27 March 2006
Keynote address to the IPPR by Minister for Culture, David Lammy - 'From Access To Participation: Culture, Community and Civil Renewal'
Introduction
• Good morning. Thank you Ben. Ladies and Gentlemen I'm delighted to be here with you this afternoon. This is a good way to start the week as it builds on my article for Prospect on the participation agenda.
• I've been Minister for Culture, which I've said before I think is the best job in Government, for little under a year now and I am constantly astounded by the invention of our artists, the depth of our remarkable cultural heritage and the unique role that our libraries and archives play as a resource for communities.
• Culture empowers us to understand ourselves and share with one another our hopes, fears and dreams.
• In the past we've focussed, as the Labour Government, on extending access for many who were previously left out. My argument today is that the agenda must move on. This morning I'd like to consider with you how to move from a world in which access in guaranteed to one in which enduring participation is the norm.
Historical context & sector check list
• The achievement of providing universal access to the richness of British and global culture has bequeathed us many benefits. Your report emphasises that the arts, museums, archives, our historic environment and libraries are a cornerstone of societies' shared civic space and this sits alongside our hospitals, town halls and our schools.
• Just think of the extraordinary treasures cared for and conserved in our museums and galleries and the community pride embodied in our public libraries.
• And there's also our rich and diverse tradition of charitable cultural associations that make up the web of our civic life.
• A century ago Octavia Hill tapped into the deep well of British social activism to found the National Trust – which is now over three and a half million members strong. The Trust along with English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund - conserves and cares for properties and places from Hadrian's Wall to John Lennon's house - all with a real resonance in the life of the nation.
• The remarkable social reformer Michael Young wrote in the 1945 manifesto:
"By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centres, we desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation."
• The 1945 Government went on to found the Arts Council under John Maynard Keynes to realise that vision. And in the 1960s Jennie Lee renewed the Arts Council and expanded its work in the regions as well as the creation of the new institutions on the South Bank.
• And since 1997 we've invested in culture:
- We've invested in the physical infrastructure of our cultural buildings from the South Bank to Sage;
- We've invested in creativity and quality by doubling the Arts Council's grant-in-aid and year on year increases for English Heritage;
- We've invested in our great museums through the re-introduction of free entry to national museums and the extra funding enabling a renaissance in the regions;
- And we've invested in our bright tapestry of voluntary organisations through the National Lottery.
• DCMS devotes more of its funding than any other Department in Whitehall to voluntary and community groups and more people choose to volunteer in our sectors than any other. That's something we're extremely proud of.
• While there have been a diversity of positions and inspirations, the golden thread that runs from Sir Hans Sloane, through Octavia Hill and Jennie Lee to all of our work today is the belief that our brilliant culture should be available to everybody.
• Like that other great institution that sprung from the incredible energy of the 1945 Government, the National Health Service, public provision of culture embodies the democratic values of quality, fairness and universal provision.
• And like the NHS, our cultural institutions must stand ready to adapt to the changing circumstances in which they find themselves today.
• This means confronting the test of moving from a cultural framework that guarantees the right to access to one in which regular and sustained participation is the norm.
• We can legislate for access from above but participation needs to be built from below. We need to move from a world in which people's rights are guaranteed to one in which everyone participates in shared civic life.
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The challenge of living together
• The attacks on London on the 7th and 21st of July last year added a new urgency to the emerging debate on personal, community and national identity.
• Because of the danger of faith becoming a new tension we need more than ever to build a sense of belonging.
• Because of the danger of different races living parallel lives we have to establish lines of communication between communities.
• But these fault lines are not just to be found on questions of faith and race. This is not a "clash of civilizations".
• Because of the potential for a growing divide between rural Britain, the inner city and suburbia it is essential that we provide the spaces where people can begin to understand one another's beliefs.
• Because the generation gap is increasing as young and old are less likely than ever before to meet we need to find the places where they can convene and come together.
• Today we are more likely to live alone, more stressed and less trusting than ever before. While in the 1980s half of us said that most people can be trusted that's declined to less than a third today. [1 - see footnotes]
• Over the same period the proportion of people who describe their neighbourhood as one in which "people do things together and try and help each other" fell from 43 per cent to 29 per cent.
