Arts Council England: Regional Distribution of Funding

Both those perspectives reveal the decades-old practice of neglect that results in many cities suffering from a cultural deficit, denying them the prestige and economic rewards of successful artistic institutions. Worse still, this means that hundreds of thousands of people, particularly those who are underprivileged or living on tighter budgets, have virtually no opportunity to access arts and benefit from them. That is a serious problem. Study after study shows that interaction with the arts positively influences people’s mental health, helps with depression and anxiety, and builds bridges between cultures and worldviews. In other words, it is a vital part of the existence of a civilised society, and no one should be denied it.

The current disparities between the capital and other cities and between the wealthy and the underprivileged can be resolved only locally through education; by teaching young people how to enjoy the arts, helping them to develop the tenderness needed to do so, and assisting them in the recovery of the wealth of experience waiting behind the doors of theatres, operas, philharmonics, museums and galleries. However, in order to do so, such places must first exist within reach of those people, which in many cities and towns is simply not the case. For that reason, I very much welcome Arts Council England’s decision to increase funding granted to artistic organisations outside London, as well as its encouragement for London-based organisations to relocate to less culturally overserved cities. That is a much-needed policy change and will help to address some of the most pressing inequalities in our country.

At the same time, it is incredibly important that this historic change is carried out carefully and prudently. It is a fact that decades of preferential treatment made London one of the most culturally and artistically fascinating places in Europe, and indeed in the world. It is a source of immense soft power, an economic and creative powerhouse, and the pride of our country. We must ensure that levelling up does not come at the cost of defunding high-quality arts in our capital city, which would result in London lagging behind other European capitals. Rather, its wealth of expertise and talent should be leveraged to support other cities in developing their own cultural industries, not sacrificed on the altar of misunderstood equality.

It has been said many times in this Chamber, but perhaps it needs to be repeated once again, that, in levelling up, we want to help other regions to develop and grow, not to drag London down just because it is simpler to do so. Unfortunately, it appears that Arts Council England’s latest funding allocations have partially fallen victim to the easier version of levelling up. Such cuts come at the worst time, as the creative sector’s recovery continues to be hampered by soaring costs due to the cost-of-living crisis. Take, for example, the funding of £17 million that has been allocated to move English National Opera. That amount is far from what is needed to undertake a relocation on this scale, let alone to invest in and improve on the existing infrastructure. In effect, it is removing funding from the ENO and forcing it to move out of London at a few weeks’ notice, with no consultation or concrete plan for the transition. Arts Council England seems to pursue an oversimplified vision that lets it use a narrative of “levelling up” without doing any real long-term work to make it succeed in practice.

It is true that most British cities need and deserve better access to opera, especially so since Arts Council England cut the funding of the Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne touring, effectively cancelling two very successful undertakings that bring opera to people throughout England. At the same time, however, simply transplanting a 100 year-old institution with hundreds of employees from London to another city as a solution is not the best way to proceed.

If Manchester suffered from a deficit of green areas, would the Government propose to dig out a decades-old tree from Hyde Park and move it 160 miles north? Of course, it would be theoretically possible to do so, but it would also be ridiculously expensive and inefficient, and the tree in all likelihood would not survive the operation. The same can be said of English National Opera. It is firmly rooted in London, thriving in the ecosystem that was carefully cultivated for years and at the same time sustaining a symbiotic relationship with its audience. The very proposition to move it is controversial; to attempt to do so with virtually no preparation would be simply an act of lunacy.

What is more, without English National Opera, London will have just one major opera company, the Royal Opera House, which offers a different opera experience, perhaps at the luxury end of the market. Berlin and Paris each have three opera companies; Vienna has four. Not only does this mean fewer opportunities to engage with opera and art, but it threatens the jobs of over 600 skilled art workers, including musicians and technical and support staff, who are embedded in the wider London cultural scene. This reduces opportunities for new rising stars who, in turn, will be more likely to work abroad, and puts an already challenged industry at even greater risk.

