6 Friday March 18 2022 | the timesOne step
to boost
visitor
numbers
Covid may be receding, at least from
the front pages, but its disastrous
effect on box-office figures is far
from over. Newly unveiled by the
Insights Alliance are the results of
a survey of 23,369 formerly regular
arts attendees. About 14 per cent
haven’t returned since the pandemic
started and say they won’t do so
until Covid is over. In other words,
possibly never. Another 30 per centsaid they expected to attend less
often in future.
That gloomy picture is reinforced
by the 2021 admissions figures from
the Association of Leading Visitor
Attractions (Alva). Predictably,
outdoor attractions did well
(Windsor Great Park tops the list for
the first time, with 5.4 million visits,
followed by Kew Gardens and
Chester Zoo), while museums andgalleries struggled horribly. The
British Museum, which pulled in
6.8 million visitors in 2015, managed
only 1.3 million last year. Neither
the National Gallery nor the V&A
reached a million.
Lockdowns accounted for much of
that decline, but so did the collapse
of international tourism. Alva
maintains that one simple step the
government could take, at no costto the taxpayer, would greatly boost
the figures. That would be to reverse
the decision that school and youth
groups from the EU need passports
rather than ID cards to enter the UK
— a decision that seems to be
deterring many EU groups from
coming at all. Is it too much to hope
that, in this small matter at least,
common sense will prevail over
ideology? I won’t hold my breath.not where it puts on shows. That
seems like an open invitation to bend
the rules. Yet even if this does result
in a substantial transfer of London’s
arts activity to the regions, how will
the companies already existing in
those places feel about competition
from interlopers? Most are clinging to
survival by a thread already.
Third, using the culture department
and ACE to impose all this seems
perversely against the spirit of
levelling up. Why not let elected local
councillors decide what sort of cultural
activity they want in their areas, and
boost their budgets to make it happen?
Over the past decade culturalT
he more I think about
how the government’s
levelling-up policy is
being applied to the
arts — and I gather
that Arts Council
England (ACE)
bureaucrats have been
instructed to think about little else —
the more misconceived it seems. As a
newspaper critic I am privileged to see
dozens of shows around the country
each year, so I have a vague idea of
where the regional arts are flourishing
and where they could improve.
Unfortunately, the mission imposed by
the culture secretary Nadine Dorries
— which will remove £75 million of
arts funding from London to boost
activity in the regions — seems based
on four complete fallacies.
The first is that London gobbles up
a disproportionate amount of
England’s arts subsidy. The second is
that persuading, say, a theatre
company to relocate its offices from
London to Doncaster will magically
boost the economic revival of South
Yorkshire. The third is that the
cultural side of levelling up is best
masterminded from above by a central
body, namely Dorries’s culture
department, rather than by responding
to local demand. And the fourth is
that it’s an excellent thing for cabinet
ministers to commandeer the arts for
social-engineering purposes.
Let’s look at those fallacies one by
one. According to Darren Henley,
ACE’s chief executive, his London
“clients” get about 25 per cent of the
total client funding. That seems a lot
for one city, but remember that there
are 14 million people in Greater
London and its commuter belt. That’s
14 million with easy access to central
London. And 14 million is exactly25 per cent of England’s population of
56 million people. So even leaving
aside the argument that, as a great
capital, London should have a wealth
of world-class arts institutions because
it is competing with Paris, Berlin and
New York for cultural tourists, its
present share of subsidy is justifiable
on population terms.
Second, offering London-based arts
organisations financial inducements
to relocate to the regions seems like
a huge upheaval with little guaranteed
benefit. For a start, Dorries’s
department has specified that what
will count, statistically, is where an
organisation’s office is registered —Raphel Famotibe and
Ramesh Meyyappan in
Wonder Boy at the
Bristol Old VicIt is an
exercise to
win cheap
headlines
spending by English local authorities
has almost halved. That’s not
surprising, because over the same
period the government has cut its
overall funding by £15 billion in real
terms. If ministers are serious about
making culture an integral part of
levelling up, they should recognise
that local authorities run most of
the institutions that bring culture
into ordinary communities —
3,000 libraries, 350 museums and
116 theatres among them — and give
them more support for doing so.
Boosting local authority budgets,
however, would mean ministers such
as Dorries forfeiting some control over
how it is spent — which brings us to
the last point. How much is this whole
exercise really about improving the
spread of culture in England as
opposed to winning cheap headlines
that may persuade voters in northern
England to re-elect the Tories? I
would say quite a lot of the latter.
And that strikes me as unethical, to
put it mildly. Call me a fuddy-duddy,
but I look back with nostalgia to that
era — only about 30 years ago —
when the Arts Council was a fiercely
independent organisation, and
government ministers took pride in
not interfering in artistic matters.
If Dorries needs convincing about
the wisdom of that approach, she need
look only at Unboxed, the “festival of
Brexit” that started this month in a
flurry of total public indifference.
Conceived by Tory politicians, it is
financed with £120 million of public
money that’s desperately needed
elsewhere in the arts, and — a
committee of MPs declared this week
— is shaping up to be a fiasco.
They can’t be right, of course. It’s
happening mostly in the regions, so it
must be a triumph!Richard Morrison the arts column
The fallacies at the heart of Nadine Dorries’s cultural levelling up
STEVE TANNER