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Margaret Hodge’s speech to Demos

As far as culture goes, you – we – all of us, have all never had it so good.

And the evidence is there across the piece, whether we look at participation numbers, commercial income, creative output or international awards.

Despite the Credit Crunch:

• Cinema admissions in the first half of 2009 were the highest they’d been for seven years.
  
• West End theatres chalked up a record year for audiences, breaking through the 14 million barrier for the first time.
  
• English Heritage visitor numbers peaked at 1.2 million last August – and 
  
• Museum attendance grew over three times the national average for all visitor attractions in 2008.
  

But this success did not come about by accident. It was made possible by a deliberate act of public policy-  more taxpayers’ money, leading to  increased and sustained public investment,  allowing  individual talent to flourish and enabling infrastructure to be renewed.

Since 1997, we have increased our investment in the Arts by 83% in real terms and our investment in museums by 69%.  
It’s because of that investment that the Arts Council was able to report that new work now makes up 47% of the repertoire in subsidized theatre as compared to a mere 14% a decade ago.

And it’s because we chose to fund free admissions to all our national museums, that attendance at those museums which previously charged has grown by a massive 124% since 2002.

And more recently, people felt we had finally put to bed the false dichotomy between access and excellence. Indeed there is now a wide consensus that it is only through excellence in artistic and cultural endeavour that we can encourage greater participation in and enjoyment of culture, heritage and the arts.

The last decade has also seen a coming together of the arguments deemed important to justify public investment in the sector. More and more people understand the intrinsic value of culture and yearn for the experiences which will enrich their souls and even transform their lives.

At the same time, there is wider recognition of the role arts and culture can play across our lives:

• Stimulating creativity as children develop their skills and capabilities in schools,
  
• Creating more attractive places where people want to live and work;
  
• Using cultural investment as a catalyst for regeneration;
  
• Or, supporting the creative sector as a key growth sector of our modern economy.

There is also a growing recognition that as traditional institutions, like the church or the village hall, institutions which bound communities in the past, diminish in their authority, culture and the arts gain in importance as means through which communities can build a sense of shared identity and purpose. Whether its amateur dramatic groups, book clubs, drawing classes or village film clubs, culture and the arts have become a powerful contemporary way by which social capital is created.

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When Banksy returned to his birthplace to ‘transform’ the Bristol Museum for a temporary show, the queues to see it were six hours long at times. A few months later we saw the same thing happen in Birmingham when the Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold went on show.

And I will always remember the very first debate to which I had to respond as Arts Minister which was about how a community had come together in the village of Berwick in Elmet to campaign for the resources they needed to excavate the remains of an Iron Age Fort.

So why is it that we can trumpet and celebrate all this success of the past decade, yet feel so nervous about the future?

Why is it that as we enter a period of financial constraints in public expenditure the pervading view is that the culture and heritage budget should take its hit. 

And interestingly, this isn’t the case in the Netherlands where the arts and culture have been excluded from public expenditure cuts.

Because don’t forget, public spending for our sectors is relatively minute. Expenditure on museums is a mere 0.08% of total public spending – that’s less than a tenth of one percent.

Public spending on museums, libraries, the arts, architecture and the historic environment  all together come to just over one percent of the total health budget alone.  Or another way of looking at it - our total spending on the cultural sectors is less than the total underspend in the Department of Health!

So, to have, say, a 10 or 15 percent cut in these budgets would contribute virtually nothing to the overall targets for reduction, but would wreak untold damage on the health of our cultural infrastructure and capability. Of course, we should always seek efficiency savings but where on earth is the sense of pulling back from a proven track record?

The argument has already been accepted for international development which is a similarly small component of the public spending envelope, and which has been excluded from cuts. 

Our challenge in the immediate future is to build that same public consensus on the critical importance of culture, heritage and the arts so that we achieve the most important thing we can for the future – a continuing and sustained level of investment.

It’s so easy to cut and yet, it’s so difficult to rebuild. It’s taken us a decade – ten long years - to create the breadth and depth of greatness we now enjoy. It would be tragic if we allowed that to be threatened by short term fiscal pressures on the basis of equal misery for all.

