D'log :: blogging since 2000

Front page lead-story on the paper version of today’s Guardian, “Thousands to lose jobs as universities prepare to cope with cuts…

“Universities across the country are preparing to axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses to cope with government funding cuts, the Guardian has learned. Other plans include using post-graduates rather than professors for teaching [*] and the delay of major building projects. [...] arts and humanities courses are being dropped.”

Alarming, but not exactly new news. It’s been looming since well before Christmas, if you knew how to read the policy runes.

* “cos’ anyone can teach. u don’t need no training or experiunce”

“According to the latest analysis from Arts & Business…

“business investment [ in the arts ] in the Midlands fell by 16 per cent, to £7.3 million, funding from trusts and foundations decreased by 36 per cent to £5.7 million and donations from individuals by 23 per cent, to £6 million. The fall in the Midlands was way above the national picture, where business investment fell by six per cent, to £157 million, and donations from individuals by seven per cent, to £363 million.”

Paul Sangar on “certificate inflation” among employers recruiting staff…

“In 2008 the government elected on the promise of ‘education, education, education’ slashed the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) postgraduate scholarship programme by a third, so good luck to non-scientists [aiming for a funded PhD] . Oh, and AHRC scholarships are not means-tested, so the poor compete with the rich here as well. With spending cuts beckoning, other scholarship programmes can expect the same in due course.”

The WMRO notices that West Midlands arts attendance has not increased since 2005, despite all the public money poured into audience boosting measures and audience research. In previous reports by other researchers it was revealed that none of the government targets for public participation in arts activity between 2005/6 and 2007/8 were met. It now looks as though the same trend is continuing into 2008/9.

The Arts Council : Managed to Death (PDF link) now online from the Conservatives-aligned New Culture Forum, and written by the author of June 09’s not-wholly-convincing article on the Council in Standpoint.

The Art Fund has published its 2009 survey of British museums and galleries (PDF link). Visitors were broadly up during the warm months of 2009, with 20% of venues experiencing more than a 10% rise in visitors. Redundancy payments, a decline in overseas holidays, and the weak pound, all seem to have contributed. But this is against a background of funding cuts, declining investment income and business sponsorship, and higher utility bills. Paid staff are increasingly being replaced by unpaid volunteers…

“The rise in volunteers has mirrored a fall in paid posts”

There’s also a new report on children’s engagement with cultural activities (PDF link).

Another major arts funding cut, to an absolutely vital part of the arts — foundation courses…

“plans unveiled last month by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to cut funding for foundation degrees”

A new recession snapshot of the cultural and creative industries in the West Midlands (PDF link)…

“evidence is now emerging of widespread cuts to local authority arts, culture and tourism budgets and/or small grant schemes. This coincides with a reduced Advantage West Midlands budget and reduced availability of funding from private investment … The number of advertised cultural sector vacancies has dropped again in recent months to nearly half what it was during the same period last year.”

However, the Midlands heritage/sports/cultural sector seems to be replacing a shortfall in overseas tourists with income from local people having “stay-at-home” holidays in the UK.

Regen.net has the full list of Advantage West Midlands projects that will see major cuts. Creative projects and creative-employment projects cut include:

Jewellery Quarter Joint Venture

Rotunda LED Art Gallery

The Innovation and Design Centre

Black Country Living Museum – 1930’s High Street

Business Brokers for High Growth (North Staffordshire)

Regional Advantage Creative Fund – Extension (North Staffordshire)

Skills solutions for AWM business clusters (North Staffordshire)

The Art News­paper has undertaken a May/June 2009 survey…

“a growing number of exhibitions are being cancelled because of the recession. We have identified over 20 important shows that have been axed (or, in a few cases, postponed) later this year or in 2010. Our list almost certainly represents the tip of the iceberg. Many venues have not yet published their 2010 programme, and some unannounced shows that had been provisionally scheduled are being quietly dropped.”

And talking of cuts, in the UK The Times reports that…

“Whitehall is drawing up plans for deep cuts in the higher education budget that in the worst case would slash a fifth from university finances, funding officials have disclosed … According to the University and College Union, 5,000 higher education jobs have either been cut or are at imminent risk, a third of them in London. “

And I’d assume it’s likely that niche departments in the arts, media and humanities will be disproportionately hit.

Ooops. The Head of Finance at the Dutch equivalent of the Arts Council has run off with all the cash.

Still, it could be worse — they could have found a £100-million black hole in the culture budget. Like our own DCMS just has.

Two new “behind the scenes” reports on the crisis in British arts management, which should make interesting reading as the arts stares into the abyss of a seemingly inevitable 15% to 25% cut to public sector spending outside of the ‘protected areas’, possibly even eventually compounded by knock-on cuts to unemployment benefits. The first is Private Views : Voices from the Frontline of British Culture (£10) from the Social Affairs Unit think-tank. The second is The Arts Council : Managed to Death, from the New Culture Forum and written by the author of last month’s not-wholly-convincing article in Standpoint. Both think-tanks are broadly aligned with the Conservatives. Neither report is available online, sadly, but I thought I’d mention them here for those following my ‘Arts Cuts’ blog category.

