Lucky for some

The Independent Theatre Council (ITC) represents nearly 600 professional performing arts organisations from around the UK. Only 15 of them received money from Sustain. Of those 15, only three were non-building based organisations. Talking to one of those organisations, Travelling Light Theatre Company from Bristol, it was clear that Sustain had made a much needed intervention at a crucial time. General Manager Kath Grieg explained, “Our youth theatre, which serves a very deprived area of Bristol, was on the brink of collapse due to loss of income from a range of sources including youth opportunities funds, and trusts and foundations. Contact with young people is essential to the artistic quality of our professional productions as it directly informs our work. Sustain has enabled us to broaden our participation.” Travelling Light received one of the smallest awards but made it stretch a long way – behaviour common to the touring sector, which is used to achieving a lot with a little.

HELP OR HINDRANCE?
As one of the few touring companies awarded sustain funding I asked Travelling Light why they thought they had been successful. They believed it was because they had received excellent support from their lead officer at Arts Council England (ACE). Many companies in the same lucky position echoed this experience, stating that the guidance and support of specific officers was crucial to their successful applications. Gary Stewart of Oval House also cited good officer support as the source of their success with Sustain. Oval House has used the award to explore more entrepreneurial models of operation and to extend its support to touring companies who it recognises as having a particularly difficult time at the moment – owing to the increased pressure on Grants for the Arts. It has developed successful partnerships with touring companies and found ways to maximise earned income together. Conversely, however, the complaint of many other companies was the lack of good guidance and support from ACE officers. A fair few reported that they had been strongly discouraged from applying to Sustain by their officers, and told it was not for them.

WIDER IMPACT OF NARROW VISION
So who and what was Sustain for? The absence of a clear answer to this question has been one of the main criticisms of the programme. ACE itself did not express a clear strategic vision for what it hoped to achieve with the fund (other than plugging deficits). The criteria for applying to the fund were very obscure and often interpreted in contradictory ways by officers, who in turn felt they had not received proper guidance.
Many organisations have commented that they are only now beginning to experience serious financial problems as a result of the recession. Arguably, the Sustain fund was created and distributed too soon. ACE had been conducting research into the effects of the recession on the sector. The research was not complete and the effects were not fully known at the time, leading to the creation of a pot without a purpose and inciting the subsequent random feeding frenzy. Looking back over the awards made, it looks like a panic initiative to maintain the status quo. We have a hugely overbuilt infrastructure in the arts – it takes a lot of money to feed it and every few years another scheme is needed to prop it up.

CUTS TO THE CORE
However, what’s done is done. More important to address now is the question: what of the future? A set of emergency cuts has just been announced by the new coalition government with the likelihood of further to come. ACE is bemused at being hit harder than other DCMS client organisations. Difficult decisions lie ahead. Having made this significant investment through Sustain, however, it would be close to insanity for ACE to now make cuts to the beneficiaries of the programme.
Even more reckless, however, would be a decision to reduce investment in the many smaller, leaner organisations working hard in the arts, looking for ways to grow their businesses resourcefully and entrepreneurially. No industry can sustain itself properly without investment in research and development. It seems all too easy to reduce support to smaller organisations and individual artists – the thought process presumably being that if there’s no building, there’s no body to bury! Investing in the arts, though, is about investing in the people who create it. Sustain should have been about real future-facing investment – loans to enable experiment and exploration, to tide organisations over during rocky times, without removing their motivation and ability to seek alternative sources of support and earned income. £40 million has been spent now – but we have to be more careful and more visionary in the future if the cultural sector is to be genuinely sustainable.