The Future of Arts Funding?
Today, an important consultation that will shape the future of arts funding in Scotland, closes for submissions. The Scottish Parliament's Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee is collecting views on the future of arts funding in Scotland, and it's still possible to submit your views on this open consultation until the end of today.
If you are involved in the arts, or are affected by arts funding, I would encourage you to submit to the consultation. Even if you've never submitted to something like this before, it's very simple and will not take up much time in your day. The announcement that this consultation was to take place was made less than one month ago, as reported here in Arts Professional.
Importantly, it is a chance for us to have a say in how arts funding works, and it is notable that this is the first open process to give such feedback on the provision of arts funding in a long time.
The background to this consultation started with the events around Creative Scotland's Regular Funding decisions in 2018. This is a fund which is awarded to a group of organisations with the aim of giving them sustained funding over a period of 3 years. The amounts awarded range from hundreds of thousands, to millions of pounds, and the organisations who receive it are drawn from all art-forms, and spread all over Scotland, some of them with a national scope.
In 2017, applications were submitted for the period 2018-2021. The proposed date of decisions was to be October 2017, pushed forward later to November. In the end, delays to the process meant that this was postponed until January 2018, just 3 months before the start of the financial year. This was understood to be due to delays by the UK government in announcing its budget settlement to the Scottish Government, and the knock-on delay whilst the Scottish Government allocated a budget to Creative Scotland, which didn't happen until December in the end.
When the decisions were announced, the decision not to award to children's and disabled theatre companies provoked vocal outcry, and subsequently the decision was reversed, albeit only for 5 organisations.
The long and short of it is that this u-turn process, and other shortcomings in the Regular Funding assessment process, undermined confidence in the way that arts and cultural funding is distributed, and led to parliamentary committee meetings where Janet Archer was questioned by ministers, and ultimately resigned her post as CEO of Creative Scotland in the wake of these events.
It is no secret that things at Creative Scotland have been strained over the time since these events, and it must be said that Creative Scotland's staff have shown a remarkable fortitude and resilience in dealing with the loss of public and ministerial confidence in their organisation, and the strained relations with some parts of the cultural sector. I sincerely hope that they are all getting good support and taking care of their mental health in what must be an extraordinarily testing time for them.
It is for the good of the country that arts and cultural funding comes into a new era of transparency and trust. The irony for me is that it seems that what the Creative Scotland board were attempting to do at the point of reversing some of their decisions on RFO funding, was to be open, accountable, listen and take on board feedback in a constructive and positive manner. I remain convinced that the issues around this particular debacle came down to consistency of approach.
Creative Scotland, in distributing around a third of the national arts funding budget, undertook to carry out an understood process with understood timelines, only to be undermined by government delays. The decision-making framework was then to be undermined by the introduction of another funding stream (the Touring Fund, which strictly speaking shouldn't have come into the decision-making mix of RFO and perhaps was due to budgetary pressures).
The supposed final decisions on successful awards was then to be further undermined by the subsequent decision to fund the 5 previously unsuccessful organisations which seemed very much to be the ones which kicked up a fuss, and confidence further eroded by the fact that they were taken on such a quick timeline, which did not allow for certain procedural issues to be addressed, for example the matter raised by ministers of purported factual inaccuracies in the assessments of some unsuccessful organisations.
The sessions of the Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Relations Committee which met to discuss this process, with submissions from and questions put to Janet Archer Creative Scotland's then CEO and Ben Thomson, Interim Chair of Creative Scotland over the funding decision period, illuminate the rigorous attention shown to the decision-making by ministers. The clip below which is from the Scottish Parliament's channel, begins at MSP Tavish Scott questioning the u-turn.
