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It?s ten years since the National Lottery was born and over the past decade this funding has transformed the arts and cultural map. Jeremy Newton was in at the start as the Arts Council of England?s first arts Lottery director; and he?s still in the thick of it now, running NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Gillian Bates gets his assessment of then and now.

If a week is a long time in politics, then ten years is a very long time in the life of the National Lottery. It seems that we can scarcely recall that the arts fund was originally established in Conservative Britain, initially as a way of repairing and improving arts buildings.

The person charged with the task of distributing this fund in England was the arts Lottery?s first Director, Jeremy Newton. Now Chief Executive of NESTA, Newton spent his first two years as Lottery supremo working for the Arts Council of England on capital projects - repairing and adding innovation to arts buildings that had been neglected... So far, so simple ? or was it?

Moving goalposts

From the outset, some small print in Government policy meant, bizarrely, that film production was included in this ?capital projects only? remit: ?We ended up having to pretend that films were buildings, so we treated them as stand alone capital projects?? explains Newton. Most of the films that were funded were relatively undistinguished in terms of quality and commercial success: ?It was not the UK film industry?s finest hour, but at least we made sure more films were made and seen.?

Just two-and-a-half years after the Lottery was launched, John Major was Prime Minister and introduced the Arts For All Scheme. The Lottery changed forever: ?There was a general sense that too much of the Arts Lottery money was being spent on buildings, which is ironic in that it was in order to fund buildings that the Lottery was devised in the first place. Quite quickly there was a political move to shift to a wider range of opportunities.?

Growing tensions

As Arts for All was established, a split developed within the Arts Council of England, which Newton believes has only recently been addressed. His team still concentrated on the core activity of capital funding for buildings; but another team was tasked with allocating the Arts For All awards. It was a change, which, at first, Newton regarded as ?a bloody nuisance?. He believes that the major restructuring of the Arts Council, which has occurred much more recently, should have been implemented then: ?The Arts Council needed a plan and needed to change its structure to make sense of the Lottery funding. It probably wasn?t radical enough at the time. I think that only in the past two years has the nettle been grasped of taking a comprehensive look at the whole structure of arts funding, creating regions and creating the Arts Council as it now is.?

?We were working with an inherent structure that had all of the tensions and weaknesses that Peter Hewitt has been trying to resolve with his restructuring. How much Lottery funding was being spent in each region was clearly a big issue for the Regional Arts Boards; whether it was spent on buildings or arts activity was becoming a big issue both nationally and regionally? All of this accentuated and aggravated the tensions and structural flaws that had been there for a while in the way the arts system was organised.?

Additionality

He maintains that Arts For All also created a blurring of arts funding:

?It was the first blurring of the boundary between revenue [funding] and the Lottery, and that line has been progressively more blurred ? by accident and by design ? throughout the past seven years, so that there is now much less of a clear distinction about what the Lottery fund is for and what the annual grant aid is for.?

Despite this, ten years on Newton still believes that the principle of ?additionality? is at the heart of Lottery funding. He sees the blurring of funding boundaries as being a good thing in the long-term, and believes that the Arts Council has, on the whole, resisted using the Lottery for core funding. But planning is now essential, and he advocates a project-based approach: ?You need to plan more for the vagaries of what will happen to Lottery money. It goes up and it goes down, and it may disappear at the end of the current franchise. It may be taken away, so you need some mechanism which allows for Lottery funding to be incremental??

Project problems

Looking back over the early Lottery capital projects, there have been some notorious building project failures - such as the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, which cost £11m to build and was sold to the University of Hallam for £500,000. Newton is bullish that this was not a failure:

?It is still a great building and it is being put to public use, so why fight it? Even in an extreme case such as that, I don?t think we will be judged in 100 years as having done something particularly stupid or mischievous. For every National Centre, there are hundreds of really important additions to the national network of small- medium- and large-scale facilities that are extraordinarily honourable in terms of what they are now used for, how flexible they are, and how adept they are at accommodating what artists want to do in them.?

However, he does accept that whilst the Lottery was sprucing up buildings, it was ignoring the often fragile infrastructure of workers and managers who felt ill-equipped to run their new, grander venues: ?I don?t think we adequately rose to the challenge of the management implications... Because it is actually bloody difficult to run a large-scale building project: it?s bloody difficult to run any arts organisation and so we expected a huge amount from our managers, and with hindsight we were expecting too much of them.?

Looking ahead

As far as the future of Lottery funding is concerned, he is confident that the arts will continue to get their rightful share. He is impatient at the suggestion that Lottery money will be siphoned off to support the London Olympics, though recognises the potential threat from Lottery organisers, Camelot, creating a new Olympics Lottery game: ?If there is a separate stand-alone Lottery game, fewer normal Saturday draw tickets would be sold, which would reduce the amount of money going to the arts... the cannibalisation of Lottery ticket-buying is the fear at the heart of this, which Camelot has been challenged to try and avoid.?

Newton is optimistic that the arts will continue to receive Lottery funding, provided the sector can competently make its case for this: ?My hope is that there will continue to be substantial money for the arts and I will do everything in my power to lobby and campaign and persuade for that to be the case. But most of the burden of proof lies with the arts world itself. Provided the arts can demonstrate that they are spending the money well and efficiently, on things that are worth spending on and that have an impact on social and economic activity throughout the UK, then I think the money is relatively safe.?

London bias?

The future prospects for Lottery funding are perhaps of less immediate concern at NESTA, which was set up by Act of Parliament in 1998 and uses the interest on a £200m Lottery-funded endowment to support and promote innovation and creativity across science, technology, the arts and learning. This makes Newton one of the few people in the country to be happy when interest rates go up!

Since May 2000, when the programmes first opened, NESTA has spent over £58m on programmes supporting 624 awards, but has faced criticism (as have the arts) that a high proportion of its awards have been placed in the London area. Newton admits there have been some problems: ?It is still true that a higher proportion of our successful applicants come from London and the South East and we are trying to do something about that. We have appointed representatives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and we are looking at the deployment of NESTA?s resources among the regions of England and how we target representation around England. We are targeting specific regions.?

?It is going to be very difficult for any region other than London to develop a real critical mass of creative industries, but it needs to happen and NESTA is passionately committed to making it happen. We don?t want to spend all our creative industry money in London ? quite the contrary we are desperate to spend it elsewhere.?

Newton may believe that the Lottery will still be around in ten years, but he is equally buoyant about the future of NESTA. ?NESTA in ten years time will have changed the world! It will have changed the way in which the arts, science and technology are taught in classrooms throughout the UK. It will have changed the way individual artists and scientists and engineers and inventors are nurtured, developed and promoted. It will have broken down some of the barriers between the subsidy world and the commercial world?.

Many of the people involved in organising the last 10 years of the Lottery have been invited to a special Camelot Birthday bash. Newton has certainly earned his place at that particular party, and is proud to accept the invitation.