As cost and efficiency savings move up the government agenda, Sukhy Johal MBE and Tim Bryan examine the value a collective approach can bring to the arts and the cultural sector at a regional level.
Collaborative working sits at the heart of modern organisational life. The Government itself is structured into distinct departments representing the interests of sectors or sections of public life. In recent times, this has become the working method at regional level. Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), Regional Cultural Consortiums (RCCs), Government Offices and Regional Assemblies are all, in effect, umbrella organisations operating on behalf of a number of smaller organisations, practitioners and constituents. Wikipedia identifies a number of reasons for establishing or joining an umbrella organisation1, including being able to carry out activities that could not be accomplished alone, due to economies of scale, a better pool of experts and experience, and exchange of knowledge. It also points to ‘a sense of community and support’ derived from multilateral activities and the possibiility of creating greater public awareness.
The cultural sector lends itself well to these criteria. Accustomed to collaborating and working in partnership at grassroots level, it has a tradition of shared experience and a sense of community. As a recognised entity and Government department, the cultural sector is still relatively young, so it needs to ‘punch above its weight’. From securing local authority funding to ensuring that the value of the arts and culture are recognised in Regional Economic Strategies, the sector needs to operate strategically and collaboratively on key issues.
Regional issues
At regional level, this is especially true in order to ensure that the arts and the cultural sector are incorporated into Local Area Agreements, Regional Economic Strategies and Regional Spatial Strategies. According to the latest DCMS figures, local authorities spend £3.2bn annually on culture. Cultural services have an enormous influence over the effectiveness of a council’s services and its public perception. Yet statutory responsibilities for culture within local authorities only extend to public library service provision, protecting the historic environment and upholding the Licensing and Gambling Acts. Everything else is discretionary – which is where a collective and sector-wide approach can add significant value. In recent years, this role has been picked up by the RCCs working with partners at Arts Council England, Sport England, Museums, Libraries and Archives Councils, screen councils, lottery providers and English Heritage to present a ‘single voice’ for the sector.
Culture East Midlands (the East Midlands RCC) has worked with partners to secure £500,000 to establish a major Local Authority Cultural Services Improvement Programme over the next two years. Designed to support local authorities in the delivery of cultural services, the programme is the only one of its scale and type in the English regions and aims to improve efficiencies and services for people right across the East Midlands. The funding for this project, a combination of Department for Communities and Local Government Regional Capacity-Building Fund and partner matched-funding, simply wouldn’t have happened without this shared approach.
Profile and planning
When Liam Byrne MP was appointed as the Minister for the West Midlands region, he chose to address the issue of improving perceptions of the region through established umbrella organisations, Culture West Midlands and Advantage West Midlands (the RDA). At a summit hosted by Culture West Midlands in November last year, he and James Purnell (then Culture Secretary) met cultural and business leaders from across the West Midlands region to support the launch of a regional initiative to determine how best to increase culture’s contribution to prosperity, community development and personal wellbeing. With umbrella organisations and collaborative working already in place, being able to present a unified case to ministers was far more compelling.
Similarly, when the Prime Minister announced plans for building three million new homes by 2020, the cultural sector spotted an opportunity for playing its part in creating well-designed, long-lasting communities. Culture East Midlands led a bid to secure a major ‘Invest to Save’ Treasury-sponsored award to fund the production of guidance and frameworks in planning for culture. A collective partnership of Non-Departmental Public Bodies, RCCs and regional planning bodies, the Culture Planning Toolkit (CPT) forms a crucial part of the ‘Living Places’ programme – a national alliance of cultural and sporting bodies that understands that culture and sport are powerful instruments for community-building.
The value of a collective approach and resource for planners and developers is clear. At present, planning, regeneration and development professionals are forced to go through a number of different channels in order to access information on distinct areas of cultural planning (e.g. sports, arts, libraries, museums, etc.). A scoping exercise as part of the CPT project showed that while excellent guidance for integrating sport, heritage and libraries into local communities already exists, there is little or none available for other areas of the cultural sector, such as the arts.
By taking the sector as a whole and identifying gaps in provision, the CPT project will, for the first time, place new guidance alongside that which already exists, thereby making integrating culture into housing projects considerably easier. Not only has this collective approach leveraged significant national funding, but it has been welcomed by planners, developers and regeneration experts keen to reduce the time and effort spent on consulting a number of different sources.
Olympian efforts
Possibly the best opportunity for the cultural sector to advocate a collaborative approach and raise its profile will be through the 2012 Olympic Games and associated four-year Cultural Olympiad. Culture West Midlands is leading the regional input into the Cultural Olympiad, ensuring that there is a planned, co-ordinated and collaborative approach outside London that links into the strategies of the voluntary, community, public and private sectors. At a recent event to update stakeholders involved in the Olympiad, this message was reinforced at national level by Jude Kelly and former Olympic athlete, Jonathan Edwards. Calling the Cultural Olympiad the ‘greatest cultural show on earth’, Kelly underlined its significance as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strengthen links between sport and the arts.
Detractors may assert that working collaboratively will not help them deliver against immediate priorities, or that umbrella organisations add another layer of unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication, but these examples clearly demonstrate the power of a collective approach. There have been teething problems, but they are nothing that a firmer understanding of different roles and responsibilities couldn’t prevent. Individual parts of the sector will always need to specialise and deliver specific priorities, but there is still a need for the sector to pull together and present a united front around key shared priorities.
Sukhy Johal MBE and Tim Bryan are Executive Directors of Culture East Midlands and Culture West Midlands respectively.
w: http://www.culture-em.org.uk; http://www.culturewm.org.uk