WYTN meets with the Arts Council - what have they got to say?
Written by Paul Sansom
* Paul is planning on going back to the Arts Council so if there is anything you would like him to ask or specifically talk about then please contact us and we'll forward it on. We're keen to hear your thoughts and opinions.
When politicians begin to harp on about a justification for the arts, it would appear the Arts Council's motto: "great art for everyone" may become a forgotten phrase like MPs are impartial when acting in a quasi-judicial role.
Comments, such as those made by Harriet Harman last month on The Guardian's Northerner Blog, do not come as a surprise as the Arts sector has had to endure significant cuts to state funding in the last few years, as well as the Arts Council being told to reduce their administration costs by 50 percent.
The economic recession coupled with the Olympic Games have drastically reduced funding to the Arts. The Government has cut state funding by 30 percent, while the Cultural Olympiad has taken away £161 million that would have been available for Arts and heritage funding.
Regional Director for the Arts Council's Yorkshire office, Cluny Macpherson, does not paint the rosiest of pictures either - as he puts it in terms of survival. "Companies and organisations are all struggling in different ways. This is either because their grant from us is going down as we've got less money, or their grant from local government is going.
“It's also harder to get private sponsorship. So we've got to do work around just making sure they’re still around as far as we can," he said.
However, this does not mean the Arts Council will fund all struggling companies and organisations: "If an organisation had a particularly bad year and disappeared of the face of the earth it would be more expensive to reinvent them than it would be to keep them," said Cluny.
He also noted other sources of funding have become harder to come by for the Arts community, as local authorities’ budgets have been cut in a similar way to the rest of the public sector. Coordination, then, is crucial between the Arts Council and local government.
"These cuts are real and this is a big issue for local authorities. They've got day care centres to keep open and schools to keep open, they've got real decisions to make.
"So in that climate it's important that if we're investing in something in their space, where those people live, the local authority is interested in that as well," he said.
Organisations and individuals can apply for Arts Council grants, although Cluny admitted: "I suppose our relationship, and certainly our funding, its scale is more aimed at organisations than it is at individuals, but then of course those organisations then employ individuals. You can still access lottery funding as an individual if you've got a particular project for your own development."
For the majority of these individuals they will apply through the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts funding programme. However, Cluny said: "We get different feedback from that sheet."
While some of the feedback is positive, he said people have been critical: "There was a point where people felt it was too constrictive as there was too much to fill in, so we opened it up and we've given people space to just write about their project. Some people like that and some people don't. We are always trying to change it a little bit."
Although, it is unlikely to go through a radical change as Cluny explained: "What I'm not apologetic for is we need to justify why we're using taxpayers’ money to do this. We need to monitor it properly, so we have to collect that data properly and people need to prove they're going to use it well.
"It's quite a significant and serious thing to do, and as much as I absolutely support that the state should be funding it and doing this, nevertheless that comes with some responsibility. We can always improve the system, maybe the phrasing is difficult for people and we can try and change that. But the principle of it, that we need to get the information from you to tell you whether or not we think we can invest public money in it, is one that I think is perfectly reasonable."
For those who are successful in receiving funding, Cluny said their decision is made only after a lot of deliberation and from a knowledgeable perspective. In the 1990s Cluny played in, what he described as: "a slightly esoteric East European sort of gypsy klezmer band", called Caravanserai.
This experience, he said, is not uncommon for most employees at the Arts Council. "There's sometimes this perception that we're all besuited bureaucrats and pen-pushing box tickers, but actually virtually everybody who works here has worked in the Arts sector. In the office at the moment we have somebody working who has run their own video production company, two actors, a producer and a published novelist."
For grants below £800,000 Yorkshire's regional council is responsible for ultimately deciding whether or not to allocate funding, and for those that are more than £800,000, these applications will be sent to the national council.
The regional council is a panel consisting of 15 members of which four members are representatives of local government and the rest is made of people from the Arts community. Their decisions are based on analysis and assessments made by employees in the Yorkshire office, which they then give to the council before they meet.
Cluny admitted it can be a difficult decision not to award funding: "If somebody's been doing the same thing for 30 years you think I don't know what they're going to do now. But having said that you have to balance that against knowing that it's the public out there who are paying for it. You can't shy away from making those tough decisions.