I ask Arts Council England to reconsider its approach to operas, especially since it casts a shadow on an otherwise well-designed and much-needed set of proposals. The overall direction of the policy is most welcome, and I am very much looking forward to the long-term benefits that it will bring to our towns and cities. I only hope it will not come at the expense of some of the most accessible and progressive operas this country has known. Instead, I am hopeful that the steadfast support that they have received—with 77,000 people so far signing a petition—will be enough to convince Arts Council England, and indeed the Government, to reinstate the funding and continue their mission. I also hope that the expertise and experience of these institutions will be used to replicate their success, not lost in a misguided attempt to make funding distribution look more appealing on paper.

We are so fortunate in the UK to have such a wealth of world-leading arts institutions They are good for the soul of the nation, they sustain a burgeoning creative arts sector and they can lead to the regeneration of whole communities. I remember how, when Liverpool won European Capital of Culture in 2008, it was the rocket fuel to drive the city economically and culturally forward. Arts Council England needs always to ensure that the rocket fuel is distributed equitably and fairly.

I visit a lot of cultural organisations around the country. Wherever I go, I am normally joined by someone from one of our arm’s-length bodies. In every case, whether they are from Arts Council England, Historic England or the National Lottery Heritage Fund, they have such deep expertise and knowledge of towns, places, politics and cultural structure that I am often amazed. This portfolio was constructed by region and area councils, using a lot of information from applicants with deep local knowledge, and was ultimately approved by Arts Council England’s national council, on which my noble friend Lady Fleet sits. So it is very much a collective decision.

I am pleased with the portfolio, which includes quite a lot of vitality in the sense that it includes 276 new organisations for the very first time. London remains the biggest region funded by Arts Council England, but its funding outside London has increased by 22%, which is the general direction of travel that it has been moving in for some time. People often think that Arts Council England funds only the performing arts, but the range of organisations that it funds is much wider. It includes museums, literature, some heritage and so on; there is a lot of other material in there.

Some of my favourite organisations in this round include Mind the Gap, a wonderful organisation in Bradford—it is probably the leading one in the UK—that helps learning-disabled children in performance and the arts. It is an incredible organisation; its grant was increased by 25%. I am also a big fan of museums. A number of museums were in the portfolio for the first time, including Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Bradford Museums and Galleries and Rotherham Museum. Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums is a stalwart and is now the biggest museum NPO in the country. Another one of my favourites, to give noble Lords an idea of the variety here, is the North Yorkshire Moors Railway—also a new entrant in this round. It is an organisation responsible for 1,000 jobs, 1,000 volunteers and 300,000 visitors.

So, in my view, we have a very good portfolio. However, Arts Council NPO status is not a necessary condition for success. Last week, the Minister referred to the Culture Recovery Fund, through which we were able to award grants to more than 5,000 organisations—clearly many more than even applied to Arts Council England. There is a massive arts and culture economy out there and not all of it requires Arts Council NPO backing. Also, the portfolio will change again next time. In many ways, it is good that the portfolio changes and that organisations both come in and leave. It is an indicator of vitality and life, and an indicator that Arts Council England is alive to investing in new places, new areas and new people.

I want to explain to noble Lords that Arts Council England NPO funding is not the only cultural intervention that arm’s-length bodies—or government, for that matter—make. Over the past few years, since I have been at DCMS, there have been many extraordinary initiatives and projects that continue to help the Government invest in the cultural sector, which they see as extremely important, from some smaller interventions to larger ones.

For example, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, referred to the European Capital of Culture. Our City of Culture programme is really successful. We have had Hull in recent years, Coventry has just finished and we are looking forward to Bradford in 2025. It looks as if there has been almost £700 million in investment into Hull over the last few years, partly as a result of that, and £173 million has gone into Coventry directly as a result of City of Culture. We know that, as the noble Lord said, in Liverpool it was the booster, the rocket that went under it. It is no accident that the Liverpool cultural sector represents 50% of the revenues into that city. I regularly meet the cultural director there, Claire McColgan, and organisations such as the Everyman, the Liverpool Phil, National Museums Liverpool and Liverpool Cathedral. It all comes together to make the place an incredibly lively whole.

We have also had the cultural investment fund, a £250 million manifesto commitment. We are halfway through giving out a number of grants, and in a recent round we gave out funds from DCMS for culture-related projects in Barnsley, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stockport, Torbay, Middlesbrough and the Isle of Wight. I am trying to give noble Lords an impression of the other things going on in this area, levelling up the country and introducing regional fairness to cultural intervention. Historic England has a wonderful programme called high streets heritage action zones, through which it invests in places street by street, with 67 towns and cities receiving almost £100 million of government money.