• In my experience whether it be singing in a choir or the way local resident's come together on an HLF funded London Turkish Heritage Project in my constituency, participation in collective endeavour helps to foster a sense of belonging, develop understanding and build a culture of mutual respect.
• New evidence from our Taking Part survey confirms that. It shows that if you participate in the cultural sector you're more likely trust many people where you live. And this holds true no matter your ethnicity or social background.
Casting Forward
• The need to care for the spaces where people can meet is becoming more important as the old granite certainties of class, religion and family on which identity and ideology were based are being replaced by the shifting sands of personal choice, values and autonomy.
• Long-term trends could push us even further apart.
- Already there are more people over 60 than there are under 18. By 2020 demographic change will have begun to bite.
- We will be an increasingly diverse society as migration from within and outside the EU increases. By 2020 Leicester will be the first English city where the majority of residents will be non-white. London's population will have grown by a million, over three quarters of whom will be from Black or minority ethnic backgrounds.
- By 2020 the Second World War will slip from our lived memory into written history. By then there will only be around 1 million people alive who will remember the war compared with 12 million today.
- And by 2020 the world's population will peak at around 8 billion placing increasing pressures on our natural resources and our global climate.
• What is clear to me is that meeting these challenges will require us to work more together not less. There can be no retreat from climate change behind gated communities no more than from the winds of international competition into isolationism.
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Diversity as strength
• To begin to knit together the disparate strands of modern living we must put three central pillars into place.
- The first is equality of access. No-one should be discriminated against on the grounds of ethnicity, sex and sexuality or age.
- The second, is participation. We know that public services work best the closer they are to the public when the public are engaged is shaping those services that they want. Participation in also serves to remind us of our responsibilities to one another.
- Finally, interaction. The importance of building opportunities to encounter those from a background different from your own so we don't end up living parallel lives.
• I believe that shared cultural experience is the mortar that bonds the building blocks of society together. And those interactions form the foundation of our rich national culture. From Bend it Like Beckham through to the Beatles – the British culture draws on a myriad of influences and fuses them into something new.
• In this country we've often thought about comprehensive schooling, the Doctors waiting room or even the local pub as the kind of place where the everyday encounters between different groups might occur. I think we should also be able to assert that cultural organisations are vital to this task.
• And there are three reasons why I believe the cultural sector to be important.
• The first is that we can provide the physical infrastructure where people can meet. Parks, squares, libraries, theatres, halls are the democratic spaces of everyday life where we meet as equals. They provide the foundations for numerous groups from football teams on Hackney Marshes to the ones that rely on their local library's broadband service.
• The second is the extraordinary vitality of our cultural organisations across the length and breadth of the country. I've already mentioned the National Trust but there are countless other examples of cultural groups that form the backbone of community life. Many of our national organisations not only bring together on a national or regional scale but they play a bigger role legitimising working together on a local scale. Tate Modern's work with the local community is one excellent example of this.
• The third and unique aspect is how culture is both an expression of and a stimulation to discussion on questions of identity, community and nationality.
• It is no accident that American Gansta Rap found its second home in the banlieue in Paris and its voice in the mouths of the disadvantaged and disaffected.
• So the answer to the question "who are we and where do we want to go" won't only be found in newspapers. It won't be found even in Hansard. It will be found in the everyday negotiation and discussion that produces cultural works from painting to pop.
• Culture and the arts are not just worthy goods but social necessities.
• From the smallest to the largest cultural organisations are where those bridging encounters between those who look, sound and live differently from one another can take place.
• That's what I call "encounter culture".
• Take for example the British Museum and the BBC World Service Bigger Picture Project last year. As part of the major Africa 05 festival the British Museum and World Service brought well over a thousand schools together in Africa and the UK through cultural exchange.
• This goes to the heart of why we invest in culture. It is because we value innovation, heritage, risk and diversity. But we also invest because we know that the well-being of our society as individuals, communities and nations depends on the tools to explore who we are, being in the hands of the many and not the few.
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Developing encounter space - where next?
• But if we're to reap the full benefit - and the prize is within our grasp – we must build a society where our cultural life is not only open in theory but in practice.
