Man with a plan

It’s difficult not feel some sympathy for a man with a cold who has just got home from attending all three major party conferences. Alan Davey, Chief Executive of Arts Council England (ACE), adds to his likeability by admitting that the arts are what keep him going – turning, for example, to Elgar’s First Symphony to help him through the horrors of 9/11, when the DCMS sent him to look after victims’ families in New York. He sees the arts as an inner resource, believing that they “offer something to a person that stands them in good stead throughout their lives”, and he worries that people don’t have the opportunity to find out what the arts might do for them.
Nevertheless, he has some hard questions to answer after his first nine months in the job. He took over from Peter Hewitt right in the middle of the funding review – a dream job, maybe, for the man from the Ministry (he was at the DCMS for five years and the Department of National Heritage before that) – but he doesn’t disagree that it was something of a nightmare start. He is now tackling the new Arts Plan, published earlier this month, and is at some pains to reassure me that ACE’s four priorities (digital opportunity, visual arts, children and young people, and London 2012) do not exclude developments in other artforms and other areas, but it also becomes clear during our good-natured conversation in his modest office that most of the headliners have something to do with initiatives stemming from Government.

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There are threads running through arts policy which are clearly driven by the DCMS: 2012, the apparently eternal focus on the young and the issues coming out of the McMaster report, which he was involved in commissioning before arriving at ACE. He uses the word ‘ambition’ a great deal – defining it, building it and making it happen – though he admits that the mission statement ‘Great art for all’ can be no more than an aspiration, given current levels of resources. He makes much of ACE’s ‘engagement campaign’, which will build relationships with broadcasters (the BBC and Channel 4 are the current front-runners) to build up people’s perception of the arts. “There are all kinds of ways of using technology to link audiences and individuals with the live experience in the way that we’ve not currently explored,” he points out, citing the Royal Opera House experience of live feeds to cinema audiences. He also hopes to deepen and broaden people’s experience of the arts through digital media, though he is adamant that “this is never, never, never to replace the live experience”.
Points mean prizes
Time to tackle that huge bugbear, the Olympics. Davey is relentlessly optimistic in seeing the Games as “our chance to get the arts taken as seriously as sport… that sense of striving and moving towards something and realising talent amongst a whole bunch of people, and [ending] up with something extraordinary. If we can get the rest of the country explicitly to recognise that, and this includes politicians, I think that’ll be a prize well won”. The Cultural Olympiad will include the use of outdoor giant screens to show cultural content when sport is over for the day. He explains away worries among arts organisations that too much money – including Grants for the Arts – will go to Olympic-based projects, especially with 2012 as a priority in the Arts Plan. Davey tells me that grant application forms will have a box to tick “if you think you’re ‘Olympically relevant’”, but that the main decision will be on “does it have artistic integrity and is it the kind of thing we want to fund?” The tick box will only be looked at once the quality of the project has been established.
Free and easy?
It’s clear that the Arts Plan is not only interlinked with Olympic plans, but closely meshed with aims put forward by Brian McMaster. The proposed ‘free week’ has now transmogrified into a free theatre ticket scheme for under-26s – is ACE jumping when the DCMS says so? “It didn’t happen like that,” Davey insists. “Basically, DCMS said, if we give you £2.5m, what can you do, and what would you like to do? The question was genuinely that open. They said, ‘can you do the free week for that?’” (How we laughed!) Numerous possibilities were modelled and costed, but theatre was chosen for the pilot scheme “because they’re more experienced in incentivising schemes of various kinds”. He brushes aside the howls of anguish from some quarters: “For heaven’s sake, can’t we have something that is nationally eye-catching, that gets the issue of engagement on the table?” he asks. I challenged him on the short lead-in time, clearly imposed by Government, and the 8-day consultation period. Davey clearly felt he couldn’t turn down an extra £2.5m for the arts – though it’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if he had. “We’ve talked to theatres and we think it’s do-able; they think it’s do-able,” he says.
Life of Brian
ACE identified four issues from McMaster, including the ‘free week’: digital development, which has made it into the Plan; peer review, on which Davey is consulting with his opposite numbers in Scotland; and international development. Closer partnership with the British Council is on the cards, with joint planning already underway. Other McMaster ideas, including granting longer funding agreements to leading (though not necessarily large) regularly funded organisations, also interest Davey greatly – though he dryly points out that “the likelihood of the Government granting us a ten-year charter is possibly remote”. However, he’s quite clear that he doesn’t care for the Conservative idea of bringing the major national organisations under the aegis of the DCMS rather than ACE. “I think the national companies have a real part to play in the ecology of the particular artforms they’re engaged with,” he says. It has already happened in Scotland, and he points to a threefold increase in administration for the companies concerned as they try to comply with Treasury requirements. He adds that “the notion that the national companies are the jewels, and everyone else is struggling a bit, I don’t like at all”.
Finally, he has had to deal with healing what he himself has called “a damaged organisation”: ACE itself. Baroness McIntosh’s review over the summer (AP176) identified some hard issues linked with communication and relationship-building, which came as a nasty shock to some in the organisation. I ask how the patient is doing. “The patient’s great actually. What’s really impressed me is the spirit of the people in this organisation to really care about what we’re doing.” Davey clearly feels it’s time to stop being apologetic and frightened of engaging with people and ideas. “What’s clear is that everyone’s taken the lessons very much to heart,” he explains. Let’s hope that ACE is an organisation that continues to learn.