What if we stopped asking the council for money?
For the past three years I have been working on the Isle of Wight establishing Creative Island as a cultural development agency. It’s been a lot of fun. We are, in essence, an external and independent organisation that emerged following the demise of a local authority-run arts service.
One of the first things we did, involving more than 500 people and organisations, was to develop a cultural strategy for the island, All the Wonder, which we then persuaded the local authority to adopt. Admittedly, with no resources to ensure its delivery. If we had insisted on that, we probably wouldn’t have got it through. Since then we have set about delivering on that strategy. Which has mostly been about encouraging and supporting others, working at strengthen the island’s cultural ecology, looking to make better use of what we already have, avoid duplication, secure new investment — not for ourselves but for the island — and make the case for the island regionally and nationally. And I am confident, in a relatively short period of time we have made a difference.
And yet one red flag on our organisational risk assessment hasn’t shifted: “Withdrawal of Local Authority investment.” It is a perfectly reasonable risk. Local authorities are under extraordinary financial pressure and, quite understandably, increasingly focused on their statutory responsibilities. Culture is not a statutory responsibility in the way adult social care, children’s services or housing are. Consequently I became increasingly frustrated by the fact that there didn’t seem to be very much I could do about this particular risk. Despite making the arguments, building relationships and providing the evidence, it became increasingly obvious — whether it is entirely true or not — that I was asking for money that simply wasn’t there.
And worse, I was taking up the time of capable, well-paid council officers whilst they kept apologising for not having any money. The conversation needed to change.
Perhaps I had become too accustomed to thinking about local authorities as funders of culture, rather than as partners in cultural development. That sounds like a subtle distinction. I don’t think so. The question for a cultural development organisation like ours should perhaps no longer be: “How do we persuade the council to fund culture?” but: “What is this council trying to achieve, and what can we do that will help it achieve it?” This doesn’t mean abandoning the argument for public investment in culture. Quite the opposite. It means finding a more sophisticated relationship with local government at precisely the moment when the old one — council gives cultural organisation money, cultural organisation delivers culture — is becoming harder to sustain.
The Local Government Association says councils remain the biggest public funder of culture, but its figures show how dramatically that funding has come under pressure. Real-terms annual spending on culture and leisure fell by £2.324 billion between 2010/11 and 2023/24. So there is little point pretending we can simply persuade councils to return to the funding relationship of twenty years ago. Better to consider what comes next?
Local authorities have an extraordinary range of resources, expertise and influence that cultural organisations can benefit from. They have political legitimacy. They have intelligence and data about their places. They can open doors to health, education, housing, economic development and regeneration. They can convene organisations that might never otherwise speak. They control or influence buildings, libraries, public spaces and other civic infrastructure. They commission things. And they have strategic influence: the ability to make sure culture is in the room when the next economic, health or regeneration strategy is being written.
And perhaps most importantly, they can give us permission. A council saying, “We think these people have something useful to contribute to this problem”, can be enormously powerful. Permission for culture to be part of conversations about health. Education. Economic development. Regeneration. The future of a place. That isn’t a substitute for investment in culture. But it is a different kind of investment in the relationship.
On the Isle of Wight, that shift has already led to some quite different conversations. We now sit on the authority’s Economic Development Board and have been able to shape priorities within the island’s Growth and Prosperity Strategy. Representatives from public health, education, regeneration and economic development attend and inform our board meetings, not because we have a project we want them to fund, but because they see that we have expertise that might be useful to them. We have also been exploring the implications of an emerging combined authority and building relationships with cultural organisations across a much wider geography, so that the island’s cultural interests and expertise are represented in future regional conversations. And something else has happened. People in the authority have told me that we have helped them understand something about their own place that they didn’t fully understand themselves. Oh, and once we stopped asking for funding, different bits of the authority started asking — and paying — for some of the work we do. Funny old world.
We spend an enormous amount of time making the case for the benefits of culture. Culture improves health and wellbeing. It combats loneliness. It contributes to social cohesion. It supports young people. It makes places more attractive. It contributes to economic development. All of which may well be true. But perhaps we need to stop describing these simply as the benefits of culture. What if culture is actually part of the mechanism through which we achieve those objectives? That is a much more interesting proposition.
And it isn’t as unusual elsewhere as it might sound. In the Netherlands, municipalities account for around 60% of public expenditure on culture, while municipalities have a significant role in cultural provision and participation. France explicitly describes cultural responsibility as shared between the state and territorial authorities. I’m not suggesting we copy either model. We have a different history and landscape. But they raise an interesting question.
We seem to have a model in which culture is something a local authority supports when it can, rather than something that can help it achieve the things it is already responsible for. And, by the way, cultural organisations need to change the conversation too. We need to be better listeners, and work at understanding what the council is trying to do. It means being curious rather than transactional.
It also changes the question we should ask of national funders. We are very good at funding cultural activity. We are much less good at funding the relationships that allow culture to become embedded in places. What if we funded cultural organisations to spend time understanding their local authority? Building relationships with public health, education, regeneration and economic development? Understanding local data and priorities? Convening cultural organisations across a geography? Making sure culture is in the room when the next economic or regeneration strategy is written? What if we started understanding outcomes rather than obsessing about outputs?
It might not produce an immediate project. It might not generate instant audience figures. It might not even look much like cultural activity. But it could change the position of culture within a place.
Of course, I don’t think this means we should stop arguing for public investment in culture. Artists need to be paid. Cultural infrastructure needs investment. And some things are worth doing because they are culturally valuable, not because we can demonstrate a contribution to another policy objective. But perhaps there is conversation to have alongside that one. For years our organisational risk assessment told us that withdrawal of local authority investment was a risk. I assumed the way to manage that risk was to try to make ourselves indispensable to the funding relationship. I now think there might be another way. Make ourselves indispensable to the place. That feels like a much more interesting ambition.
And I suspect there are already people in other places doing exactly that. I’d like to know what they are doing.