculating, controlling and quantifying can, and must
now add up to a substantial proportion of the budget.
7. We would not argue that all controls
should be abolished. There is clear need to account for public
money; but most of the bodies handling these national funding
streams are themselves public bodies, with rigorous accounting
and auditing teams. It makes no sense to duplicate them. Likewise
outcomes must be monitored, but the risk averse, anti-intuitive
systems which have been imposed on what are essentially creative
schemes of work do little good, and a great deal of damage. In
a climate where such funding will be rare and much prized, it
would add great value if funding bodies trust their partners a
little more, and learn to rely on their instinct for what works
locally and how a service should be delivered.
September 2010
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