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Funding and the Arts CounciIf ever a quango needed a major overhaul, the Arts Council of England certainly did in 1997, and for the first eighteen months or more of the new government it continued to make a major fool of itself on many occasions and became almost universally loathed by arts practitioners. It became bloated, outgrowing its Great Peter Street offices, and its major figures were embroiled in so many controversies that they had little credibility. At one stage the entire Drama Panel resigned, but even that made no impact on the powers-that-were in the organisation. Like so many quangos it became complacent and arrogant, but pride cometh before a fall and, to its credit, the new government, led in this instance by Culture Secretary Chris Smith, decided it needed reform. Reform is what it got, and painful reform too, for many posts were cut, new personnel appointed, and ACE became a leaner organisation, to the extent that now it is beginning to regain the respect it used to have thirty years ago. It wasn't until 1999 that the government increased grant-in-aid to ACE:
(In fact, I had already predicted the end of additionality in December of the previous year, when Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown made a £1.5m cut in arts funding.) And, of course, the government added a sixth Lottery "good cause", which they claimed would not reduce the amount of money available to the original five because it was to be funded from the success of the midweek lottery. I wonder if even they believed that. Essentially funding under the present government has not changed very much from what it was under the previous Tory administration. Yes, they have increased grant-in-aid, but only after making cuts when they first came to power, for they kept to the previous government's strategy, and, of course, abolished the principle of additionality, so that the total amount of funding available is little different. And we also are suffering the results of one of the Arts Council's idiocies: millions from the Lottery have been spent on improving the buildings and equipment of theatres throughout the country. However, no one seemed to realise that these magnificant new or refurbished buildings would be more expensive to staff and maintain, so now these same theatres are experiencing financial crises. An increasing amount of Arts Council and Lottery money (although it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the two) is being spent on stabilisation funding and recovery plans. So it has to be said that New Labour has not particularly improved the lot of theatre in financial terms. Life is still tough: most theaters and companies are still existing on a knife-edge and every week brings news of yet more crises, yet more possible (and in some cases actual) closures, and yet more contraction of a regional theatre scene which was once, just thirty or so years ago, flourishing and producing exciting new work. And that's where we will look next, at the state of theatre in the regions after three years of New Labour government. Next page: The Regions Articles Indices:
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