Good Data. Bad News.

For the last decade I have heard tales of doom and gloom around cuts to local authority funding of the arts and culture. Anecdotal evidence of a reduction in investment seemed to be backed up by a variety of surveys showing an increasingly depressing picture.

A few years back I noticed that the DCMS was quoting a large round number on the scale of local authority investment in culture and sport. The nice people at the Audit Commission (RIP) then pointed me in the direction of the robust data that was being used as the basis for the DCMS claims.

For anyone who is interested, I can recommend the financial stats section of the CLG website as data geek heaven. Frequently updated, it provides recent predicted and actual income and expenditure for a vast range of consistent budget headings for each individual local authority and aggregated for the whole of England.

Looking through the 'real' data tells a very different story. Overall in England, support for culture as a whole and the arts specifically has risen and risen. I'm not saying there haven't been cuts: the arts service in my local district was wiped out a few years ago and I have seen other services in adjacent authorities subsequently toppling like dominoes. 

But the fact remains that despite some cuts, the overall amount of investment made by local government in the arts has continued to rise.  How do you explain the divergence between general perception and reality?  Partly human nature I think: if you are angry because you have just had a cut in your budget, you’re more likely to want other people to know and therefore you are more likely to fill in the survey form.  I would also guess (and this is a guess as I haven’t analysed the figures) that there may well have been a cut in Districts and Counties that has been more than made up for by large unitary authorities, many of whom have increased their investment to support new Lottery funded buildings.

The top line ‘actual’ figures for 2010/11 have just been released.  This was not a year of big cuts: overall across all Council services they show an increase in expenditure of 1.8%.  But expenditure on ‘Cultural Services’ reduced by 5.9%.

More detailed figures will be available later this year and we’ll be able to see the trend for libraries, leisure, arts, etc.  I can guarantee it won’t make pleasant reading, but the 2011/12 sequel (when the big national cuts in funding to local government start to kick in) will be even more of a shocker.  And it’s likely to get worse and worse over the current spending round.

I’m talking to an increasing number of cultural sector who are now seeing that while they breathed a small sigh of relief that the national cuts to arts organisations weren’t as big as they imagined they could have been, the major damage will come through savage reductions in local government funding.

Regular readers of this blog will know we’ve been saying this for some time.  We’ve also discussed the current scale of local government funding for the arts compared to Arts Council (in a nutshell, you can’t make direct comparisons but they would appear to be very similar). 

You may have heard moans and groans from local government in the past about cuts to the arts and culture, but now it is being savaged for real and this could go on for years.  We know the importance of high quality cultural experiences to local communities and the positive impact the cultural sector can have for local economies.  Well directed local government funding shouldn’t be a cost to a Council: it should be investment that reaps significant returns for their communities.  The official figures suggest in many places this message is not getting through.

It may not be glamorous, but given the scale and importance of council support, isn’t it time that all leaders in the sector individually and collectively started prioritising making the case for sustained local government investment in culture?

David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK