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Sara Selwood's defence of the Policy Studies Institute's 'The UK Cultural Sector' (ArtsProfessional, issue 12, October 22) made interesting reading. At the risk of sounding like Railtrack complaining about the wrong kind of leaves, measuring the contribution of the arts in money terms alone is giving us a warped set of performance targets.
I don't have a problem with anyone measuring how I, as a local government officer, invest public money to meet the corporate objectives of my local authority. If the Policy Studies Institute or anyone else can show me how to do it better, I'll gratefully accept any help to maximise the impact I can make with my meagre budget. Where I take issue is with the assumption that our contributions to access and regeneration should be measured only in monetary terms. What Professor John Stewart calls 'the wicked issues'(fear of crime, juvenile nuisance and social exclusion - difficult to explain and wickedly difficult to solve), can only be turned around with money when it is combined with creativity. PSI are quite rightly measuring the impact of funding, but have not tackled measuring the creative input. Another academic, Professor Trevor Hancock of the University of Ontario, says that communities have four wealths. There is the economic wealth that PSI, District Audit and Best Value inspectors home in on. But there is also the social wealth (access to universal education, health services, community facilities);and environmental wealth (clean water, clean air, and the quality of development). And the more these three wealths are balanced, the more the fourth wealth - human wealth (the ability of each individual to explore and attain their maximum creativity)- can grow. Until we are valuing and measuring each wealth equally, statistics like the PSI collection will only paint a quarter of the true picture. Social, environmental and human wealths can be measured. They measure concrete achievements but they also measure the way residents feel about their area and if regeneration is really making their quality of life better. So when do we start?