Percent for health

Any scheme which directs money towards artists is likely to be welcomed in these pages: especially one which, in these uncertain times of Olympian raids on the Lottery and economic instability, has the potential to place art at the heart of our communities and provide gainful employment for artists. Percent for art is just such a scheme. It is a planning requirement whereby local authorities insist that property developers spend a proportion (usually 1%) of the budget for a large capital project on public art. Long supported by the national Arts Councils and design champions, the notion of a percent for art has gained traction over the past five or ten years, and now many rural and urban local authorities stipulate it in their planning regulations.

Most policies are fairly broad in their depiction of art, including performing arts events, temporary projects, collaborations with architects and landscape design, but, most of all, percent for art is having an undeniable impact on the built environment, not least in the health sector. The NHS is currently building on an unprecedented scale. Private financing and public money are being used to create a new generation of hospitals and healthcare facilities across the country, and many of these new buildings have been subjected to percent for art requirements.

This enables an investment in art which can influence the environment and perception of the hospital as a vibrant, cared-for, accessible and visually appealing place, helping to improve the patient experience and benefiting staff and visitors. Recently, many hospitals have adopted innovative approaches to public art, enhancing the reputation of the hospitals among health professionals and the public. There is a connection between hospitals with forward-looking, innovative art projects and the perception of those hospitals as forward-looking and innovative centres of clinical excellence. Barts and the London’s Breast Care Centre, which opened in 2004, is acknowledged as a national leader, not simply for its clinical provision, but also for its excellent design and the outstanding incorporation of specially commissioned artworks by Cornelia Parker, David Batchelor and DJ Simpson, among others. [[percent for art is having an undeniable impact on the built enviornment, not least in the health sector]]

Of course, public art commissioning can go wrong. Anyone who has visited new urban developments or hospitals will have seen incongruous lumps of sculpture placed un-strategically near car parks and public entrances. Indeed, there are those which we will have all walked past many times without even registering. Alongside the strikingly inappropriate, there is often to be found the strikingly banal. Too many local authorities have instituted percent for art schemes as their sole means of encouraging artistic engagement with the built environment. Artists and developers are often not supported or guided in their activity. Some planning officers have been willing to approve applications where the consideration of art offers no sense of context, scale and impact. Some local authorities, perhaps mindful of their electoral vulnerability, have failed to support commissioners of percent for art schemes when the media has decried the ‘waste of money’. Nowhere has this been more keenly felt than in the NHS.

The commissioning and installation of public art in the NHS requires careful consideration, consultation and a coherent approach to improving the environment, using creativity, careful communication and good housekeeping. Hospitals are a special case – they are not profit-making and their primary function will always be to make people better. But, crucially, art can help: studies in recent years have found art in healthcare environments can speed recovery and reduce the need for analgesics. In order to make public art work, it should aim for the best possible bang for its buck: it should be commissioned with the needs of its public in mind, emphasising accessibility and value. Increasingly Trusts are employing artists, project managers and consultants with a real understanding of how this can be achieved. Commissions are more commonly focused on factors including artistic merit, accessibility, patient value, sustainability and practical issues of installation and maintenance, rather than expediency or grand statements.

Applied properly, percent for art can involve artists in a design process which results in better-looking buildings which serve their public better. This may well end up with a very small element of the total budget being spent on art in terms of sculptures, paintings and mobiles, but money going on improved processes, public engagement, integrated arts spaces and enlightened design. Arts spending will always have its detractors: just last year, Northern Ireland’s Health Minister initiated a review of the percent for art policy in the health service after the Northern Ireland Public Service Association criticised spending on art during the redevelopment of Ulster Hospital. Yet now is not the time for per cent for art to be reversed; it is the time for local authorities to engage with commissioners and support the health sector’s bid to escape the institutionalised bleakness of its past. It’s time for artists to move beyond art on hospital walls and in hospital gardens and to start thinking about how they can make better
hospitals.