• Achieving this vision means we have to continue to adapt to take our values into a modern setting.
• We have to recognise that there is a perception gap between the vitality of our cultural life that I've described to you today and others views of our cultural life.
• The cultural sector is often characterised as narrow, elitist and self-interested.
• We need to ask ourselves why this is the case when:
- there are 3.5m members of National Trust;
- there were 36 million visits to DCMS sponsored museums and galleries last year;
- two-thirds of people attended at least one arts event;
- and almost one in ten of the adult population volunteered in our sectors over the last twelve months.
• I think this means that we need to get better at communicating the value that we create. Sometimes we can all become a bit too focussed on the minutiae rather than raising our gaze towards the panoptic horizon. We must move as well.
• Our great cultural institutions must reflect the changes in our society. Just as the BBC has moved from a Reithian conception of improving the masses to one in which its mission is to empower people's own choices.
• Not one voice speaking to many but many voices speaking to one.
• As my colleague David Milliband set our last week, giving citizens greater power over their local services means more responsive services, more responsible citizens and a shift in the perception of the motivation and efficacy of the provider.
• This is as true for the cultural sector as elsewhere. Building this culture of participation will mean a change in mindset. It means ensuring that the framework for our investment supports bottom-up innovation rather than top-down dictation.
• We must all take a broader view of what "culture" is of value. This calls us to be guided by what the public values with the proper role of experts informing not determining where that value lies.
• I know that Liz will talk shortly about how the Heritage Lottery Fund is negotiating the challenge of blending expert advice with citizens choices. But I think the value is there for all of us to see. It puts heritage in the hands of the people whose story it is seeking to tell.
• This not only helps us to preserve the heritage people value, but also builds trust in organisations and supports the legitimacy of what we do in the eyes of the public. In short, it creates public value.
• Many of you here today will have examples from your own experience and I look forward to hearing them over the course of the next few months.
• So we've started on our journey but we need to accelerate the pace of change if we're going to keep up with the runaway world that's clearly around us.
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Opportunity for the future
• There are some fantastic opportunities ahead for us to achieve this step change.
• In 2007 we will be commemorating Britain's leading role in the abolition of the slave trade.
• In 2008 we will be celebrating Liverpool as the European Capital of Culture.
• And in 2012 we will be staging the Olympic and Paralympic Games here in the capital.
• We can seize the opportunity to entrench a culture of participation across the length and breadth of the nation.
• The five interlocking Olympic rings represent the interdependence of the five continents of the globe. In the run-up to 2012 I want our cultural Olympiad to draw on the UK's unrivalled and inventive culture to demonstrate and strengthen the links between those five rings. I'd like to hear from you and other stakeholders about how we can achieve this.
• Another way of developing an encounter culture is thinking about what more we could do to use those democratic public spaces that are already in place.
• Britain has a rich tradition of fetes, carnivals and street festivals. And our streets, our parks, gardens and squares – but also community halls and churches – can be the physical foundations for cultural expression.
• For example, in France the annual fete de la musique sees ten million people go out onto the street to listen to over 800,000 musicians from bed room bands to major stars. The Notting Hill carnival here in London is clearly an amazing celebration of our diversity.
• But, while not every village can be a Notting Hill, I saw at in Tottenham last year in the grounds of Bruce castle museum how our festival can begin to achieve that.
Close
• I think that you can all be proud of depth of excellence demonstrated across the cultural sector today. The talent our artists, the world-class strength of our museums and galleries, the quality of our libraries & archives and the unrivalled excellence of our heritage sector.
• The cultural sector has a unique and important role to play and contribution to make to fostering an encounter culture through empowering individuals and communities.
• And, as has always been the case, I do not think that we can begin to answer the urgent questions around personal, community and national identity without the cultural sectors' contribution.
• Just as the challenge for the twentieth century was to extend access our task today is to build participation. I look forward to working with all of you on that mission and discussing those ideas further with you over the coming months today.
• Thank you
Footnotes
[1] "today" is 1999. Data from PM's Strategy Unit (2004) Strategic Audit Cabinet Office: London..
[1] Halpern D (2005) Social Capital Polity: Cambridge
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