EleanorTurney.co.uk

So, after yesterday’s Spending Review, the general feeling seems to be wary sighs of relief – a universal “Well, it could have been worse”. However, as the wonderful Johann Hari points out, it really is quite bad. And this is certainly true for the arts.

To quote from Jeremy Hunt’s letter to ACE:
“I am writing to inform you about the outcome of the 2010 Spending Review for my Department. DCMS’ overall budget will reduce by 25% by 2014-15… This letter sets out the funding settlement for Arts Council England covering the financial years 2011-12 to 2014-15.

The resource grant in aid budget for your organisation will be cut by 29.6% in real terms by 2014-15. The new grant in aid budget for your organisation will be £1448m over four years. Within this settlement-
• I would ask that the Arts Council tries to ensure that the budget for the regular funding of arts organisations is not cut by more than 15% in real terms over the next four years. There will of course be variances to individual RFOs and I recognise this may mean total withdrawal of funding in some cases. I understand you will soon be going through a process to decide levels of regular funding for the next four years. I would expect all organisations in receipt of regular funding to receive information about indicative levels of funding for the Spending Review period by the end of March 2011.
• I expect spending on administration to be cut by 50% in real terms. We expect that bodies will meet the costs of restructuring.”

Now, this looks to me a lot like meddling – which contradicts the enshrined arm’s length principle that ACE currently enjoys. Mealy-mouthed phrases such as “I would ask” and “I would expect” basically mean “I order you to” when they are spoken by someone with the power to remove your funding. I cannot see how these edicts do not contravene the arm’s length principle. ACE is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation (quango), and the quasi-autonomous bit is important – it’s why ACE exists rather than everything being funded directly from DCMS. To erode this function is to erode ACE’s power. However much it has been criticised recently, the arts would miss it if it went altogether.

Furthermore, although ACE’s restructure did not save as much or streamline as much as it claimed, it has recently been cut. To request further admin cuts of 50% raises serious questions about how the organisation can actually continue to function. I am all for reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, but there have to be enough staff to manage and process applications etc, or everything will grind to a halt. The mood at AP Towers is that to cut the admin costs, the regional offices are the most likely target, hitting rural and regional arts hard. Hunt seems to subscribe to the view that admin = bad, and it ain’t necessarily so.

Hunt also says “The Foreign Secretary and I are keen to ensure that the UK reinforces its international reputation for artistic excellence, and hope the Arts Council will support international cultural exchange through its funded organisations and other activities.” Now, Hunt apparently “hope[s] there will be opportunities to unlock additional funding from the private sector to support those activities”, but as well all know, private investment is not a substitute for public investment, and this is basically extending ACE’s remit further, while cutting it back. That doesn’t make a whole of sense, economic or otherwise.

What do you make of the cuts?

There was a lot of talk at Shift Happens earlier this month about innovation and making mistakes, with soundbites such as “we learn more from our mistakes than our successes” flying around. Attractive though the rhetoric sounds, I wonder if it stands up to scrutiny. For a start, it ignores the question of funding: how can you justify asking for (more) money if your previous project flopped?

Failure is an expensive luxury. If you lose the confidence of funders, audience or staff – or, worse yet, all three – the way forward is less clear. NT Live! can run in the hope of widening audiences and eventually breaking even, because the National Theatre receives millions of pounds from Arts Council England annually, has an ongoing sponsorship deal with Travelex, received additional support from Nesta, and can absorb the loss, even though each broadcast costs around £150,000. For most artists and arts organisations, though, no matter how fantastic an idea is, a financial failure makes it harder to convince anyone to fund your next project – whether that’s Ace, sponsors or philanthropists. However eager the audience may be to experience a risky, exciting, innovative project, it has to get off the ground first.

Even those with the most genuine and generous philanthropic leanings might find their patience and pockets tested by failure. And, in the current economic climate, it feels somewhat irresponsible to be encouraging people to make mistakes, however useful the lessons might be. The risks that pay off may be worthwhile, but the risks that don’t could end careers. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is a fact. The problem, in part, is the tick-box mentality associated with public funding, which requires you to know the outcomes of your project before you start.