The Artists Information Company, in a recent (4th June) letter published in The Guardian, but seemingly not yet visible to Google…

“Our research into artists’ employment in 2008 shows an 81% reduction in volume of openly offered work in October to December – 63% fewer commissions, 95% fewer residencies and no academic jobs listed. Factoring in evidence from the first quarter of 2009 suggests the reduction in the value of paid work this year could be as high as 44%.”

  [ Hat-tip: Emily at Intute ]

Oddly, the story that the British Council plans to cut 500 jobs seems to have had almost no coverage beyond obscure titles such as Personnel Today and Crain’s Manchester Business News…

“the British Council, which promotes the UK overseas, announced that it intended to reduce its staff by between 400-500 jobs — about one-third of the organisation — over the next two years.”

So where does that leave the plan of last July, to scrap the restructuring and double the arts budget? Was it all just smoke and spin?

News just in from Canada…

“Small magazine publishers and editors are fighting proposed changes to Canadian Heritages’ magazine funding criteria that will bar subsidies to any publication with an annual circulation of less than 5,000. That’s most academic journals, art magazines and literary magazines in Canada…”

News from the THES…

“researchers will be left reeling by the news that not only is there no trace of the extra £1 billion for science that ministers were reportedly seeking to stimulate the economy, but there will be an internal raid on [research] funding pots to finance more directed programmes.”

Thankfully it looks like the arts and humanities are relatively safe, at least for this year…

“The savings are being made across the research councils as a whole,” RCUK said. [ but ] The Arts and Humanities Research Council said it had “no intention” of cutting existing grants and contracts.

But note the use of the word “existing”. What of the near-future?

Created in Birmingham has welcome news of a temporary £44.5m boost to UK arts funding. It should just about mop up the severe and ongoing decline in business/trust sponsorship of the arts, caused by the recession and the ruinous decline in interest earned on bank deposits. At least for this year.

So far as I can tell, the £44.5m is nothing much to do with the recent loss to the arts of £4m in the Budget, arising from the cuts to the DCMS.

So where the cash coming from? Most of this £44.5m booster package would seem to be the result of recent National Audit Office-inspired changes to UK law, meaning that the Arts Council can no longer massively stash away Lottery proceeds for a rainy day — and instead has to distribute its Lottery funds ASAP. A report from the Council for the Advancement of Arts, Recreation and Education concluded that Lottery organisations were sitting on a…

“£1.7bn surplus intended for good causes” [ and that ] “The Arts Council of England has £155m in its bank accounts”

That figure was also reported as “£152 million” by April 08. I wonder where the other (roughly) £100m is? Hopefully being primed and primped for release in 2010/11, and not already siphoned away to help pay for the Olympics.

(Previously on D’log: after the last round of cuts the press eventually found out that Grants for the Arts were to be cut in total terms from May 08, down by 7.4%.)

This time next week, once the budget spin has stopped spinning long enough for Tory central office to examine the fine-print, we should know how heavily the arts are to be cut…

“If the worst-case scenario is enacted, it will all but wipe out any real terms gains made in government arts funding over the current three-year funding deal.”

Birmingham shows the world how to shave a Community Arts Worker.

It seems that it may be goodbye to Arts Council England, West Midlands, as the nation hobbles joyously toward the 2012 Olympics. According to The Stage and the Council’s own restructuring plan, it will be effectively merged into a far larger Arts Council region that will cover “the Midlands and South-West” — that’s coast-to-coast from Land’s End across to the Lincolnshire Wash — with the change accompanied by large staff cuts (20 jobs lost from the West Midlands office) and budget cuts. And it’ll probably get a trendy new name like Arts Council : The Big Stretch. Ok, I made up that last bit.

But “The Big Stretch” may be quite an apt name, since (I quote from the Council restructuring document)…

“East Midlands and West Midlands have geographical and economic integrity, and should be joined with the South West to form one area” … [ to become one of ] four areas rather than nine regional offices”

But far more importantly, it seems individual artists in the Midlands will only have one national point of contact after 2010 — and it won’t even be in the Midlands or the South West. Since there will be only…

” a centralised Grants for the Arts team, based in Manchester”

…serving the whole of England.

The Council aims to have the changes in place by April 2010. Once again, it seems Birmingham has lost out, re: the recent round of arts/media HQ relocations. Surely Birmingham might have been a better choice to locate this Grants for the Arts office, re: the implicit need that the Arts Council has for artists to do a face-to-face with officials before applying, and the travel-time to/from the rest of the UK? Unless the Arts Council finally gets to grips with digital media and starts doing online video interviews, some individual artists may find they’re spending almost as much on the early-morning Manchester rail-fare/hotel than they’re likely to get in a small grant.

With the Grants for the Arts office in Manchester, and a possible move of the current West Midlands office to somewhere outside the region (Nottingham, Bristol, etc), we may end up with no Arts Council presence in the West Midlands after 2010. Many artists might say that we probably wouldn’t notice they’d gone, but it’d still be yet another blow to the arts/media ecology in the region.