Richard Morrison
The latest changes to Arts Council England funding are deeply worrying
It’s a pity, in a way, that the uproar following Arts Council England’s radical redistribution of its grant allocations for 2023-6 has focused so much on the fate of one organisation. Of course, the prospect of English National Opera being stripped of all its public subsidy (currently £12.8m a year) unless it moves out of London is massively worrying. That’s especially true for the 300 musicians, technicians and other staff who work there, who certainly wouldn’t all get jobs in the strippeddown, regionalised version of ENO envisaged by the Arts Council.
The fact is, however, that ENO has been vulnerable for years, artistically and financially. At a time when there is such an obsession in government with moving public subsidy away from London and into the regions, the company was an easy target. What worries me more is that the treatment of ENO is merely the most prominent example of a far wider and more ominous policy within the Arts Council. It is the belittling of classical music generally, and opera in particular.
Consider the following grim list of casualties from the Arts Council’s funding shake-up. Welsh National Opera loses more than £2m of its annual grant for touring regional venues in England. Glyndebourne loses half its grant for touring its productions.
The London Sinfonietta, one of the world’s most renowned contemporary music ensembles, loses 41 per cent of its funding: a devastating cut that will have a huge negative impact on young composers particularly. The Britten Sinfonia, which provides East Anglia with top-class orchestral concerts, has lost its entire grant. All the big London orchestras have had their subsidy cut by 12 per cent, and London’s biggest classical music venues – the Southbank, Barbican and Royal Opera House – have also had millions slashed from their grants. Yes, there are winners, notably the minorityethnic orchestra Chineke! and the ‘play it from memory’ ensemble Aurora.
And at least the big regional orchestras had ‘standstill’ allocations (though that represents a severe real-term reduction with inflation running at 11 per cent).
Overwhelmingly, however, it’s terrible news for many classical music and opera organisations that have already been clobbered by closure during the pandemic and reduced box-office takings during the current recession. And bad news for those organisations means potentially life-changing hardships and even more insecurity for thousands of professional musicians, as well as the reduction of educational work and an impoverished concert life.
I wish I could spot some redeeming logic or persuasive strategy behind these decisions, because during the Covid crisis I was really impressed by the way that the Arts Council’s leaders – Nicholas Serota, its wily chairman, and Darren Henley, its indefatigably cheerful chief executive – rose to the challenge of delivering emergency funding. Unfortunately, I think they have really messed up this time, and that’s putting it politely. If the idea was to boost the arts in the regions as part of a levelling-up agenda imposed by the former prime minister and his culture secretary, why cut the regional-based Britten Sinfonia and major companies that tour opera? If the aim was to reward companies striving to make their audiences and workforces more ethnically and generationally diverse, why chop ENO, which has led the way in both areas?
It’s possible that by the time you read this the Arts Council and ENO will have agreed some compromise that at least gives the opera company a year’s grace to sort out its future, whether in or out of London. (And, not least, the future of the too-big-for-purpose London Coliseum, which ENO owns but rarely fills.) What won’t be quickly bridged, however, is the vast chasm between the Arts Council’s apparent aspirations for England’s musical life and the sort of work currently being done by our leading classical music organisations. Put crudely but not, I think, unfairly, the Arts Council’s attitude seems to be, ‘Your sort of music making is elitist’, and the response from the classical music world is: ‘Yes, if that’s what excellence means.’
In short, in the Arts Council’s eyes, it seems, all the exemplary educational work done by the UK’S big symphony orchestras and opera companies is beside the point. They are simply deemed to be performing the wrong sort of music, in the wrong places, to the wrong people. No wonder many beleaguered classical music managers are wondering whether even applying for an ACE grant in future is worth the bureaucratic hassle and the potential humiliation of rejection.
The treatment of ENO is merely the most prominent example of a more ominous policy