The impact of arts ‘levelling up’ in the UK is still not fully understood
It all seemed so simple, so obvious, so fair. For decades, the lion’s share of the UK’s classical music funding, public and private, went to London. ‘Of course!’ said some. London is a world capital. It competes with Paris and Berlin for cultural tourists. It has a huge population. And it supports two opera houses and a dozen professional orchestras. ‘Nonsense!’ said others. People in the regions pay their taxes. They have every right to expect that money to be redistributed fairly so that it supports music across the country.
For a long time those arguments went unanswered. But then along came a government – the current one – that saw the advantage of redistributing subsidy to the regions as part of a bigger policy called ‘levelling up’. Decrees to that effect were issued by ministers, and Arts Council England hastened to comply – not least because levelling up was a good fit with its own ten-year plan to partially defund professional orchestras and opera companies, and boost community and voluntary outfits.
The result? We know about English National Opera, told to relocate to Manchester to retain its subsidy. But levelling up has triggered many other changes to the orchestral and operatic landscape – and the implications are not yet fully understood.
So let me raise a few questions about levelling up’s effect on our artform, questions that I don’t think have been sufficiently examined in the media. First, the biggest winner from levelling up so far is Manchester, which has got a new £240m arts centre (the Aviva Studios) and the promise of ENO’s residency on top of the three professional symphony orchestras already resident in the city. How does this benefit everyone else in the north, especially in places such as Bradford and Sheffield, both with populations similar to Manchester’s but a fraction of its professional music activity?
‘Cities should not be pitted against each other to fight for much-needed arts investment,’ said Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, in the wake of losing out to Manchester over ENO’s relocation. The government’s response seems to be that cities should indeed be pitted against one another, because the communities that want music the most will clearly fight hardest to get it.
That, however, raises the second question, which is whether England’s local authorities are in any position to bid for levelling up funds, given how precarious their current
