Victoria Pagan demonstrates the importance of making the case for the arts within regeneration.
When I joined ERS five years ago, we were working largely on research and evaluation for projects to regenerate communities through activity under the ‘National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’ (2001) 1, including Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), New Deal for Communities (NDC) and Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF). Policymakers were thereby attempting to promote a holistic, longer term approach towards the improvement of communities, and to narrow the gap in the provision of and access to good quality services.2 SRB gave areas up to seven years of funding to address employment, education and skills, social exclusion, environment and infrastructure, local economies and business, and community safety. NDC programmes built on this by targeting individual communities with around £50m, usually over 10 years, to promote sustained improvement in similar areas to those described under SRB.
These approaches advocate an understanding of the interactions between different social functions (for example, health, crime, housing, education, employment) to promote positive outcomes for people. Often, our role has been to assess the impact of the investment and associated delivery practice by bringing an external exploration of data, for example, through interviews with stakeholders, consultation with residents, cost benefit analysis and an ethnographic enquiry. What was either missing or marginal in the programmes was activity to improve people’s emotional, social and physical well-being related to leisure, arts and culture. Existing projects frequently aimed to divert the antisocial activities of young people rather than promoting enrichment for its own sake and for all.
In the past 18 months, there has been significant growth in the prominence of the arts and culture delivering positive outcomes. ERS has developed a multidisciplinary team across four national offices, building on the original base of economists, geographers and anthropologists to include sociologists, planners and historians. It reflects the changing attitudes of arts and cultural organisations, as well as statutory authorities, towards mutual recognition of collaborative practice to achieve shared outcomes. We are increasingly asked to support the collation of an evidence base to demonstrate the effects of working in this way, measuring the contribution of the arts, culture and creative industries towards outcomes that were traditionally ‘someone else’s business’.
More of a case has still to be made in individual authorities. However, specific indicators of progress can be found in the new ‘Performance Framework for Local Authorities’ and ‘Local Authority Partnerships Single Set of 198 National Indicators’ 3, and a growing number of local authorities are choosing to include the National Indicators which pertain to culture within their Local Area Agreements (LAAs). Arts and cultural organisations are also being commissioned to deliver specifically targeted outcomes within LAAs, representing a trend towards greater respect for their expertise and value. Those seeking to regenerate deprived areas have come to recognise the important role that the arts can play and the range and substance of the contributions they can make. My aim is to help arts professionals seize these opportunities and to have the full value of their work recognised.
Victoria Pagan is a Principal Consultant at ERS. w: http://www.ers.org.uk
1 http://www.neighbourhood.gov.uk/publications.asp?did=85
2 http://www.communities.gov.uk/corporate/www.ers.org.uk
3 http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/localgovernment/nationalindicator