There’s an irony that turnout in Local Elections rises whenever issues being discussed on the doorstep are national. That will be the case on May 6th this year. As well as the UK General Election there will be English local elections in all 32 London Boroughs, all 36 Metropolitian Boroughs, 76 Second-tier District Authorities, and 20 Unitary Authorities.
I’ve written before about the scale of investment by Local Government in Culture and Sport in England, but it bears repeating. Currently there’s an annual net investment of £3.3 Billion. That doesn’t include grants from other sources and it doesn’t include capital investment. Big numbers nationally, but very variable when you get down to individual local authorities.
A couple of years ago (and with a different professional hat on), I did some simple analysis of local government investment in the arts, taking the official CIPFA figures for net spend by each local authority and dividing it by the total population in each area to give a spend per head.
I couldn’t believe what I found so I got a professional researcher to check my workings. They were right.
Of the then 149 County and Unitary Authorities in England, 12 were investing more than £10 per person per annum. 14 were investing less than £1. One was actually investing minus 8p/person. How could it be a negative number? The authority in question had actually spent less on the arts than it received in external arts grants that year.
Sadly I don’t have up to date figures to share with you at a Local Authority level. They are out there, but you have to pay to get them. A few years ago there was a tool on the internet that could tell you the gross spend in each authority, but that included external grants and counted twice what local authorities gave to each other. And now I can’t find it anyway. It’s certainly not part of the Audit Commission’s otherwise very useful ‘Oneplace’ website for Local Government data (which suggests the title may need to be reviewed).
Audiences UK will pay to get this data (although it thinks it should be freely available). But in the meantime you might want to ask your prospective local Councillor:
1. How much your local Council invests per person on Culture and Sport?
2. How this compares to the national average?
3. How hard they’ll fight to defend this investment?
Of course, it’s not all about the money: an awful lot of talented arts officers manage to deliver marvels with peanuts. But even peanuts will be under threat in the next spending round unless Councillors understand the value of culture and sport and are prepared to fight for it.
David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK
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