Arts Council England response to call for evidence: “Business Rates Reform, Fair Funding Review: Call for evidence on Needs and Redistribution”

Arts Council England’s mission is 'great art and culture for everyone'. We work to achieve this by championing, developing and investing in arts and cultural experiences that enrich people's lives, enabling new artistic developments, realising talent, and championing culture in public policy. As the national development agency for the arts, museums and libraries, we support a range of activities from theatre to music, reading to dance, photography to digital art, carnival to crafts. We support and invest in high quality arts practice and the best emerging practitioners whom we believe are the backbone of a dynamic creative economy.

Arts Council England welcomes this review and the opportunity to engage in the principles of measuring needs and resources. Our response below complements our submission to the parallel consultation, ‘Self-sufficient local government: 100% Business Rates Retention’. We agree that this fair funding review is necessary at this stage to ensure that no council loses out if it has a low business rate funding base and that, alongside the provision of statutory services, all have the opportunity to invest in sectors, such as arts and culture, which contribute to economic growth, bring communities together and enrich people's lives.

We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this consultation, and below we set out our response. If you would like to follow this up, please contact Chris Steward, Policy Officer

Question 4: What other measures besides councils’ spending on services should we consider as a measure of their need to spend?

In addition to councils’ current spending, it could also be helpful to consider the need to spend by examining current and future demand. For arts and cultural services, useful measures to aid consideration of the demand profilecould, for example, include local level participation data from Active Lives Survey[1], detailed socioeconomic and demographic data from theDCMS Taking Part Survey[2].

Question 6: What other considerations should we keep in mind when measuring the relative need of authorities?

We would welcome a needs assessment that recognises the crucial role local authorities play in supporting arts and cultural services. Indeed, local government spent £1.2 billion on arts and culture in 2014/15 and is the Arts Council’s most important strategic and delivery partner. The ability for councils to invest in culture has been challenging over recent spending rounds, with local authority investment in arts and culture having declined by 17% since 2010. Despite instances of closures of cultural venues and reductions in access to culture for communities, most local authorities have sought to maintain support for cultural institutions. However, if local authorities are able to continue provision of stable support to such institutions then it is important that this funding review takes into account howindividual authorities can retain the financial capacity to do so. Whilst this should look at current and planned spend on arts and cultural services, it would also be welcome if local and combined authorities are able to invest more in their creative economies in order to boost business development, attract skilled worked and encourage tourism. The need for this is particularly important given the shift in funding to business rates collection and the government’s focus on incentivising growth.

The extent to which local government can support culture will in turn inform our own investment decisions as a national and expert development agency – both those we are taking at the moment, and our planning for those organisations for which we will provide revenue funding in the period 2018-22.

We agree that it would be helpful if there is consideration of such factors as the extra costs of delivering services in rural areas, which has an impact on delivery in most sectors. We would also welcome further information on consideration of statutory and discretionary services.

Question 13: What behaviours should the reformed local government finance system incentivise?

Local authorities should be incentivised to engage early on with funding partners such as the Arts Council in the development of medium andlong term investment strategies in institutions and activities that further their wider economic and social development objectives. The Arts Council makes multi-year commitments to the organisations that we fund, and it is important that the funding review incentivises local governmentto plan future investments and partnerships with organisations in a similar manner. Moreover, we believe that improved co-ordination between local government and funding agencies will help the public sector to manage budget pressures through a more efficient approach to investment decisions.

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