A sweet note finally emerges from Arts Council grant fiasco

Aug 12 2008 Agenda by Terry Grimley

As the Birmingham Opera Company stages its latest production, Baroness McIntosh’s inquiry into the row over the Arts Council’s Christmas cuts shows how reorganisation created a structure that was unfit for purpose, writes Arts Editor Terry Grimley.

Representatives of the Sydney Festival, San Francisco Opera, the Bregenz Festival in Austria, the Mozart Festival in La Coruna and other arts professionals from Belgium and Italy are all expected to be rubbing shoulders with the audience for Birmingham Opera Company’s latest production, King Idomeneo, this week.

The fact they are taking the trouble to travel to the one-off production in a disused rubber factory in Ladywood indicates the level of international interest in the unique model the company has developed for staging opera with mixed professional and community casts in unconventional venues. Last year’s production of Traviata won it the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for audience development.

But if Arts Council England had had its way back in January, King Idomeneo would not be taking place and the company would probably have been wound up by now.

BOC was the most controversial West Midlands victim in a draconian round of national cuts which brought ACE some of the most negative publicity in its 60-year history. At the height of the resulting controversy its then chief executive, Peter Howitt, faced a bruising encounter with a who’s who of the British theatrical profession, who passed a vote of no-confidence in ACE at a stormy meeting at the Young Vic.

Apart from BOC and the Stratford-based Orchestra of the Swan, organisations which were dropped from ACE’s portfolio of regularly-funded organisations (RFOs) as part of its strategic review included London’s new writing venue the Bush Theatre, Exeter’s Northcott Theatre (whose demise would have left a vast swathe of the West Country without a professional theatre), the National Student Drama Festival and the London Mozart Players.

The cuts were all the more unexpected because when the Government announced its grant to ACE for the three years from 2008-9 to 2010-11 at the beginning of October last year (by which time the announcement was three months late) it showed an increase of 3.3 per cent, much better than anyone had anticipated.

By the time the dust had settled at the end of February, ACE had added 81 new organisations to its portfolio of RFOs, and three-quarters had been awarded increases in line with, or above, inflation. But what might have been a good news story was completely overshadowed by the chaotic implementation of a strategy which seemed to be seriously compromised by inconsistencies and even faulty data, leading to a humiliating retreat over much of the disputed ground.

So extreme was the public relations disaster that virtually the first act of incoming chief executive Alan Davey was to commission a report on the whole affair from Baroness McIntosh, the former head of the Royal Opera House. He has already accepted the 11 recommendations contained in her report, published on July 30.

As it happens, the particular case of Birmingham Opera Company seems illuminating in the context of the structural problems Baroness McIntosh found at the Arts Council.

In particular, there was a difficulty about relating national and regional perspectives which was a legacy of the 2002 reorganisation, when the previous two-tier funding system - a London-based Arts Council overseeing nine semi-autonomous regional arts boards - was collapsed into a single tier.

At the time people in the regions might have feared a London takeover, but it seems that what actually emerged was more like the opposite - a federal structure with a weak central overview. The 15-strong national council is dominated by the nine regional chairs, and Baronesses McIntosh’s first recommendation is that its composition should be addressed to ensure a stronger national perspective.

Another closely related point, much seized on by opponents of the cuts in January, is that recent reorganisation has removed the element of peer review which used to be integral to the way ACE operated. For most of its history there were art form-specific committees including distinguished practitioners, and the elimination of the moderating voice of artists ensured that the bureaucrat’s mindset would go unchallenged.

Baroness McIntosh is clear that the resulting loss of confidence in ACE was serious. She writes: “Almost all witnesses I spoke to believed that ACE has not only the right but the responsibility to make hard decisions about funding but most, including some who did well from the 2007/8 funding decisions, said they had lost respect for ACE as a result of the way the process was handled.”

Let’s not forget - though I could find no mention of this in the McIntosh report- that organisations being cut received notification shortly before Christmas and had just a month at the most difficult time of the year to prepare their appeals. So the timing was hardly conducive to goodwill.

But then Baroness McIntosh concludes that the Arts Council itself was in poor shape to be undertaking such a potentially controversial reshaping of its portfolio: “It is my view that ACE was unwise to embark on a radical review of its RFO client base without first properly reviewing what that client base looked like in its entirety from a national standpoint. The failure to do so, which I believe derives from ACE’s overly complex structure based on 10 separate decision-making bodies, meant that the process which followed, though robust and well-ordered in its own terms, lacked a coherent intellectual framework and was therefore very likely to run into difficulties as it unfolded.”

As to the lack of a coherent intellectual framework, I find the Arts Council’s purpose as baffling now as I did in January when I was looking at its various statements of intent and trying to relate them to some of the proposed cuts. Take the Orchestra of the Swan as an example - seemingly the very model of the kind of organisation the Arts Council said it wanted to promote, with its high artistic standards, commitment to outreach activities and almost indecent enthusiasm for commissioning new work.

Having been chopped as a RFO, I gather OOTS is now very happy with the funding it is receiving through the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts scheme, but that’s not entirely the point. An organisation which self-importantly calls itself “the national development agency for the arts” should be doing better than sending out patronising letters (I read this particular one) to clients justifying cutting them by reference to a national “strategy” which it turns out doesn’t actually exist.

Baroness McIntosh has something to say about this sort of thing, too: “Arts Council England needs to ensure that the importance of maintaining open, respectful relationships with all its partners, in order to sustain a healthy ecology of funding and support for the arts, is fully understood at all levels of the organisation.”

She is able to find nice ways of saying that some people employed by ACE may not be quite up to the job and that many of them should get out more. She recommends that “all Arts Council England officers responsible for making judgments about the quality and significance of their clients’ work, including regional executive directors, should ensure that they have sufficient first-hand experience to make those judgments credible.” I would have thought that most people would have assumed this was a given.

The irony about Birmingham Opera Company’s fight for survival is that it seems to have been offered as a sacrificial victim by the West Midlands office. You can certainly sympathise with the temptation to free-up more than £300,000-worth of funding which last year bought just two performances, albeit in a 5,000-seat venue.

At the same time Arts Council West Midlands was impatient with the company’s unconventional business structure - perhaps with justification, although the inflexibility which refuses to acknowledge that securing an entire factory for rehearsal and performances is a form of sponsorship is just baffling.

Ironically, the impetus to save the company came from London, because it seems that this was were its national significance was recognised. Despite its protestations to the contrary, my suspicion is that the West Midlands office would have been pleased to see Birmingham Opera Company pack its bags and disappear.

Quite apart from the fact that it had reallocated its grant before the appeals process was completed (money had to be squeezed out of budgets elsewhere around the country in order to restore it), a give-away was the suggestion that Welsh National Opera could replace the company’s community work. This statement conjures up for me a supermarket customer who is happy to buy something called “orange-flavoured drink” in preference to real orange juice.

The most disturbing aspect is that a regional office would not be more protective of something of international uniqueness on its own doorstep. It recalls one of the most hilarious moments of the January controversy, when it was reported that ACE’s Yorkshire office had cut the National Student Drama Festival because it did not realise its national importance. You might have thought the word “National” in its title was a clue. Of course, this was hearsay and probably not true.

The trouble is that the Arts Council’s fall from grace was such that you can’t quite be sure.