Arts organisations left counting the cost as Government funding axe falls

Tuesday night: West Yorkshire Playhouse, 12 hours before the Arts Council announces how it is going to administer the most severe cuts to Britain’s cultural life for generations.

Rod Dixon, artistic director of Red Ladder, is one of Yorkshire’s most outspoken critics of the cuts and fears greatly for what the morning might bring.

He has come to the theatre to try to take his mind off the impending news the morning will bring. Little good it has done him.

Twelve hours later Dixon is on the phone, discussing the fact that Red Ladder has received a cut in its core funding of 33.7 per cent, which amounts, with inflation, to a 39.6 per cent reduction.

“We’ve been clobbered,” says Dixon, sounding defeated. “We’ve just had a meeting about how we go forward. We don’t want to lose staff, but we just can’t afford wages. We’ve been running three tours a year, now we’re going to have to go down to one and I have no idea what those shows are going to look like because we don’t have the funding to do big productions.

“It’s not a good day.”

It is a sentiment repeated over and over as the picture slowly begins to unfold as to what the cultural landscape will look like post March 30, 2011 – for the arts in Britain, D-Day.

About 8am yesterday the emails began to filter through to arts organisations around Yorkshire, with the news they had been waiting months to hear.

Some organisations found themselves pulled into the fold for the first time, receiving core funding from the Arts Council. Previously known as Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) these companies are now known as National Portfolio Organisations.

There were 105 RFOs in Yorkshire yesterday, as of 2012, there will be 80 NPOs. New NPOs include Leeds-based theatre company Slung Low, Sheffield’s Eclipse Theatre Company and Barnsley Civic Enterprise.

Alan Lane, artistic director of Slung Low, said: “To be included in the new portfolio of organisations is exciting news for everyone involved at Slung Low and a privilege that we take very seriously.”

Despite Lane’s understandable upbeat attitude, the overwhelming feeling yesterday was one of deep disappointment.

Marcus Romer, artistic director of York’s Pilot Theatre, was one of the lucky ones whose company received an increase in funding. He warned that celebrations should be muted and short lived.

“While this is undoubtedly a positive result for Pilot Theatre, this is not a time for any organisation to feel triumphant, as the country will be a poorer place as a result of these cuts. We also recognise the difficult position that ACE has been put in with the settlement they received from Government. So it is important to remind ourselves where the cuts and the imperative for them stems from.”

Later Romer added that on the day his organisation sent in its application to become an NPO, the staff opened a bottle of champagne. Yesterday it was cups of tea. “You don’t dance at a funeral because you’re not dead,” says Romer. The director was swift to make clear that the cuts are deeply unpopular in the UK arts world, a message that has been repeated loud and often, with distinguished defenders of the arts from Sir Richard Eyre to Dame Judi Dench having added their voices to the good fight ahead of the announcements.

By 11.30am yesterday, Cluny Macpherson, chief executive of Arts Council Yorkshire felt – and looked – like he had already done a full day’s work.

“It’s a tough day, no doubt about it. We have had to make tough decisions and there was always going to be some pain,” says Macpherson. “Already we have had lots of organisations getting in touch to say either thank you and that they are grateful to have made it into the National Portfolio, others saying that they aren’t very happy and others who have said they understand why we have made the decisions we have. People are frustrated, it’s an emotional time. What we are doing today is emotional, it’s about companies, it’s about individuals and ultimately their jobs.” In the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review it was announced the Arts Council would see a 29.6 per cent cut in its budget for 2012 to 2015. It was told to pass on these cuts, with 14.9 per cent cuts to the arts organisations it funds, leaving it with £28,817,847 to be spent on arts organisations in Yorkshire.

Previously RFOs would receive their core funding and then be eligible to apply for Grants for the Arts funding, money set aside to pay for individual projects. NPOs will no longer be able to apply for extra funding for individual projects, but will have to pay for them out of the core funding they receive.

It was never an option, says Macpherson, to simply administer across the board cuts of 15 per cent to all organisations, which has been dubbed “salami slicing”.

Instead, he says, the enforced funding cuts were an opportunity to re-assess the companies the Arts Council has historically funded and, with five criteria, measure the organisations it wants to support going into the future.

He says: “It’s our job to make qualitative decisions and if we just cut 15 per cent from everyone there would be a random falling off of companies. We want the best organisations to thrive and it is our job to make the decisions about which companies they were.”

Two of Yorkshire’s biggest organisations, Northern Ballet and Opera North, were critical yesterday of the Arts Council decision. Northern Ballet received a real term cut of 14.9 per cent, although the company insisted its actual cut was 25 per cent, while Opera North was unhappy with its 15 per cent budget reduction.

Mark Skipper, chief executive of Northern Ballet said: “We received £3.3m in total from Arts Council England in 2010-11 combining core grant and Sustain funding (an Arts Council one-off grant set up to combat the effects of the recession). We feel this is a true reflection of the income required for Northern Ballet to successfully continue to create new work and maintain touring levels. Therefore, today’s announcement that we will receive £2.5m in 2012-13 is to us a direct cut of £800,000 or 25 per cent based on what we actually received in 2010-11 and is a true reflection of our funding situation. We are deeply disappointed with this funding outcome for Northern Ballet. These cuts will severely impact the potential achievements of the company just as it embarks on a bold new future.”

Richard Mantle, chief executive of Opera North said: “It is gratifying that our work continues to be recognised by the Arts Council and we are grateful for three-year funding, however I am concerned that there has been a non-existent strategic approach to the funding of national organisations particularly those operating in the regions

“The financial ecology in which we operate is quite different to that of London – not only is our ACE grant 70 per cent of our total revenue, we also rely heavily on local authority funding, which is falling at an alarming rate. It is simply inequitable to treat Opera North in the same way as a London-based company, where the impact of an across-the-board cut will be significantly less, and where the opportunity to generate philanthropic support and commercial revenues is considerably greater.”

The cuts kick in next year and all the companies that have been unsuccessful will have 12 months to find a way to keep surviving once the net of Arts Council funding has disappeared.

As Macpherson said, there was always going to be pain. For some companies it was less painful than expected, for others like Third Angel in Sheffield and Wakefield Theatre Royal, more so.

Without a doubt, the future of Yorkshire arts today looks a lot different than it did 24 hours ago.

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