Partly as a result of the pandemic, over the last few years there have been some very large interventions, such as the Culture Recovery Fund and the film and television restart fund, both approved by the then Chancellor and now Prime Minister. As a result of the film and television restart fund alone, during the pandemic film and television had a record year: £5.6 billion of spend around the country. We are looking forward to the announcement soon of the second round of the levelling-up fund, which I hope will include a large number of culture projects. Please look out for that over the next period.

I hope the Minister will agree with me that these sorts of cultural interventions are more important than ever, and it is more important than ever that distribution is fair to maximise the opportunity for people all over the country to experience culture and to work in these fast-growing sectors.

In some senses, in order to rob Peter to pay Paul, we have robbed them both. On many occasions in this House, I have commended the help that Rishi Sunak gave the creative industries, and I reiterate how grateful we were for that. But it seems crazy that the future of some of those big organisations, which received large amounts of money, is now in doubt because we are going to take such large amounts back. That surely has to be looked at.

On touring, I was on the Arts Council committee that identified areas of the country that were underprovided for in terms of opera. We came up with a list. The problem is that these cuts undo some of the very work that the Arts Council did. Glyndebourne Touring and the Welsh National Opera go to the places we identified. There has to be a continued line of thinking here.

I come to one or two of the other groups that have suffered. Here is an example of what we might do: why did the Arts Council not talk to the ENO, without uprooting it to Manchester? Anybody who has worked in an opera house—I was on the board of the Royal Opera House and have written three operas—will tell you that you cannot uproot an opera company and put it somewhere else, especially when something like Opera North is already there.

I was on the board of the Royal Opera House when it shut down for refurbishment and it was seriously suggested that we should shut the Royal Ballet for two years. Luckily, I was able to get in touch with one or two funders, such as Lord Sainsbury and Vivien Duffield. When I told them that this was being planned, they rang up and said, “You can say goodbye to all our funding”, because anybody who knows anything about art knows you cannot just stop training. Like an Olympic athlete or the England football team, you have to train all year round. What about all those young dancers coming through? That idea was scotched very soon.

May I draw a medical analogy? While I completely agree that we need funds around the country, there are specialist groups which earn their money. Take the London Sinfonietta, which has lost 41% of its grant. You could say that the work it commissions is niche or the high end of contemporary music, but this is the one company doing it. In my mind, this is not unlike how, in London, we need one or two centres of excellence, because you cannot have that excellence around the country. Think of neurosurgery, for example; many cases will be referred to the hospital in Queen Square, which is so good at it. A child with a terrible paediatric problem will be referred to Great Ormond Street. There is nothing against having one or two centres of excellence that specialise, such as the London Sinfonietta.

Many companies, such as the Britten Sinfonia, cannot understand why they have been cut, given that they have made huge efforts to do what the Arts Council said it wanted. Britten Sinfonia has involved 8,000 children in the east of England and commissioned more than 250 works. It travels to Addenbrooke’s to play music to patients, and it travels to His Majesty’s Prison Whitemoor. What more do you want? That is going out of London, making a base in Cambridge and involving the local community.

We really have to be careful—rather as with our debate tomorrow about the BBC licence fee—that we do not throw the baby out with the bath-water. This is what I fear about one or two aspects of this. I would like to quote my fellow Cross-Bench Peer, my noble friend Lady Bull, because she made a very telling point about the Arts Council redistribution in the debate last week. She said:

“My view is that this rethinking should not have been demanded within the short timeframe of a single funding round. In doing so, the February directive from the then Culture Secretary gnawed at the fingers of the arm’s-length principle. Planning for such a fundamental shift requires a much longer horizon if it is to avoid destabilisation, particularly within a sector still recovering from the pandemic, and if it is to lead to sustainable and positive change that delivers for all communities across all parts of the UK.”—[Official Report, 8/12/22; cols.286-87.]

So, yes, let us level up, but with rather more caution than has been shown so far, and more planning and more dialogue with the people concerned.

