ARTS FUNDING AIDS THE ECONOMY AND MORALE
EVERYONE’S TALKING about levelling up. Since the Government published its plans on the subject, there’s now a bit more clarity on how they intend to bring it to life. It was heartening to see the UK’s ‘vibrantly creative arts sector’ get a mention in the first line of the plans alongside the NHS. This is no coincidence: both entities are sources of deep pride and both are increasingly vital to the population’s future health and wellbeing.
At the Centre for Cultural Value, which is based at the University of Leeds, we have just completed 15 months of research into the impact of Covid-19 on the UK’s cultural sector.
We talked to over 230 people who work in the sector and conducted a UK population survey to see how people’s views and behaviours shifted as the pandemic unfolded. We also crunched the numbers to see how the pandemic impacted on different parts of the cultural workforce, and looked at how Greater Manchester dealt with the pandemic too.
Some of the findings were positive. People working in museums, galleries, festivals and theatres told us repeatedly that their organisations delivered activity closer to local communities during the pandemic.
Some, like Slung Low in Leeds, used their logistical skills to set up a food bank. Others, like Theatre Absolute in Coventry, developed new projects to support creativity and wellbeing at home. Eighty per cent of the people we surveyed across the UK said that taking part in arts and culture was important to their wellbeing – that it improved their mood and helped them manage anxiety.
But despite the rapid take-up of vaccines, people’s confidence to return to cultural venues remained low throughout 2021. As the cost of living rises there is now a concern that audience numbers will take a long time to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels – and some older audiences may never come back at all.
This is bad news for our local cultural venues, including those here in Yorkshire, and this is where levelling up could make a real difference. Our research is clear that investment in the arts and culture can boost both local economies and people’s morale.
After the 18 months we’ve all had, we could perhaps do with that more than ever. But London has historically received a disproportionate amount of funding, and our research tells us that arts and cultural funding is still unequal.
During the pandemic, funds to help cultural organisations survive have generally been allocated to places that already receive the lion’s share of public funding. Levelling up could balance things up, but only if future funds for recovery are targeted towards those places hardest hit by Covid-19.
It’s not just different places that were hit differently. Particular parts of the creative and cultural sector were affected more than others.
For example, live music, the performing arts and visual arts were hit the hardest, with the professional workforce falling by around a quarter between March and June 2020, with no signs of significant recovery by the end of 2020. Although job vacancies are now picking up, there is currently a recruitment crisis unfolding across the sector with organisations struggling to employ suitably skilled workers. Younger people, women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds working in the cultural sector were among the worst hit in terms of losing work and income.
And for some freelancers, who make up a significant part of the cultural workforce, the impact was sometimes utterly devastating with no state support to cushion the blow. Freelancers constituted 62 per cent of the core-creative workforce before the pandemic and only 52 per cent by the end of 2020.
Over the past few decades, governments and councils across the world have been interested in the potential of culture to regenerate towns, cities and regions – especially regions like Yorkshire which have been badly affected by deindustrialisation. We know that arts and culture can play a key role in making the places more attractive and sustainable places to live.
For example, people in Glasgow, Liverpool, Derry-Londonderry, Hull and Coventry have all benefited from being cities of culture, and similar benefits await Leeds in 2023 and (hopefully) Bradford in 2025.
However, research also teaches us that top-down investment designed to develop creative cities or cultural quarters generally doesn’t work. This approach has been proven to perpetuate social inequality and exclusion by driving up house prices and business rates, gentrifying what were previously affordable areas of larger cities inhabited by local people. Investment in cultural programmes that involves local people at every stage of planning, development and investment can ensure this doesn’t happen, as well as having much more lasting impacts. But there isn’t a blueprint for this kind of investment. Cultural projects must respond to the geography, communities and heritage specific to each place – those things that give an area its identity.
We need to move away from pitting places against one another in competitions for funding and instead ensure that support is given where it is most needed in a way that responds to local priorities. In reality, this means targeting areas that might have limited cultural activity to begin with but who would nonetheless stand to benefit most from harnessing culture’s regenerative powers.
If led sensitively at the local level, levelling up could present a rare opportunity to reanimate our empty high streets and neglected parks and rekindle a sense of pride and belonging in the communities we’re all part of. Culture offers a tried-and-tested way to rebuild our society from this crisis, but we must do so in a fairer and more sustainable way.