Just reflect a moment - Tracey Emin attracts columns of coverage when she complains of a 50% tax rate and threatens to leave Britain. Why are the Great and the Good not shouting loudly for the arts as we move towards deciding where the axe should fall?

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And I worry that the threat of cuts is forcing the arts back to justifying expenditure on instrumental grounds alone and that could have an effect on what is produced and distributed.  Of course the economic arguments matter and of course the educational or social capital justifications are important. But having spent the last decade building confidence in the intrinsic value of our investment in the arts, we should not allow the threat of cuts to recreate old divisions.

So the onus on us all is to make the case for the arts – to counter the claim of Oscar Wilde that ‘all art is quite useless.’

There’s a political truth here. And it is that politicians will only support cultural investment if they are confident that the public will back them. Local authorities find it difficult to prioritise library spending when our own Taking Part survey shows that only 4 out of 10 adults use their libraries and the trend is downwards. School heads would rather employ an extra assistant to hear children read than a poet who will stimulate creativity, if parents and politicians prioritise reading over everything else.

So we need to build and articulate the public backing for the arts and culture. For a start, let’s mobilise the support of all those who participate in or enjoy arts, heritage and cultural experiences:

• The 9.4 million adults who take part in voluntary and amateur arts groups.  
  
• The two out of three adults who believe that investment in our historic environment makes localities more attractive for people to live and work in.
  
• The two out of three children of primary school age who last year visited a museum outside of school.

That is one heck of a lot of people for whom our investment matters. They should be shouting loudly.

We underestimate public support and our job is to corral it and lead it.

But we do face challenges.  Firstly it’s difficult to express the value of much of what we’re about because it’s pretty difficult to accurately measure the impact. It’s our collective responsibly to do something about that. One step we’re taking today is announcing the first joint DCMS/DEMOS fellow, Samuel Jones, who has the responsibility of turning the data we have into the impacts we seek.

And secondly, one of the great virtues of the arts is that they provide a safe place in which to push back boundaries, to challenge current orthodoxies or to address contentious issues. Endeavour that pushes at conventional boundaries is much more difficult to promote at the time it happens.

The installations that emerge in the Turner prize competition are often controversial, but anyone who went to the Turner prize retrospective at Tate Britain will have observed how quickly controversial arts becomes accepted orthodoxy. The Angel of the North may have been attacked as a waste of money when it was first erected, but it is now a strong symbol of a proud community. And we do need plays like Behzti or Jerry Springer the Opera to tackle important but difficult issues.

So our task must also be to extend understanding of the role culture and the arts can play in society. We should not be inhibited by the bigoted populist rage in the popular media. We need to take the argument on and win it with the public.

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And finally, this is not a plea for unquestioning public investment. Our institutions need to become ever more efficient. The boundaries between commercial and publicly funded work must continue to be blurred and we should encourage and celebrate the success of theatres like the Royal Court in getting two publicly funded plays, Enron and Jerusalem playing to full houses in the West End.

And all our cultural institutions need to work ever harder to attract private finance as part of a mixed economy of funding, so that they become less vulnerable to the vagaries of public finance.

It isn’t good enough that private giving to the public arts runs at half the level of private investment in the United States. And our sectors need to work harder to convince those who do give charitably, that investment in the cultural sectors matter. At present, only 4% of charitable giving finds its way into our cultural institutions. So in building a wider and stronger consensus for public investment we need, in parallel, to build an equally strong commitment for private investment.

But whilst the major challenge for the next decade must be to maintain funding, we, of course, face other challenges too.
We may have done well in extending audiences, but we still have a long way to go to ensure more equal representation in both who enjoys and who works in the arts and cultural sectors.

There have been some terrific innovations from some of our great cultural institutions.

I am thinking of the Royal Opera House, for example, who linked up with The Sun to fill their seats with readers of the red top paper.

Or the staging of plays by the Royal Court in the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre.