I always complain that the Government do not fund the arts generously enough, but it is also important that we acknowledge that arts funding in its wider sense is extremely broad and deep. For example, we have the BBC and tax credits for theatres and museums and for television, video games and film—all of which I regard as arts subjects. We also have our regimental museums funded by the Ministry of Defence and the City of London putting approximately £100 million a year into the arts. We have our local councils and our universities—my noble friend Lord Mendoza mentioned that he is on the board of the Ashmolean, a university museum. We have charities: the National Trust runs more museums than any other organisation in the country. We have an incredibly rich ecosystem and very wide and deep arts funding—which, if you added it all up, would probably come to a couple of billion, if not £3 billion, a year—so we are incredibly lucky. Of course, we also have the private sector, including Sky Arts, the Bridge Theatre, a range of private organisations, a thriving music industry, and a publishing industry which never gets enough attention because it does not get an enormous amount of government money, if any. Again, we forget about the rich ecosystem we have in the private sector.

I will pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said when he opened the debate. I was pleased to listen to his speech, because, while he knows a lot more about Liverpool than me, I have spent a lot of time in the city and in Tate Liverpool. We can go to almost any city or big town in the country and see how arts funding can be transformative—and not just in Liverpool; I was thinking about NewcastleGateshead, which effectively created a tourism economy on the back of places such as the Baltic and Sage Gateshead. Another example is Yorkshire Sculpture Park. If you go to Margate, you will see the incredibly galvanising effect that Turner Contemporary has had on it. To complete the picture: there is the amazing work that Roger De Haan of Saga has done just down the road in Folkestone based purely on philanthropy. There you can see—in miniature, if you like—the incredibly galvanising effect that culture can have.

So, when we have complaints to make, we should all realise just how lucky we are in this country. My first complaint is that we never have enough leadership from the Government to make that point about the arts again and again. It remains, on both sides of the House, an embarrassment for politicians to be seen engaging in and supporting the arts; they are still regarded—ridiculously, in my view—as too elitist, but we should sing from the rooftops the contributions that the arts make all over the country. I pause here to praise my noble friend Lord Mendoza on the incredible work he has done as cultural commissioner, particularly during Covid. He was kind enough to mention my White Paper, but, in the privacy of the Chamber, I reveal that he actually wrote it—please do not tell anyone else.

Before she speaks, I also praise my noble friend Lady Fleet, who has done some fantastic work on music education. I was not able to be present in her debate on music education, but her 10-year review has been widely welcomed and is much needed. Again, that is a good example of how government departments can join up—in that case, the Department for Education and DCMS—to push an important agenda.

Talking about music education, I must segue into the one misstep that the Arts Council has made: its absurd decision on the English National Opera, which was taken at short notice and with no consultation at all. People are involved in that decision, not just the singers and orchestra but all the backroom staff. I must also mention the chairman, Harry Brünjes, who has led the ENO for nine years. Not only is he unpaid, but he has put his own money into ENO. It has been a pretty thankless task for him to turn around an organisation that was at a very low ebb nine years ago and widely derided, to get it to the position it is in now: a popular organisation welcoming many young people through its doors who have never seen opera before, engaging in health—for example, through its ENO Breathe campaign to help people with long Covid—and getting out to the regions. He has done everything and more that any Government could ask. His reward, effectively, was a kick in the teeth from the Arts Council. It is unforgiveable—and I say that as someone who has the utmost respect for Darren Henley and the Arts Council.

That was a terrible decision, and it should have been given with much more notice. If there will ever be another decision like that, it should be made as part of a wider strategy stating what the provision for opera is, how we deliver opera as a product—I know this sounds very managerial—most effectively around the country and what role the ENO can play in that. It may sound sentimental to cite individuals, including Stuart Murphy, the chief executive officer, but that is no way to treat people; it sends a terrible signal, and the Arts Council must look again at that decision.