Whilst I personally feel these were vital questions which needed to be answered, I wonder about the opposite effect to that described by Tavish, whereby he outlines that if a board is seen to respond to outrage over funding decisions, then people will see outrage as a valid means of influence. I wonder if ministers questioning a board listening and being responsive to concerns would also have a chilling effect on boards taking such actions in future. Indeed the Scottish Government itself could have been seen to have taken the same approach when it seemed that arts budgets were going to be significantly affected by loss of National Lottery income, responding to the concerns of the arts sector by making funds available to meet the shortfall.
It is a complex question- which for me generated another question - was it the case that the board's responsiveness provoked a lack of trust because it was inconsistent with the usual way of making arts funding decisions?
And indeed, would it ever have been possible to make everyone happy when there wasn't enough money to go around, and so much visibility and scrutiny of the RFO announcement?
I am unsure. There is certainly a public relations case to be made that this kind of outcry would have been much less likely to occur were RFO applications and decisions made on staggered timelines. For example, organisations submitting when suited them, and their funding coming to term 3 years after being awarded. One might argue that it wouldn't be in the public interest to have such a major pot of funding be so diffused as to be inscrutable, but then is it healthy for such an amount of pressure to exist over funding decisions that a board feels the need to create an emergency amendment? Or should the Creative Scotland board have resisted bowing to pressure and taken their time over next steps? Moreover is it healthy that board members of an organisation charged with distributing public funds should be put in a position to quit with immediate effect over funding decisions they had overseen? That a few unpopular decisions should undermine the whole picture, of which the whole Creative Scotland team and board undoubtedly put a lot of work, good judgement and expertise into their decisions to support?
Much of the pressure in this pressure-cooker of a situation was undoubtedly caused by the delay of the UK Government in announcing its budget and you might say that others have paid the price for that, not least the stressed-out members of the cultural sector who spent their Christmas period in utter uncertainty over jobs and their futures. The Creative Scotland staff who were on the front line of delivering this are not perhaps the first victims that we think of, but they nonetheless have been affected.
This catalysing event seems to contain some clear learnings, not least of all that perhaps the overall design of arts funding, alongside the general disgruntlement of both the funded and the unfunded, need to be addressed and consultation with the sector improved. Making submissions directly to the Scottish Government would seem to be a good step towards this.
In future I would welcome the introduction of some kind of third body, which exists to create dialogue between the sector and the arts funding regime, to make it more transparent, accountable and responsive. The issue with an organisation like Creative Scotland, that exists to distribute funding is that getting good, honest, useful feedback from those who want you to fund them in future is an unrealistic goal. An independent mechanism to create an open channel of communication would seem like a forward-thinking first step. Such a body could also have a remit of diversity and seek out views proactively from people who had been unsuccessful with funding, or who might never have applied before, rather than the current practice of requesting such feedback from the people who got funding at the ends of their projects, or are a sector representational body, who are sometimes too invested in the status quo and maintaining good relationships to feel able to be critical. This body could also advocate for solutions to such issues and Creative Scotland would be obliged to work with them, which as a paradigm of feedback and response is quite ground-breaking.
This is just one of numerous possible improvements which could be made. There is a lot of dialogue going on in Scotland recently about universal basic income and how it could level the playing field for people to pursue creative lives that will ultimately benefit the entire country. The mechanism could be replicated in small regular stipends to artists (of all kinds, writers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, composers) to create a sustainable system of income. Artists are incredibly resourceful people, and the costs of living in much of Scotland, whilst not as low as they once were, are still relatively low. The impact that funding artists directly could create for Scotland could be unprecedented. And the areas of the country where there are no RFO organisations, and notably low levels of cultural and artistic activity, could be prioritised for such funding, fostering new creative communities to flourish.
My personal feeling on the 2018 RFO debacle is that it is very tempting to look at a situation and shake our heads and say that things went very wrong, instead of looking forensically at what in fact went wrong, as well as what went right. This is our opportunity to do some of that and people who have felt shut out of arts funding can articulate exactly why, and even contribute some constructive ideas.
The consultation exercise has had a short window, but there is still time to submit today.
Read the call info and submit on the Scottish Government website here.
