Tony Durcan on 100% cuts, the Newcastle Culture Fund and Bryan Ferry

Tony Durcan is director of culture, libraries and lifelong learning for Newcastle City Council. Harriet Harman recently weighed into the debate on the city’s ‘100% culture budget cut’ and the city has now come up with a new fund to support culture.

Room 151: Bryan Ferry and Sting have been vociferous in their criticism of Newcastle’s so called 100% budget cut to the arts, but they don’t have to pay for Adult Social Care. What is the story from the council’s point of view?

Tony Durcan: The reality behind the headlines is that yes, in our budget consultation we proposed that we would remove 100% of our subsidy to the independent culture sector and we also said that we would withdraw about 43% of our funding for the museums service and a similar amount for the libraries service over three years. The thing that really captured the press attention was the 100% figure. It was translated as “Newcastle won’t be funding culture”. However, if you took that 100% out and the money that we spend on museums, (leaving libraries out for the moment) we would still be spending £1.9m on culture at the end of those three years. We do lots of different things to support culture but you could understand what the headlines were about. The Arts Council was quite concerned that they wouldn’t have a sustainable position if local authorities generally pulled out of supporting these institutions. So, not wanting to be  seen to be filling the gap, they took the position that they could not be the only funder of culture in a city or local authority. The other point about the 100%, if you looked at the individual institutions it was going to, for each of them it would vary from between 5% to 15% of their operating budget. So in terms of lost income it was less than the hit that our own services like museums and libraries and some non-cultural services were having to face over the three year period. Having said that though, it is also about the message it sends to the rest of the city: why should others provide funding if the local authority doesn’t? The cut would also remove a slug of funding which provided a bit of stability to these institutions and enabled them to look at how they got other funding. So there were complicated implications in there which all came out in the consultation that we had. We listened to that.

Room 151: What was your solution?

TD: When we published the budget for consultation there wasn’t a lot of headroom. We had not actually come up with a proposed extra 20% of savings so that we could mediate the decisions on the basis of the consultation. Anything that we proposed we had to find money for from elsewhere.  There was an important political dimension too because although there was a big media debate about funding the arts we were also working with ward members who had to make difficult decisions too. There was one very senior ward member who said to me ‘there will be nothing left in my ward if the library closes’. She understood, strategically, that the council had to do it that way, but in terms of implications for her ward, it was becoming very difficult. That made it hard for members to vote in mitigation funding for the cultural sector when they were seeing local things disappear. So after a lot of discussion with the Arts Council our solution has been to create the Newcastle Culture Fund. The £1.2m that has until now been the subsidy to the independent culture sector and sits within the culture budget, which I manage, will still disappear over the three years. But there will be a separate fund which we are asking the Community Foundation to administer.

Room 151: What is the Community Foundation?

TD: It’s a nationally federated organisation. It’s a charity but it has local branches which are semi-independent. They support and fundraise for community development work and they manage funds on behalf of other organisations: for instance we have Sage Gateshead in the North East and they have an endowment which is managed for them by the Community Foundation. We’ve asked the Community Foundation to manage the Newcastle Culture Fund. We’re guaranteeing that it will have a £600,000 per annum level of funding from 2015-16, but the fund is open to others contributors. So should Bryan Ferry, for example, wish to contribute to the Culture Fund he could, easily, but he wouldn’t be giving the money to the council. The Community Foundation will set up a panel – which will include some elected members but not in the majority – who will make the decisions about funding as we move forward. We are developing, with help from the Arts Council, the criteria for people to bid into the Newcastle Culture Fund.

Room 151: Why will it be operational from 2015?

TD: Because that is when the big cuts come out of my budget. We are hoping to have a shadow fund open for some restricted bids in 2014-15 to test how it works, to test if we have got the criteria right and things like that. But we are hoping to launch the fund itself at the end of the Spring, early Summer.

Room 151: What are the issues involved in approaching funding for arts in this way?

TD: There are a number of issues, one of which is that we’re trying to build up the fund from various sources. For example we have leant money to the airport. We get interest back on the money that we have leant and some of that interest will go into the Newcastle Culture Fund. If we get an increase in business rates – which we are anticipating over the next few years – a percentage of that increase could go into the Culture Fund. We’re hoping to put some of our public health money into the fund and therefore part of the criteria for organisations will be: how are they helping to address health and well-being issues?   We have those kind of headline ideas but we haven’t ground them down and articulated them in detail. It will be about investment rather than subsidy and will cover core running costs. One of the risks is that the money will be available to the independent cultural sector, so not just the institutions who get money from us at the moment.  So those institutions could be in a more vulnerable position. The money will be given to the best bids so it creates a certain pressure.

Room 151: What about the private sector? Will you be actively soliciting funding from there?

TD: We don’t want to tread on funding arrangements that the sector already has in place. We don’t want to go to an organization that has an arrangement with, say, Northern Stage, and get them to give money that would otherwise have gone to Northern Stage. But one of the benefits of working with the Community Foundation is that they do fundraising of their own and so they have approaches to that. That’s part of the deal we’re striking with them at the moment.  What the treasurer and the Leader want is that the £600,000 (that we build up from more opportune funding areas) be seen as our contribution and that we can build it up further than that and have a more generalist approach to funding culture than we might otherwise have had.