I want to mention two or three other things, very quickly. It is the 70th anniversary of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest. If any noble Lord gets the chance to serve on it, do—it is wonderful. It is like “The Generation Game”: various arts and treasures come in front of you and you decide whether they are part of our cultural fabric. I was lucky enough to stop Jane Austen’s ring being exported to the American popstar Kelly Clarkson; she was very decent about it. It is a reminder that we care very much about cultural objects being linked to our island’s story, just as our friends the Greeks care very much about the Parthenon sculptures, which should be reunited with the frieze in Athens. As the Minister knows full well, although he cannot say so as he is feeling sort of butch and robust about the whole thing, the frieze is like a movie that has been cut in half, with half of it having been taken, against the will of its owners, to another country. That is another thing that must be remedied.

Finally—as the yellow lights flash—one of the key things about levelling up that we should never forget is digital: we can and should get organisations based in London to audiences outside London. It is difficult to measure what a “London organisation” is: Tate has an SW1 address but a presence in Liverpool and St Ives; the National Theatre has an SE1 address but National Theatre Digital is in all our schools, for free.

In conclusion, I fully endorse everything that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said about touring. It really is ridiculous, when we have this incredible cultural scene in this country, that we cannot sort out any help for our musicians for touring in Europe.

Such cultural vandalism feels like virtue signalling, devoid of serious strategic thinking and forced through at speed. When Birmingham Royal Ballet relocated from London in the 1980s, it was undertaken with five years’ consultation with audiences, staff and its new venue home, but there has been no consultation in this instance. The move has to be completed in five months, and the Arts Council has not even bothered to consider where ENO might take up residence; it just has to go “up north”.

One venue that might work given its size is Factory International, Manchester’s soon-to-be multimillion-pound arts venue, itself a recipient of Arts Council funding. But no one asked it, and it has made it clear that it will not change its contemporary focus to accommodate the new tenant. Artistic director John McGrath stated that its goals are

“new works, not the traditional opera repertoire.”

What about the Grand, in Leeds, which has the largest stage in England outside of London? But no—it already hosts the wonderful Opera North. Indeed, the whole venture of moving ENO north seems to be a slap in the face for Opera North, the director of which, Richard Mantle, points out:

“It’s not a new idea to have a large professional opera company performing opera in the North; we’ve been doing it for 40 years”.

Somehow, in the debates about opera prompted by this ENO issue, we perhaps get a hint of what the Arts Council’s views are on both opera and its relationship to northern audiences, or to audiences in general. Darren Henley, the chief executive of the Arts Council, claims that opera needs to change to satisfy a new generation of audiences, who he claims want

“opera … presented in new ways: opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet.”

He suggests that such

“New ideas may seem heretic to traditionalists”.

They seem so to me. They are not novel or radical ideas, but they are cheap and second-rate gimmicks, as far as I am concerned, and they show a disparaging view of audiences and the art form. The premise seems to be the cliché that traditional opera, including some of the greatest music ever composed, appeals only to the fusty, rich upper classes and the privileged.

I am reminded of the incident last July, when the Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, accused Angela Rayner of being a champagne socialist for going to Glyndebourne, as though she were betraying somehow the working classes. I assume he was forgetting that, historically, opera has been a popular art form, enjoyed by millions of people of all social classes, all over the world. Being priced out by expensive tickets or not being able to afford to get the train to London is a problem, but it is very different from the snobbish chippiness that seems to imbue the political and artistic establishments’ implicit prejudice that the plebs will not be interested in, or get, high art. This attitude was on display recently, when the BBC announced that, in order to attract viewers from lower socioeconomic D and E groups, it will make “lighter” dramas, comedies and sports documentaries and use “factual entertainment competition formats”—yuck. It seems that, if you are poor, you will be given poor-quality programmes.

Perhaps that is too cynical, but the Arts Council director of music, Claire Mera-Nelson, has justified attacks on ENO, which, ironically, was set up nearly 100 years ago with the mission to bring opera to the masses—a noble cause. She said that there is insufficient growth in audience demand for traditionally staged large-scale opera. This seems to be a real bean-counter’s approach to the value of the arts. As acclaimed soprano Danielle de Niese asks:

“Do we need to sell as many tickets as the O2 to be recognised? … Should we declare war on everything that isn’t mainstream enough?”

She asks whether all we will be left with is “reality TV”. She then pleads with those who run the arts and politics to “recognise opera’s value” as art per se. But that seems a forlorn hope because valuing artistic excellence is often treated as an elitist endeavour by too many in arts funding and policy circles.

