Change, decay, promise: 50 years of local government cultural services

Local government cultural services in the UK operate in conditions of severe restraint largely because – with the exception of libraries and archives – they’re discretionary rather than statutory services. Secondly, they are extremely difficult to evidence and evaluate.

Between them, these make cultural services politically weak which, over the last fifty years, has left them at the mercy of political and organisational actors in other policy sectors who can take advantage of the statutory nature of the services they provide, the relative ease of their evaluation and the strength of their evidence bases.

This has served to create a great deal of uncertainty for cultural services in conditions of shifting ideological interests in governments and changes, as a consequence of these shifts, in their operational environments.

What is the point of them?

These conditions give rise to questions about how these services should be funded, how they should be delivered and, importantly, what the point of them is. Each of these concerns has undergone considerable change over the last fifty years with no definitive answer being found.

In terms of funding, even while local government continues to be the largest source of funding for cultural services in the country, the changes in arguing how this funding should be provided, and how much of it there should be, have contributed to very different impacts nationwide.

 Inevitably, as discretionary services, the temptation to make cuts to them, particularly given the increasing demands for other, statutory, local government services, has been apparent – even if unevenly across and between local authorities.

The consequences of financial squeezes have been for most local authorities to search for new means by which cultural services can continue to be provided, even if these means may not involve them as direct service providers.

Towards a mixed economy

While the need to develop a mixed economy of funding cultural services between the public, the private and the voluntary sectors has been given new impetus over the last fifty years, the move towards a mixed economy of service providers is a much more recent phenomenon.

Again, this mix has always existed but the shift towards passing delivery responsibilities away from local authorities has become far more widespread since 2010, with subsequent effects on accountability as well as on responsibility.

Cultural services, as well as the organisations and institutions that provide them, are multi-functional in nature with widespread spillover effects between these services and a host of others that are provided not only by local authorities but also by a plethora of other organisations – public, private and voluntary.

A result of this has been the increasing development of bottom-up attachment strategies in local government that see cultural services as not only meeting cultural ends but also as contributing to the attainment of the goals of other policy sectors.

Increasing instrumentalisation

Equally there has been a tendency for a top-down instrumentalisation of cultural services where the goals of other policy sectors take precedence over those of cultural services themselves. With attachment strategies, for example, the provision of a museum service can also be used to provide educational resources and support for the needs of social care at the same time.

With instrumentalisation, meeting social care and educational requirements can become the justification for providing a museum service. Given the rather chicken-and-egg nature of this equation as a result of the multi-functional nature of local government as well as of cultural services, both approaches can be made use of by local government actors – even if their significance and importance lead in each case to differing expectations and assessments of their success.

The facts that cultural services are both generally discretionary and always multi-functional provides a great deal of ground for the development of a multitude of approaches to both their management and provision, as well as to the justifications and expectations that underpin them.

While this implies cultural services are always likely to be flexible in what they do, how they do it, and how they account for themselves, it also demonstrates that they can be subject to a range of pressures and demands predicated on quite different grounds to those that underpin these services, and which can serve to easily trump their own arguments as a result of, for example, greater political support and less ambiguous evidence.

Three concerns

Given the complexity that surrounds local government cultural services, it is difficult – to say the least – to make any predictions about what the future holds for them. But three concerns are evident that are likely to remain constant: those of balance, policy and decision making.

Balance concerning the divide between cultural services as the providers of meaning-making for individuals, groups and society as a whole and the demands for the balancing of the fiscal books has been an ever-present in this field and is unlikely to change.

The policy implications that arise from an increasingly unequal provision of cultural services between geographical areas and social groups and the demands for active engagement and participation by political actors are likely to require a great deal of innovative thinking about service provision, particularly in the context of the balance issue.

Decision making for cultural services will probably not only be increasingly examined on the basis of who is making these decisions and how these are made, but also in terms of which assumptions are being used to justify the outcomes and outputs that are then created.

This article is a summary of a longer paper by Clive Gray and Bethany Rex.