PlatForm - Playing a long game – by Liz Hill and Brian Whitehead, Co-editors

The Adapt Trust awards (p3) remind us every year of the fundamental importance of creating good access to the arts for disabled people. The Lottery capital funding programmes recognise this too, and encourage organisations to place high quality physical access at the heart of their building plans. The problem is that quality costs money.
In the case of physical access, the demands of the Disability Discrimination Act serve to place a useful imperative on spending the money to achieve that quality. In other areas of the arts, there is no such enforceable imperative – and when it comes to art, neither will there ever be a universal view as to what constitutes quality. As a result, it’s all too easy to find excuses for cutting corners. Staffing is one such area. Gillian Bates (p9) raises the age-old problem of pitiful salaries in the sector. It’s been raised before – many, many times – but the fact remains that an awful lot of people in this sector are expected to work for love rather than money, and this inevitably narrows down the pool of available management expertise to those who are willing either to live on very little or live off someone else. Other related problems arise as over-stretched and under-resourced managers spend their lives fire-fighting rather than addressing the strategic issues that could affect the future viability of their organisations. The chances of them having time to digest the contents of Stephen Cashman’s book (p12) are slim. For that reason alone, the Arts Council of Wales’ assertion that its new programme for Sustainable Arts Organisations (p1) will create the chance for hard-pressed arts organisations to step back and reflect on the most appropriate ways ahead is a welcome one; though just how much can be achieved, if the budget set aside for that will also to be used to “eliminate historic debt”, is surely a concern. Time alone will tell whether this initiative provides a long-term fix or whether future financial constraints consign it to history as a short-term tactic.