Since the Blair years and the setting up of the DCMS in the 1990s, arts organisations have been told that they must justify their funding using wordy social and economic criteria. “Art for art’s sake” arguments have too often been traduced as arcane, old-fashioned and self-indulgent, and a focus on aesthetics is assumed to alienate popular appeal. Arts organisations have been forced by funding carrots and sticks to show their worth as useful instruments in social and political change. It is true that many in the arts world have embraced this mission over recent years, with orchestras stressing that they are good for health and well-being and theatres opining on their role as community hubs. Often, these are defensive expressions, expressing an existential crisis in arts organisations about their role. In recent years, museums, galleries and classical music have all indulged in angst-ridden introspection about their alleged colonial roots and whiteness, and diversity and inclusion targets mean that outward engagement projects obsess over the age, skin colour and gender of audiences, rather than the artistic quality of their output.

The effect of all this has been the cumbersome politicisation of the arts world. There is too much “artivism” and propagandising and an existential crisis about the role of the arts. It is no surprise that Just Stop Oil activists feel free to desecrate artistic masterpieces to save the planet. Art is considered secondary to politics. All this emanates from the way that artistic excellence has been squeezed out of arts funding. If you look at the bureaucratic Arts Council development programmes, drenched in acronym-laden managerial speak, the intrinsic worth of art is barely visible. Utilitarianism rules the day. The creative local growth fund, the cultural development fund and the Great Place scheme all focus on local economic growth, unlocking productivity and everything. We need that urgently to happen, but it should have been in the Autumn Statement and not be forced on the arts.

As I have gone on about dumbing down, I want to finish by giving the Minister a bit of homework. I suggest that he and the Arts Council learn about the artistic tastes of ordinary people by reading The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose, to understand the rich history of autodidacts thriving on intellectually challenging art and literature, and the new pamphlet by the artist and art critic Alexander Adams, Abolish the Arts Council, which critiques some of these instrumentalising themes. It is selling out as we speak as a stocking filler, but it is a good read.

It may be that the Minister, if he does answer this question, will say simply that the Arts Council is an arm’s-length body, but unfortunately that is not how it is currently being perceived, as I hope the Minister will acknowledge. This needs to be properly and constructively addressed by all the concerned parties. I make these points irrespective of the particular decisions that the Arts Council has made, although all of us, perhaps more than usual, will have our personal views on these decisions, and I will come to mine in a moment. Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that we have a new Secretary of State and the instruction was made by a previous one. However, there should never have been such an instruction if the Arts Council is to remain an arm’s-length body.

We should not forget that these concerns are taking place against the backdrop of long-term cuts to the arts, the necessary help given in response to Covid notwithstanding. In the last 15 years, the Arts Council’s grant in aid has decreased in real terms by 47%. Through Brexit, we have lost the funding from Europe, and central government grants were cut by 37% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20. Some councils do not now spend anything on the arts at all. It has been reported that some councils are on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Now, of course, we have the added stress of energy costs and inflation.

Unfortunately, the arts are going to be a long way down the list of priorities for many councils, despite local authorities being vital to many of our arts organisations, including museums and regional theatres, which are particularly concerned about their day-to-day running costs. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, pointed out in a previous debate the necessary expenditure of specialist lighting for museums and galleries—one instance of something that cannot be got round. Irrespective of where you stand on austerity, these long-term cuts need to be reversed. In the debate last week, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, made this pertinent observation:

“Fiscal austerity for the arts is not needed to salvage our economy. The DCMS budget for the arts and culture is indiscernible in the national accounts.”—[Official Report, 8/12/22; col. 280.]

I have argued for a long time that we can do much more to support artists across the whole country, but that should be done through an equitable funding model based on increases in funding, not through redistribution of the kind that the former Secretary of State insisted upon, which is surely a coarsening of the envelope of funding available to the Arts Council. This has led inevitably to the “invidious choices”—the Arts Council’s own term—that it has felt it has had to make. If £43.5 million is being made available to the regions—which is very welcome—why are these cuts still being insisted upon?

