London is among the lowest funded, claims the GLA

London and the regions have made their respective cases for funding for culture at the second oral evidence session of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee inquiry into the work of Arts Council England (ACE).

Representing the Greater London Authority (GLA), London’s Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture, Munira Mirza, defended the current distribution of arts funding in England and disputed the figures published in the RoCC Report, which reveals bias towards London.

In its written evidence to the Committee, the GLA rejects the authors’ analysis that arts Lottery spend per head is £86.40, claiming that the true figure for 2012/13 was £17.26 and that “the vast majority of lottery funding (70%) goes outside London”.

Mirza told the Committee that analysis of funding per visit to London’s cultural organisations reveals that London is among the lowest funded parts of England, and gave examples of how investment in London is benefitting the whole of the country. The GLA’s written evidence also claims that the majority of audiences at cultural organisations in the capital are “not Londoners but visitors from the wider UK and overseas”.

Also appearing before the Committee were Co-Chairs of the North East Cultural Partnership (NECP), Councillor David Budd, Member for Culture at Middlesbrough Council, and John Mowbray, former President of North East Chamber of Commerce.

NECP is co-ordinated by the Association of North East Councils and includes representatives from all the region’s local authorities as well as cultural leaders. Both the oral evidence of its Co-Chairs and the written evidence it submitted previously have raised serious concerns about the increasing centralisation of funding decision-making and the impact it is having in the North East: “Strong, clear relationships with decision-makers once regularly led to genuine collaborative investment. This has been replaced with distance and lack of clarity over decision-making.”

The written evidence went on to say: “We could cite examples of ACE officers themselves being puzzled by decisions taken outside the region that do not reflect the knowledge of those working with the sector and partners at a local level” and Budd, who is also a member of ACE’s North Area Council, admitted to the Committee that important funding decisions for the region were being taken in London.

A new tranche of written evidence has also been released, including a submission by the London Theatre Consortium (LTC), which maps the partnerships between LTC members and venues and companies outside London; Arts & Business, which calls on ACE to support the fundraising of the entire cultural sector and not just those organisations with whom they already have a relationship; and ArtsProfessional’s own evidence, which links to previously published AP news stories and comment.

This builds a case for a rigorous and fully independent review to establish an unambiguous picture of the current geographic distribution of arts funding, and to examine the extent to which ACE is transparent and accountable both to those it funds and the wider public.