"For some people, if you cut funding, the impact is somebody who'd been working there for two years hasn't got a job anymore, you think well ok that's the modern world they'll go onto to something else," he said.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport say £140 million of extra funding should be available to spend on the Arts and heritage next year. This is because money that has been diverted to Olympic Games should find its way back, once London 2012 has finished in the summer.
Also the Government's reform to the National Lottery good causes fund - which restored the original share of the money made by the National Lottery that is given to Arts, sports and heritage to 20 percent - plus the increase in sales of National Lottery tickets, should help to contribute to this sum.
But it is feared this money will be channelled towards the south, specifically London. Harman argued the Government's policies, such as an increased reliance on philanthropy, if it does succeed in plugging the gap made by the cuts in state funding, will only do so for organisations in London.
Cluny believes these arguments concerned with London-centric funding are narrow minded. "Setting aside the fact that my role is to advocate the Arts in Yorkshire, you have to think if we want a national theatre, surely that should be in the capital city, that's reasonable.
"London is also really important for tourism it's known as being a melting pot for different cultures. But the Arts are effectively an industry like anything else and what happens is artists move where the work is."
He was also quick to point out that half of the £37million set aside for the new Creative People and Places programme, which has been developed to increase participation in the Arts in areas where it is the lowest in England, will be spent in Yorkshire.
Cluny is excited by this as not only will they be able to offer significant grants to a variety of organisations, but it could be the start of something new. "Maybe, because this is going to be a bottom up programme, it will create something different that we can't even imagine because we're talking to different people about making it," he said.
However, it is likely they will have to deliver this programme, and the rest of their services, under increasingly demanding circumstances. The Government has told them to cut their admin costs by 50 percent in the next 18 months.
Cluny conceded: "Cutting admin costs is an unhelpful term because in our world admin costs includes all wages of everybody in the organisation, which is by far the largest part of what our admin costs are, so it really means people.
"Whatever organisation we become in 18 months it will be one with fewer people in it. Of course you can work smarter and differently and offset some of those changes, but you can't make that scale of change without an impact on the services you deliver."
* Paul is planning on going back to the Arts Council so if there is anything you would like him to ask or specifically talk about then please contact us and we'll forward it on. We're keen to hear your thoughts and opinions.
When politicians begin to harp on about a justification for the arts, it would appear the Arts Council's motto: "great art for everyone" may become a forgotten phrase like MPs are impartial when acting in a quasi-judicial role.
Comments, such as those made by Harriet Harman last month on The Guardian's Northerner Blog, do not come as a surprise as the Arts sector has had to endure significant cuts to state funding in the last few years, as well as the Arts Council being told to reduce their administration costs by 50 percent.
The economic recession coupled with the Olympic Games have drastically reduced funding to the Arts. The Government has cut state funding by 30 percent, while the Cultural Olympiad has taken away £161 million that would have been available for Arts and heritage funding.
Regional Director for the Arts Council's Yorkshire office, Cluny Macpherson, does not paint the rosiest of pictures either - as he puts it in terms of survival. "Companies and organisations are all struggling in different ways. This is either because their grant from us is going down as we've got less money, or their grant from local government is going.
“It's also harder to get private sponsorship. So we've got to do work around just making sure they’re still around as far as we can," he said.
However, this does not mean the Arts Council will fund all struggling companies and organisations: "If an organisation had a particularly bad year and disappeared of the face of the earth it would be more expensive to reinvent them than it would be to keep them," said Cluny.
He also noted other sources of funding have become harder to come by for the Arts community, as local authorities’ budgets have been cut in a similar way to the rest of the public sector. Coordination, then, is crucial between the Arts Council and local government.
"These cuts are real and this is a big issue for local authorities. They've got day care centres to keep open and schools to keep open, they've got real decisions to make.
"So in that climate it's important that if we're investing in something in their space, where those people live, the local authority is interested in that as well," he said.
Organisations and individuals can apply for Arts Council grants, although Cluny admitted: "I suppose our relationship, and certainly our funding, its scale is more aimed at organisations than it is at individuals, but then of course those organisations then employ individuals. You can still access lottery funding as an individual if you've got a particular project for your own development."