There is another significant consideration: the growing concern that the Arts Council, in the absence of other funding, is trying to take on too wide a range of projects. In particular, there is concern that through the Let’s Create strategy, it is losing its focus on what should be its core project—the funding of artists and arts production by professional artists—and shifting that focus instead to amateur community projects, particularly in areas of the country where cultural engagement is low, as the Independent Society of Musicians has pointed out. There is absolutely a place for such projects, and they should be funded, but the funding of professional artists and arts organisations should not be sacrificed in their favour. It is notable that the cuts over which there is so much current concern are aimed at organisations involving or directly impacting on professional artists and their co-workers.

Much of the focus on these cuts has been, quite rightly, on classical music and opera, but theatre and the visual arts have also been impacted. Here, there are also potential knock-on effects in terms of the production of new art. The Hampstead and Gate Theatres in London and the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, which have all had their funding cut entirely, all support new writing. Hampstead Theatre has said that it will not now be able to support its new writers programme, so I ask the Minister whether new new writers programmes are intended to be set up elsewhere in the country. If so, how will they be supported in the longer term? The danger is that removing funding from these flagship theatres, as the Writers’ Guild and playwrights themselves point out, will simply lead to more risk-averse programming, less commissioning and less new writing everywhere.

There are cuts to significant London gallery spaces. The wonderful Camden Art Centre—I am looking forward to seeing the Forrest Bess exhibition there—and the Serpentine Galleries are nationally important spaces which put on international work by visual artists. If these spaces are diminished, the whole country will be diminished in terms of the visual arts.

There is an ecology of mutual support between London and the regions, the great danger then being that if you hurt the arts in London, you will also hurt artists and audiences for the arts in the regions. Cuts in London will have a nationwide impact, and this will be true in the business sense as well. As the Heart of London Business Alliance said in a letter to the Financial Times last month:

“Central London’s dynamic arts sector and rich culture and experiences make the West End such a unique and special place, bringing in millions of tourists every year. Many of these visitors go on to visit other parts of the UK contributing £641mn to local economies in 2019. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that short-changing London is going to make us all culturally and financially poorer while making the UK a less attractive destination for visitors.”

London is not just the place that has historically received the most money for the arts. It is also the country’s centre of business and the major centre of higher education for the arts; and the galleries, theatres and concert halls there belong to the country as much as to London. For things to change radically from the present asymmetry, which I do not dispute, we need the cuts to grants for local authorities to be dramatically reversed. But local government across the country should also have strong revenue-raising powers, as regional government has in Germany, where there is a much greater spread of arts geographically.

There are brilliant artists, arts organisations and events across the whole of this country, but even in the digital age, the natural tendency remains for artists to gravitate to the big, powerful cities; artists and arts-producing organisations should be funded wherever they are. The former Secretary of State’s artificial arts engineering is not in the long run going to change this tendency, even as it frustrates the arts. The way forward is rather to empower our English regions and regional cities politically and financially to allow artists to thrive within them, and to be able to do so in the longer term.

Additional funding will consolidate world-class organisations outside of London, such as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Ex Cathedra choir in Birmingham and Opera North in Leeds, but also newly funded organisations such as the Buxton Opera House and Bradford Museums and Galleries—yet another mention in this debate. I have seen how access to high-quality music, for example, can change the lives of young people. Should not children from all areas of the country benefit from this kind of opportunity? Of course they should: we all agree about that. As long as the newly funded organisations are delivering excellent work and reaching new audiences, I think and really hope that the levelling-up agenda could be acknowledged a success in a few years’ time.

I am pleased that within the new Arts Council portfolio there are excellent music education newcomers, such as Orchestras for All, Awards for Young Musicians and the National Children’s Orchestra, all based outside London and each contributing to the new national plan for music education. Some critics of the Government and the Arts Council have argued that levelling up will lead to dumbing down. It will not, if the investment is made wisely in organisations with a strong track record of producing excellent work.

As a member of the National Council, I can assure noble Lords that we are not all of one mind. There is rigorous debate, many decisions are disputed and many decisions are not easy. I hope the Arts Council will, in particular, think harder about additional funding and opportunities for young playwrights, musicians and artists, as several noble Lords have said, because London is taking the brunt of the cuts and those young people will undoubtedly be affected. The pipeline of talent is critical for the future of our creative economy.

