Tories reject central funding of RFOs

A Conservative government would reject recommendations by its own arts task force to fund the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, English National Opera and South Bank Centre, the national regularly funded organisations (RFOs), directly from the DCMS, and seek instead to put long-term funding agreements with “a light-touch supervisory regime” in place for both the national RFOs and “45 semi-national organisations”. Speaking at the Neil Stewart Associates’ Fifth Annual Conference on Culture, Tourism and Sport on 17 September, Ed Vaizey, the Tory Shadow Arts Minister, called for a debate on the relationship between the DCMS and Arts Council England (ACE). Citing the commissioning of the McMaster Report and the ‘A Night Less Ordinary’ scheme as instances where ACE has been obliged to implement Government plans, Vaizey said he remains “committed to the arm’s length principle”, but also said that quangos shouldn’t be doing the jobs of Government departments. ACE should also “give high-quality advice in key areas… to organisations which receive no public money across the whole arts sector”, and open up its staffing to create “a revolving door, between the council and the entire arts sector, both subsidised and commercial”. He reiterated the Tories’ commitment to increase the amount of Lottery money available to the art. He added that the Tories were committed to “a mix of public subsidy, private philanthropy and commercial ventures” in arts funding, but said “we have no hidden agenda to wean the arts off public subsidy”.