What the Hodge review of Arts Council England could mean for leisure-time music

In response to the government commissioned Arts Council England review from Dame Margaret Hodge, Making Music CEO Barbara Eifler pens her thoughts on the positives and negative impacts we might witness in the leisure-time music sector.

The government commissioned a review of Arts Council England (ACE), our arms-length public funder in England for arts and culture, from Dame Margaret Hodge and she delivered her report and recommendations just before Christmas. The next steps will be a formal response from ACE and from the commissioning government department, the Department for Culture Media and Sport. We considered therefore whether we should wait with any comment until those responses are published, possibly this month. 

But then I read the Hodge review and the speech Lisa Nandy made on 21 January announcing the 1.5 billion investment in local infrastructure (which, by the way, includes some of Making Music members’ most used spaces: churches). And that convinced me that it might be helpful to write to Lisa Nandy now, to support her instinct that ‘culture belongs to all of us, everywhere’. 

Crucially, Nandy says ‘I know that you don’t have to choose between access and excellence.’ And this is where I’d start with my review of Hodge’s report: it does in fact say just that. It says the current Arts Council England strategy, Let’s Create, favours access over excellence, and that that is not what ACE is for. That ACE should be championing and funding excellence and access to excellence; the emphasis is on funded professional activity and how that is brought to more ‘under-served’ areas or how more people are brought to experience it, to ‘visit’ great institutions. People are described as ‘consumers of the Arts’. 

But in our leisure-time music sector, we know that as well as being ‘consumers’, we are also participants and creators, even if we don’t do it for a living. 

The only reference to ‘participation’ in the 59 page report is this: ‘For some organisations, art is a way of engaging a disadvantaged part of their community – for example we saw a group of ex-prisoners enacting their version of Hamlet in Manchester, where the emphasis was on participation. The challenge for the Arts Council is to achieve both excellence and participation together.’ I don’t even know where to start with that sentence. The project referred to, I am sure, will have been absolutely transformative for the lives of those prisoners (probably for very little funding), and is that not what taxpayer’s money is for (as well as to fund the Royal Shakespeare Company)? 

In terms of education, the focus of the report is on giving access to all young people to the arts only in order to secure the future talent pipeline for the cultural sector. Nothing wrong with that; but there is no recognition that the vast majority of children (perhaps 95%?) will not become cultural professionals post-18, yet can still have happier, healthier and longer lives if they engage with the arts not just at school but at all ages, as Professor Daisy Fancourt so eloquently and scientifically rigorously outlines in her new book Art Cure. 

Enough of the negatives. What are the positives? 

Hodge insists that ACE is essential, as an arm’s length body (i.e. independent and at one remove from government), and that that distance to government must be maintained. This is good to hear; my experience of colleagues working with various governments in Europe has made me realise this is precious: that our ACE is not exposed to the whim, biases and preferences of frequently changing politicians. 

Good news, too, that Hodge advocates for an extension to tax reliefs to ‘stimulate economic activity in underserved areas’ – we couldn’t agree more, shame, though, that she did not include choirs in her suggestions… 

On funding, she recommends the government double the level of Gift Aid outside London, which would benefit the 90+% of Making Music members NOT in London; and a new law akin to the French Aillagon Law (offers tax reductions for corporate donors), focussed also on beyond London.  

She also suggests there should be a statutory duty on Local Authorities to prepare a culture strategy every 5 years; this is great, but she doesn’t go as far as saying they should fund that… 

Most usefully for us, she recommends ACE should be working with all organisations in the sector, not just the ones it funds, as the development agency for the arts, i.e. that ACE should advocate for the sector as a whole. At Making Music (not currently funded by ACE), we would welcome this: clearly ACE has great convening power for creating effective partnerships and conversations, has access to government departments and officials on a regular basis, and resource, for instance to commission relevant research. (At Making Music, for instance, we have struggled to identify how to fund and commission some updated and credible research on the total numbers of music groups in the UK, essential for our own advocacy. The most recent research by DCMS and ACE was in 2008.)  

We think, from our contact with ACE, that this is something they are willing to do, but perhaps not currently equipped to deliver, in terms of mechanisms and personnel, so it would be fantastic if that recommendation was adopted and funded by government. 

Positive in Hodge’s review, too, that the bureaucracy burden of ACE applications and funding is criticised and that it recognises such a burden falls most heavily on small organisations which don’t have the staff resource to dedicate to servicing a funding agreement. 

Perhaps a harsh conclusion, but overall we were disappointed by the Hodge review and its harking back to pitching excellence versus access in an unhelpful, outdated, way; and its lack of recognition for what we know makes the biggest impact on every individual in the UK: the opportunity to be creative and engage in the arts as a participant themselves and the resources to do so: affordable, accessible community spaces, music libraries, and trained music professionals with the skills to lead and interact with leisure-time music groups. 

Read the full Hodge review of Arts Council England here

Lead image: Portrait of Baroness Hodge of Barking, UK Parliament (members.parliament.uk), CC BY 3.0