The latest changes to Arts Council England funding are deeply worrying
Opinion
It’s a pity, in a way, that the uproar following Arts Council England’s radical redistribution of its grant allocations for 2023-6 has focused so much on the fate of one organisation. Of course, the prospect of English National Opera being stripped of all its public subsidy (currently £12.8m a year) unless it moves out of London is massively worrying. That’s especially true for the 300 musicians, technicians and other staff who work there, who certainly wouldn’t all get jobs in the stripped-down, regionalised version of ENO envisaged by the Arts Council.
The fact is, however, that ENO has been vulnerable for years, artistically and financially. At a time when there is such an obsession in government with moving public subsidy away from London and into the regions, the company was an easy target. What worries me more is that the treatment of ENO is merely the most prominent example of a far wider and more ominous policy within the Arts Council. It is the belittling of classical music generally, and opera in particular.
Consider the following grim list of casualties from the Arts Council’s funding shake-up. Welsh National Opera loses more than £2m of its annual grant for touring regional venues in England. Glyndebourne loses half its grant for touring its productions. The London Sinfonietta, one of the world’s most renowned contemporary music ensembles, loses 41 per cent of its funding: a devastating cut that will have a huge negative impact on young composers particularly. The Britten Sinfonia, which provides East Anglia with top-class orchestral concerts, has lost its entire grant. All the big London orchestras have had their subsidy cut by 12 per cent, and London’s biggest classical music venues – the Southbank, Barbican and Royal Opera House – have also had millions slashed from their grants. Yes, there are winners, notably the minority-ethnic orchestra Chineke! and the ‘play it from memory’ ensemble Aurora.
And at least the big regional orchestras had ‘standstill’ allocations (though that represents a severe real-term reduction with inflation running at 11 per cent).
Overwhelmingly, however, it’s terrible news for many classical music and opera organisations that have already been clobbered by closure during the pandemic and reduced box-office takings during the current recession. And bad news for those organisations means potentially life-changing hardships and even more insecurity for thousands of professional musicians, as well as the reduction of educational work and an impover