No one is arguing that decisions to withdraw funding from some of the very best organisations are taken lightly. It will be difficult and painful for them. However, I have confidence in the creativity and passion of organisations such as the Donmar and the Britten Sinfonia, and their capacity to survive and thrive. Companies do find new ways of working. They build new business plans. An example is the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, which lost funding in 2014 and is now flourishing. Already, the Hampstead Theatre, soon to leave the Arts Council portfolio, is working up a new business plan which will continue to have new writing at its heart.

The loss of funding can be very emotional, as we have seen in the debate about the ENO. Many words of regret and even anger have been heard in this Chamber and the other place about the new proposals, yet I am cautiously optimistic. The ENO will survive—of that I am certain. A model along the very successful lines of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a regional and a London base, is now being considered. I have no doubt that this is a huge challenge, but I am sure that with substantial support, including very significant transitional funding and perhaps funds from other pots of money from the Arts Council, as well as the prospect of core funding in three years’ time, there can be a future for the ENO. It will exist in a different way, but there will be an ENO. This must of course include career opportunities for young singers and instrumental musicians.

The Arts Council executive has taken a bashing for many of its decisions. We in this House do want opera in opera houses, but that does not mean it cannot be in some car parks too. We must ensure that due regard is given to tradition, as well as innovation, and that includes playing the national anthem—noble Lords will know what I am referring to. We must ensure that the critics of levelling up are not proved right. In the court of public opinion, the Arts Council will be judged not on its commendable diversity or environmental targets, but on whether excellent art is being enjoyed by ever-increasing numbers of people, right across the country.

We must ensure that London remains the cultural capital of the world, and I will do my utmost as a member of Arts Council England to help make sure that happens. I assure noble Lords that I will fight in the trenches of the Arts Council to see what additional funding is available; other pots of money can be found to support these excellent organisations. When I hear the LSO’s Sir Simon Rattle conduct Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, as I did the other evening, or the LPO’s Ed Gardner conduct Mahler’s Ninth, my heart, as one critic said, beats a little faster. Let every heart across the country beat a little faster.

The Arts Council seems to see a future for ENO which lies mainly in small-scale projects with an undefined residue of grand opera, but none of this has been made explicit or, it would seem, thought through in any detail. For example, ACE states that it wants ENO to keep the London Coliseum and perform there for some of the year, letting it out commercially for the rest of the time. Yet it does not seem to envisage the ENO as a company that is, in fact, large enough to perform at the Coliseum at all.

The new funding level suggests that the Arts Council model is more one of engaging freelancers as and when required, rather than building quality and talent in a maintained opera company; again, though, none of this is explicit. If the ENO is to be a genuine national opera company, developing talent and creating opera to the highest standards, it is hard to see how it can do that without a permanent company within which to develop and maintain those skills—and that is the case whether or not the Arts Council feels that large-scale grand opera is worthy of support. This is a major structural issue, with ramifications for the ecology of opera nationwide. It requires far more careful consideration and needs to be addressed as part of a coherent national opera strategy.

One of the problems with the Arts Council’s process is the complete lack of transparency in decision-making. The ENO met or exceeded all the ACE targets. ACE considers it to be run in an excellent way, yet it is impossible to find out what criteria ACE used that resulted in it, and other well-run organisations, being removed from the national portfolio. The suspicion is that Arts Council England is no longer quite the arm’s-length body it is supposed to be. I share the concerns of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. Dr Darren Henley, the CEO of ACE, said in evidence to the Commons DCMS Select Committee on 8 December:

“We always receive instructions from the Secretary of State about our grant-in-aid investment”

and that it

“needed to move money out of London”.

However, in a Written Answer published two weeks ago by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, the Government stated:

“All decisions on which organisations to fund … and by how much, have been taken by Arts Council England. In line with the long-standing principle that the Arts Council makes such decisions at arm’s length from Government, there are no plans to ask it to reconsider these decisions.”

This is, of course, a contradiction. More clarity from both sides is therefore required.

In conclusion, in the interests of all opera companies, audiences and stakeholders, Arts Council England must remedy the confusion it has caused by urgently conducting a nationwide review of the provision of opera, taking into account audiences and need. It should, if necessary, be prepared to amend its decisions accordingly and it should be fully transparent about the criteria it uses in its decision-making process.