I would like to share a few thoughts about yesterday’s Arts Council England announcement of the results of their application process for the new  National Portfolio, speaking purely for myself, and not on behalf of the English Symphony Orchestra or the Elgar Festival.

My heart breaks for colleagues whose support has been cut or eliminated.  The livelihoods of singers, conductors, orchestra musicians and staff members at some of the finest opera companies and orchestras in the UK are going to be at risk as a result of this process. The people affected include some of the best musicians and administrators in the world.

The ESO applied to join the Portfolio and were not successful. For us, that application was the culmination of nearly a decade of unbelievably hard work and huge sacrifice, and, in my own admittedly biased way, I find it hard to believe that any application could have more strongly balanced artistic excellence, distinctiveness, and outreach to underserved areas than ours. It’s now hard to see another pathway to providing our amazing musicians with the kind of stability this fantastic orchestra deserves and needs, and the thought of 3 or 4 more years of hardscrabble before the next Portfolio cycle is, frankly, soul destroying.

While many in our industry are hurting, angry and deeply nervous about the future, I would encourage all of us to also think about the welfare of our colleagues at the Arts Council who have been given an impossible remit and not nearly enough money or resources to deliver it. Over ten years, pretty much all of the people I’ve worked with at the Arts Council, from relationship managers to helpline staff, have been helpful, kind, supportive and hugely professional. For all the habitual grumbling about the ACE’s ‘bureaucratic’ nature (and don’t forget Grantium, the online portal to the very gates of Hell), ACE showed during the Covid pandemic that they could be reactive, flexible, innovative and supportive when  empowered to be so by government. I shudder to think about how hard their teams had to work (REMOTELY!) during that crisis to implement entire new grant programmes, applications and vetting procedures within just weeks in 2020. Their efforts saved the arts in Britain and the livelihoods of thousands of artists.

Successive UK governments of all parties have long sought to reduce the role of the state in funding the arts in the UK, but none have taken seriously the need to make the kinds of structural changes to things like tax law, the rules governing private and overseas trusts and foundations, or the rules around local taxation and budgets, that would be needed for a mixture of private philanthropy, individual giving, corporate sponsorship and local support to create a viable alternative to the Arts Council. Additionally, no government has ever carefully studied whether such changes, even if implemented as successfully as possible, are actually desirable. Would they be good for the arts, good for communities or value for money? It’s not unusual for American orchestras to have as many staff members in the office as musicians onstage because of the need to raise vast sums of money day in, day out. Is that a model to be copied? How does a dependence on private money affect programming? How does it affect relationships between artists and arts organisations? A look at the history of union relations in American orchestras, which all too often ends up with stakeholders at each others’ throats, should give pause to anyone pursuing the “American” model. Does major corporate sponsorship not open the door to ‘arts-washing’ by companies who want to de-toxify their brands while continuing to cause social or environmental harms? Would it not make more sense to look across the worldwide industry at which funding models, and levels of funding, produce the best results for both arts and society as a whole?

Meanwhile, the existing system is clearly not fit for purpose, and with the BBC’s future, and thus that of the BBC orchestras, uncertain, musicians and artists and those that support us are deeply concerned about the future of culture in the UK. Many will also struggle to reconcile yesterday’s results with ACE’s stated aims and objectives. London’s loss was not Elgar Country’s gain in our case – none of our local peers were successful, either, and future ACE NPO funding in Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire looks to average about £1.50/person/yr, compared to a national average of c. £8/person/yr (this is a back of the envelope calculation, corrections welcome, apologies in advance if I’ve done it wrong).  Many will also feel that ‘art’ took a distant second chair to other social concerns in many decisions. It’s hard to think of a more highly regarded orchestra than Britten Sinfonia, who lost their entire grant, while other, far less musically accomplished groups stayed or joined the portfolio. Many applicants, including me, will feel defeated and depressed by the results.

I am sure many good people at the Arts Council, who are passionate about what they do and are doing a thankless job to help support artists and the arts, are going to be feeling pretty low. It’s important for stakeholders to remember that good people have had to make painful decisions based on criteria written in response to political policies without being given sufficient resource even to deliver what those criteria call for.

My colleagues and I are going to have to go through a painful process of damage assessment, re-thinking what we can and can’t do over the coming years. But part of the reason we can have that process is that we’re currently supported by ACE via the Project Grant system. All the stuff we’re proud of that went into that application we really, really thought deserved to succeed, was made possible in one way or another by ACE. There are many things that could be done to reform the existing application system to create a meaningful pathway to NPO support and to limit the ”Russian roulette” nature of the current blind all-or-nothing application system, and I hope that, having shown such tremendous institutional agility during Covid, ACE will seize the moment to work with the sector to make common sense improvements.

If we want a more successful and enlightened funding paradigm for the arts in the UK, I believe we need to focus our advocacy in the near term on two levels. First, supporting our colleagues in every corner of the industry. We are really in this together, however much we may feel like a gang of starving hyenas all picking for meat at the same bony carcass. This includes both the winners and losers in yesterday’s decisions, as well as those who have had to manage this process. If you want good people making good decisions at ACE, now is a time to remember that the best people there are probably close to complete burnout after the last 3 years. Far better to say ‘this situation sucks’ than ‘the Arts Council sucks.’

And, on a national level, we need to insist that current and future political leaders to engage with arts policy in a more meaningful, serious and professional way. Nothing is going to get better if that doesn’t happen. Let’s face it, orchestras and opera companies practically invented ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’ with our own cottage industry of tutting ‘experts’ telling us to rethink our programming, our audiences, our marketing, etc, etc, etc. No amount of ‘rethinking’ is going to substantively improve things without a proper policy paradigm underpinning what we do. This is not going to be easy given the state of our politics in the UK. One thing all our political parties seem to agree on is undervaluing the arts and arts education. It’s been that way since I moved here 20 years ago, and the situation has gotten worse every year. I frankly don’t even know where to suggest we can start to recalibrate our leaders’ thinking, and I don’t know anyone who does.

I suspect that that is, deep down, the real reason we’re all feeling so depressed.

© 2022 Kenneth Woods