Depressingly, this is borne out by a survey conducted by ArtsProfessional magazine and released last week, assessing the financial outlook for the sector. More than 500 people working across the arts and cultural sector responded, with around one in five self-identifying as the leader of an arts organisation. The survey revealed that 41% of respondents will be programming more “popular” work, and 37% will be reducing the amount of “challenging” work that they commission.

Risk in the arts is usually a good thing. Risky means creative, edgy or innovative. Can an artist who does not take risks be interesting? Maybe not, but this is at odds with the demands of public funders. Creative risk is good, but financial risk is bad. Let’s hope that risk-aversion is not contagious, and that those who are not planning to reduce the amount of challenging work they programme hold their nerve. Otherwise, audiences could have a dull few years ahead.

This article first appeared on the Guardian theatre blog.

Just read this on the Guardian theatre blog, and am angry… here are my thoughts:

ANLO was a poorly-thought-through scheme which never had the budget to do anything useful. The DCMS had this money which ACE could not turn down, and ACE was therefore forced into launching a project far too quickly. It was never enough money to make a real difference, it was rushed into being, the marketing budget was spent with nine months of the scheme left to run, the targets were quietly revised when take-up was lower than hoped… It has been mostly disappointing.

If you don’t live in London, and especially if you have a job, then available performances are few and far between – many theatres used the scheme to get rid of tickets they wouldn’t have sold otherwise, often at matinees, which are obviously no use if you work a 9-5 job. Add in a train fare to London, or taking a day’s holiday, and suddenly the “free” ticket becomes a bit pointless.

“A socially inclusive model for accessing theatre did not exist for young people until now.” This is just a ridiculous thing to say: theatres across the country offer cheap tickets (the RSC’s tickets start at £3.50 for students, the Royal Court has a ‘pay what you can night’, for example) and have excellent schemes designed to widen engagement, develop audiences and get young people into theatres. The ANLO money could have been far more productively used to promote existing campaigns on a national level.

The scheme claimed to be in place to encourage non-attenders, such as the author, to go to the theatre, as the ACE press office told me forcefully when I said that as a committed theatre-goer I’d never found a way of participating. My response then and now is this: if it’s designed for non-theatre-goers, then why advertise in theatres? That’s simply encouraging those people (such as me) who would have bought a ticket, to get a freebie instead.

I don’t in any way support cuts to the arts budget, and dread the damage that will be done if the Spending Review hits as hard as the arts sector currently fears. I urge you all to join www.ivaluethearts.org.uk, to sign the petition. But, I can’t mourn the end of ANLO, even if it only clawed back £100K. Stopping funding for projects that patently don’t work is a sensible way to start saving money, whatever your politics.

The author sounds as thought she is doing the PR for this “ambitious two-year pilot”. It wasn’t ambitious, the targets were lowered. Further, these targets were not met in the first year of the project. We await the full evaluation with interest. In the meantime, I strongly believe that the article devalues the important work that theatres are constantly engaged in trying to widen access off their own backs, and without a pittance from ANLO.

The free tickets scheme for under-26s launches on Monday. My colleague and I are already plotting our assault on the website, and have every intention of getting as many freebies as is humanly possible. I will be blogging on our experiences – how easy/hard it is to actually get hold of tickets, how different theatres are handling the scheme, whether what we see is any good – on the ArtsProfessional website, and as usual, would welcome comments and information on other people’s experiences, too.

I am not filled with hope at the moment, I have to say. Call me a cynic, but there’s just not enough money behind it to give away tickets without damaging theatres’ revenue. I know that makes me hypocritical for using and abusing the system, but it’s free! And I’ve only not been a student for sixth months, and free stuff makes me happy. Very happy. I’ve noticed already, though, that the Young Vic are limiting people to one booking per year (although you can book up to six tickets at a time, provided each ticket goes to a named under-26 who turns up on the night with ID), and The National’s link from the Arts Council’s website doesn’t work and its own website strangely carries no mention of it. The National, the RSC and the Young Vic all already do their own cheap ticket deals (The National’s Travelex tickets are a tenner, and available to anyone, the RSC do £5 tickets for every show on a first-come first-served basis with at least ten available on the day, and the Young Vic offer £5 to Southwark residents and £10 to students and under-26s anyway), and it will be interesting to see whether these have more or fewer takers. I hope that people who try and book a freebie and miss out will be tempted to book for a small fee anyway, but we shall see.