For the majority of these individuals they will apply through the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts funding programme. However, Cluny said: "We get different feedback from that sheet."
While some of the feedback is positive, he said people have been critical: "There was a point where people felt it was too constrictive as there was too much to fill in, so we opened it up and we've given people space to just write about their project. Some people like that and some people don't. We are always trying to change it a little bit."
Although, it is unlikely to go through a radical change as Cluny explained: "What I'm not apologetic for is we need to justify why we're using taxpayers’ money to do this. We need to monitor it properly, so we have to collect that data properly and people need to prove they're going to use it well.
"It's quite a significant and serious thing to do, and as much as I absolutely support that the state should be funding it and doing this, nevertheless that comes with some responsibility. We can always improve the system, maybe the phrasing is difficult for people and we can try and change that. But the principle of it, that we need to get the information from you to tell you whether or not we think we can invest public money in it, is one that I think is perfectly reasonable."
For those who are successful in receiving funding, Cluny said their decision is made only after a lot of deliberation and from a knowledgeable perspective. In the 1990s Cluny played in, what he described as: "a slightly esoteric East European sort of gypsy klezmer band", called Caravanserai.
This experience, he said, is not uncommon for most employees at the Arts Council. "There's sometimes this perception that we're all besuited bureaucrats and pen-pushing box tickers, but actually virtually everybody who works here has worked in the Arts sector. In the office at the moment we have somebody working who has run their own video production company, two actors, a producer and a published novelist."
For grants below £800,000 Yorkshire's regional council is responsible for ultimately deciding whether or not to allocate funding, and for those that are more than £800,000, these applications will be sent to the national council.
The regional council is a panel consisting of 15 members of which four members are representatives of local government and the rest is made of people from the Arts community. Their decisions are based on analysis and assessments made by employees in the Yorkshire office, which they then give to the council before they meet.
Cluny admitted it can be a difficult decision not to award funding: "If somebody's been doing the same thing for 30 years you think I don't know what they're going to do now. But having said that you have to balance that against knowing that it's the public out there who are paying for it. You can't shy away from making those tough decisions.
"For some people, if you cut funding, the impact is somebody who'd been working there for two years hasn't got a job anymore, you think well ok that's the modern world they'll go onto to something else," he said.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport say £140 million of extra funding should be available to spend on the Arts and heritage next year. This is because money that has been diverted to Olympic Games should find its way back, once London 2012 has finished in the summer.
Also the Government's reform to the National Lottery good causes fund - which restored the original share of the money made by the National Lottery that is given to Arts, sports and heritage to 20 percent - plus the increase in sales of National Lottery tickets, should help to contribute to this sum.
But it is feared this money will be channelled towards the south, specifically London. Harman argued the Government's policies, such as an increased reliance on philanthropy, if it does succeed in plugging the gap made by the cuts in state funding, will only do so for organisations in London.
Cluny believes these arguments concerned with London-centric funding are narrow minded. "Setting aside the fact that my role is to advocate the Arts in Yorkshire, you have to think if we want a national theatre, surely that should be in the capital city, that's reasonable.
"London is also really important for tourism it's known as being a melting pot for different cultures. But the Arts are effectively an industry like anything else and what happens is artists move where the work is."
He was also quick to point out that half of the £37million set aside for the new Creative People and Places programme, which has been developed to increase participation in the Arts in areas where it is the lowest in England, will be spent in Yorkshire.
Cluny is excited by this as not only will they be able to offer significant grants to a variety of organisations, but it could be the start of something new. "Maybe, because this is going to be a bottom up programme, it will create something different that we can't even imagine because we're talking to different people about making it," he said.
However, it is likely they will have to deliver this programme, and the rest of their services, under increasingly demanding circumstances. The Government has told them to cut their admin costs by 50 percent in the next 18 months.
Cluny conceded: "Cutting admin costs is an unhelpful term because in our world admin costs includes all wages of everybody in the organisation, which is by far the largest part of what our admin costs are, so it really means people.
"Whatever organisation we become in 18 months it will be one with fewer people in it. Of course you can work smarter and differently and offset some of those changes, but you can't make that scale of change without an impact on the services you deliver."
