What lies behind the review of arts funding in Wales? Chris Ryde calls for a closer look at how the decisions will be made and where the funds will go.
The Arts Council of Wales (ACW) has set itself a daunting task in its Investment Review. Not only is it, over a period of three months, assessing and evaluating its large portfolio of revenue clients, but it is also reviewing larger project and other “priority organisations”. This exercise raises challenging questions about its internal capabilities to undertake such a review. Can its small cohort of committed staff, together with a moderately sized group of National Advisers, really examine, evaluate and assess the 150 business plans they are soliciting with sufficient depth and understanding to satisfy the arts community? Will the decisions that follow, some of which may well have huge implications, be well informed, fair and properly considered? The inadequacies of the similar exercise in England, which led to the huge backlash at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, are still raw in the minds of many, and puts added pressure on ACW to get its own review right.
The word ‘investment’ is somewhat tendentious in itself. Let’s be clear – there is no new money. What this exercise is intended to do is re-prioritise existing funds. The ACW Chair, Dai Smith, supported enthusiastically in the Assembly by Culture Ministers past and present, has stated for some time that there are “too many” revenue clients and he sees a need to “rationalise”. His recent re-appointment for another three years confirms that the political order believes his premise to be a sound one. Meanwhile, Ministers have weighed in with comments about arts organisations having no right to expect funding in perpetuity. These seem easily supportable statements in theoretical form, unless of course your organisation is the one suddenly identified as failing – against a set of criteria you were barely aware of, and in the face of positive critical assessments.
From the companies’ point of view these are very unnerving times indeed. They have to meet the demands of ACW in providing a range of well-costed and well-argued future plans, while continuing to produce high-quality work and plan for the short to medium term. It is not an easy circle to square, particularly when you when you bear in mind that the vast majority have a core staff in single figures.
And where are the artists in all this? Surely they need to be a source of investment too. Research done by my own organisation, Equity, shows the gap between the income of producing companies from all sources and the amount spent on the creative personnel who make the work is widening. The gap is greater now than at any period in the last eight years. Therefore surely this review is an opportunity for ACW to reassert the importance of investing in core artistic personnel. Let us see both an increase in work and a recognition of professional (properly paid) status as clear criteria in the assessment process.
Indeed, let us hope that ACW brings as much creative thinking to their review as their clients do to their art. There may not have been a full scale renaissance in the arts in Wales over the last ten years, but something pretty significant has been going on. There has been a huge growth in the sense of identity and purpose. There is a confident forward motion. If ACW does not manage its review with the requisite diligence, we will be once again locked in the politics and not the practice, the campaigning and not the creating, and it will be a retrograde step indeed.