I’m slightly annoyed that I’ve already booked, for real money, almost everything that I want to see at participating theatres in the next few months, but I only have myself to blame. There’s some good stuff coming up at the National, and a free ticket makes the prospect of paying the train fare to London and dashing to catch the last train home again much more appealing. I’m still upset that the only venue in Cambridge that’s participating is The Junction, when everything good seems to be at the Arts Theatre, especially given that the Arts Theatre’s student/young person reductions are pitiful and never seem to apply to anything I want to see. On a tangential note, the worst culprit for student deals that I have come across is the Theatre Royal, Bath, which takes a quid off prices. A whole quid. Unsurprisingly, it is not offering freebies, either.

Now, I like freebies as much as the next recently-graduated student, and so at first glance, Arts Council England’s new free tickets for under-26s scheme sounds like a god-send. Well, if Andy Burnham is your god. I love theatre but can rarely afford it at the moment, what with living in the sticks* where theatre is limited and thus having to add train fare to any ticket price. Two years of free tickets at any one of 95 venues across the country (which are currently looking like being pretty concentrated in the big smoke on account of there being so bloody many theatres in London), starting in March, when I will have reached the ripe old age of 22. Sounds pretty bloody good, especially when you read that theatres that sign up will have to guarantee a small percentage of freebies for every show, and that there is no limit to how many different shows one can see.

However, therein lies the problem. For starters, canny, early-rising bastards like me will snaffle all the free seats before most arty people are out of bed and lighting their first gauloise of the day. Look at ‘Kids’ Week’. A London-based, idea: one week in the summer holidays is Kids’ Week, and West End theatres offer a free child ticket (or possibly two…) with every paying adult. Brilliant – kids get to go to the theatre which I am massively in favour of, and there is one less day in the yawning chasm of summer hols. But, Kids’ Week tickets are severely limited, and sell out in minutes via a confusing and poorly staffed phone line. I think I managed to get a freebie to one event in the four years I was eligible and in London. And that’s the other problem: ‘kids’ covers all under-16s, but the freebie is reliant on having a full paying adult with you. Not only does the adult ticket price for a West End show immediately exclude a large swathe of the population, but the scheme also supposes that every interested child will have an adult willing and able to take them. I’m not advocating sending your 7-yr-old off to Shaftesbury Ave alone, but I see nothing wrong with allowing a group of young teenagers to go to a matinee together without adult supervision.

Continuing down this route, the ACE scheme sounds lovely in principle, in that it offers 16-26s those freebies, but why stop at 26? A representative sample of the population (the other people in my arts magazine office!) are angry that it excludes over 26s – why not have a salary criteria rather than an age criteria? Hell, if I continue to work in the arts I’d be all for the low-waged being given priority treatment! Furthermore, there are some serious economic considerations that seem to have been swept under the carpet. If anyone under 26 is eligible for a free ticket, how are ACE going to collect data about whose bums are sitting on those seats? I’m assuming (fairly, I think, given its track record) that ACE will need to tick boxes in order to justify the money. (Speaking of which, in what world will £2m cover 95 venues offering free seats?) So, people like me who love theatre but are generally broke are likely to snap up the freebies. Given that I actually budget in order to treat myself to shows I really want to see – or persuade friends that what I really want for my birthday is to be taken to Hamlet – a free seat I plonk myself down in is a seat’s worth of revenue lost for that theatre and that show.  I’m not suggesting that no-one new to theatre will take ACE up on its generous offer, but the question that is clamourously echoing across the arts sector at the moment is how to keep newly converted theatre-goers attending once the freebies run out. Any ideas?