Saving the arts by Friday

When Darlington Council was threatened with a massive 24.4% cut in its Government grant, it responded by proposing to axe its support for the Arts Centre and Civic Theatre. The news was received with a mixture of denial, outrage and resignation. The Council has been the generous funder of these two facilities for 30 years and its £1.3m contribution per year is a huge sum for a town of 100,000.

But the council has had no coherent arts strategy – “we don’t like documents that are only good for doorstops and nobody reads”, as one council officer put it – and has been shaving budgets for years. It is the worst of all non-policies. There was fear of negative political consequences: that being proud to support the best arts facilities in a town of its size might lead philistines to attack wasteful extravagance, and that inverted snobbery might surface about the arts only being of interest to the better off.

REALITY CHECK

Actually, the Civic Theatre is visited by people from 50 miles around, who spend £3m a year on tickets. Sale as a going concern to a commercial operator is under negotiation. The Arts Centre happily puts karate kids, clarinet players, Am-Dram and folkies, naturalists and embroiderers, jazz, R’n’B and Camra Beer Festivals cheek by jowl with contemporary dance, cutting-edge visual arts exhibitions and Arts Council-funded theatre companies.

Having got wind of what was likely to happen, I called a public meeting, promoted in the local paper, got a locally respected journalist to chair it and found a hundred people keen to learn more. A steering group was formed on the spot and the name ‘Darlington for Culture’ dreamed up by bedtime. Everyone expected a protest movement led by a few arty people, but many more were attracted to a second meeting when concrete proposals for a takeover of the Arts Centre by a community group were announced.

Meanwhile, the Council itself launched a consultation process, called Talking Together, which actually meant them telling us what they were going to do and us asking aggressive questions. Not dialogue but confrontation. To make it worse, the room we met in was a wedding room at a civic venue where we sat on gilt chairs facing a row of officers who had to stand up for an hour. At my meetings, we arrange the chairs in an open square.

DIALOGUE AND CONFRONTATION

To its credit, the Council immediately offered the newly formed group access to facts and figures – although it became obvious after a few weeks that disaggregating expenditure and income from the various venues, weeding out central charges for senior officers, cleaning or marketing, catering income and the cost of back office services, was well nigh impossible since all cultural services were managed as a single budget. We did not come up with a magic, commercial solution.

Finally, the Chief Executive of the Council called a meeting of interested parties, and a revised proposal emerged by January: restoring a smaller subsidy for one year but creating time and headspace to create the vision document we need to base our future arts policy upon. Naturally, what we get and keep in the long term will depend on many unknown factors. Will the Tories kill off local authorities completely? Will Mili-Labour re invent ‘Arts for All’ and staff our cultural facilities with unemployed teenagers on work-benefits? (In Denmark, years ago, you could avoid military service by driving a van for a theatre company, so there’s a model to borrow.)

INTO THE UNKNOWN

Darlington for Culture has attracted committed residents, cultural associations and people with a wide range of skills and business experience willing to buy shares in a co-operative enterprise, and well able to run local arts facilities alongside a core of arts professionals. People want to join in a meaningful partnership with council officers and elected members to deliver as well as receive services.

The present level and speed of Government cuts are, in my view, excessive, and the collateral damage to the arts from simultaneous reductions in budgets for Arts Councils, local authorities and regional development agencies will be both random and severe. But perhaps in the fat years arts professionals fell into the trap of failing to predict a lean decade, to plan for a sustainable future, to rationalise the distribution of expensive facilities across regions, to invest in artists rather than buildings and to engage more active citizens in creating what are, after all, arts and cultural services for all the people.