Local hero

The move by Alun Ffred Jones, Wales’s Heritage Minister, to make cultural provision a statutory duty for local authorities, is being welcomed in Wales and will be followed with envy in the rest of the UK. Neither Scotland nor England places such a statutory duty on its local authorities, and indeed, as many of our readers will be all too aware, the arts and other cultural activities and provision are usually the first in line for cuts. The lack of arts knowledge among elected members, coupled with a too-often-found ignorance about regeneration, tourism and the economic benefits of cultural activity, form a powerful barrier to progress. Local authorities trumpet their successes, but we don’t hear about it when they cut their arts officer posts, reduce their museum staff to part-time contracts or cut their cultural budgets by half. Local authority arts and culture departments need a champion, and it looks as though Wales may have got one. The picture elsewhere is not so rosy. In England, we hear that arts officers have been made redundant in Amber Valley, Harborough, Braintree and Horsham. North Warwickshire hasn’t renewed its arts officer’s contract, while Lincoln City is planning to shut its cultural services department in September. Of course, some of the pain is due to the recession and the ever-tightening squeeze on budgets – exacerbated by a political culture in which the memory of high taxes in the 1970s and 80s still exerts tremendous pressure. Yet we hear horror stories of councillors unmoved by the threat of closure hanging over their local award-winning museum, and of ‘culture’ services which employ nobody with any arts expertise. All this is despite government rhetoric about the importance of culture and the arts. It is as if the head is looking in one direction, and the rest of the body is hurtling madly the opposite way. Can Alun Ffred Jones, working on his Legislative Competence Order, drive in the thin end of the cultural wedge on behalf of the rest of the UK? And can we all exert enough pressure to bust open the door to a better – and more coherent and prosperous – local arts economy? It’s going to take tremendous political will, both at a local and a national level, to achieve that.