Or Anthony Gormley who created a unique public involvement experiment on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

But we need to constantly reflect and experiment to grow our audiences and bring more people from poorer backgrounds to exhibitions and performances. And as part of this, we need to continue to invest in our regions so that we really entrench cultural excellence throughout Britain, available to people wherever they live. Renaissance in the Regions has proved immensely effective value for the £242 million investment, in vastly improving the offer at our regional museums.

And our plans to create the first UK City of Culture in 2013 will also help to spread the benefits of culture throughout the country. It is truly impressive that Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture brought the region £800 million of economic benefit in 2008, and that city has been transformed into the third most popular week-end destination for British tourists.

And a continuing emphasis on encouraging touring by our national institutions, whether it’s of performances or artefacts, will all support a continuing endeavour to extend audiences.

But the challenge to open up opportunities to work in our cultural institutions to a wider cohort of our society remains enormous. We don’t have good data and we need to collect it. Although ten percent of ACE’s portfolio goes to BME led organisations and although nearly 50 percent of HLF’s awards have gone to areas of high deprivation, there is still entrenched inequality of opportunity for those seeking to work in the Arts.

It’s often declared that Sports are for all and that sporting success is one way of achieving social mobility. I remember the received wisdom in the 1960s and 1970s which was that pop music or sport were the only way for many people to find a way up from deprivation and poverty.  A daft exaggeration at the time, but one that concealed an awkward truth.

But it’s dispiriting isn’t it, that even today, 22% of those receiving support from UK Sport were privately educated. The position, according to a recent Guardian article, for those seeking to work in arts or culture is even more unequal with 7 out of 30 of our regional theatres run by Oxbridge graduates and 5 out of the 12 winners of the James Menzies-Kitchin award for young directors boasting an Oxbridge degree.

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Billy Elliot and Strictly Come Dancing may widen aspirations, but the closed shop culture, whereby networking and nepotism open doors and unpaid internships are the most common way the sector rations opportunities, indicates we have a long way to go.  Both Government and the cultural institutions need to think long and hard about how they can facilitate wider opportunities and real social mobility to really get the best talent working across all the sectors.

Part of the answer lies in extending the initiatives we have taken within schools. Both the Creative Partnerships programme and the Find Your Talent programme are proving immensely successful in bringing creativity to the classroom and extending artistic opportunities to working class children.

Two of the most moving experiences I have enjoyed as Minister have been seeing a class of sixty nine year olds in my own constituency all playing string and wind instruments after a year of whole class tuition. Most of the children would never have seen or touched an orchestral instrument.

Or a contemporary dance performance by a group of Muslim girls in Tower Hamlets where the traditional cultural inhibitions were set aside in celebration of excellence.

So a further challenge for the next period is to make these offers universal to all our children in all our schools. This needn’t cost massive amounts of new money. By working through existing education and health budgets we can promote creativity in the classroom and build an entitlement for every child to enjoy up to five hours a week of cultural activity both in and out of school.

Finally, the impact of new technology on our world remains a fast moving agenda. The central message we must all grasp all of the time, is that we need to seize the positive opportunities new technology represents and not become overwhelmed by the negative threats which appear to loom.

So we shouldn’t become obsessed by defending existing business models and instead we should think how new technology can democratise the arts. The digital future is an interactive one.

This means that in the future many of us stop being passive recipients, and become active participants.  Time will tell what that means for excellence and access.

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Many of our institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British Library, the Tate and British Museum are also fast becoming successful global online brands .  And we don’t quite know what that means for the international influences or for our evolving national culture.

The boundaries between art forms are becoming increasingly blurred as people exploit the new technology to test the boundaries of their creativity. And that is leading to the development of new and exciting cultural experiences for all of us.

All of these are challenging opportunities. They come at the end of a decade when we have transformed the cultural sector from being under confident and underfunded to one that is at the top of its creative game with a reputation that bestrides the globe.

That success can only be sustained if we win the argument about money and if we continue to meet the new challenges, be they to further extend opportunity or to respond to the digital age. I am confident that our collective strength, enthusiasm and creativity will ensure we win and I look forward to working in partnership with you all in the future.

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