Pushing the envelope

In March 2009, the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) completed its regional restructuring, placing its head office in Birmingham with three Area Directors co-ordinating its regional managers. Last week, Arts Council England (ACE) announced a remarkably similar approach (p1) shrinking its national office into a head office (though still located in London) and grouping its regional offices under four ‘area executive directors’. This begs the question: do we really need separate funding structures for these cultural domains any more? Indeed, is there an underlying governmental agenda here to unify the funding system?
The restructurings, we are told, have been driven by financial imperatives. But they have also taken place at the same time as the government disbanded the Regional Cultural Consortia, telling the sector to work informally together at regional level. So why not go that one stage further and merge MLA and ACE? Some, perhaps many, will argue that the sectors’ needs demand the separation of specialist functions: that it would be invidious for an officer used to appraising, say, the performance of an opera company to be tasked with advising a museum on its readiness for Accreditation. I would argue that the processes are very similar, at least at the level of assessing an organisation’s fitness for purpose. I might go even further and suggest that the core activities of both MLA and ACE are essentially bureaucratic and, with some tweaking, could quite easily be managed by officers trained in the appropriate procedures. There would still be important roles to be played by the professional associations and, of course, practitioners and specialist advisers. But why do we need to continue the duplication of desk-based processes?
After all, both organisations share the vision of quality, access, participation and sectoral development. They both campaign for making cultural experiences a vital part of our lives. Each has a role in advocacy at national, regional and local levels. Each needs to engage with local authorities as well as other potential sources of support such as the Regional Development Agencies. Would it not save time and money if all these activities were co-ordinated by a single cultural planning and development body? Not to mention the environmental benefits accruing from publishing a single Annual Report.

At one level, this already happens. The UK’s audience development agencies make no cultural distinctions in their memberships or the services they provide. Indeed, they see positive advantages in linking initiatives across domains and disseminating lessons learned in one sphere to the others they represent. They examine the changing demographics of our population and consider the relative merits of, for example, museums staying open later into the evening or theatres adjusting their performance times. They nurture new audiences – for whatever type of cultural activity. They explore ways of maximising earned income for their members and clients. Their focus is completely on the end-user. And I doubt that the end-user much cares which part of the funding structure is responsible for the particular experience they have chosen.
So perhaps this is the nub of the argument. If we look at the roles of MLA and ACE not from their need to respond to financial strictures but rather as champions of public entitlement, surely more could be gained through working absolutely together on such an agreed joint agenda. Each operates using public subsidy (and some of the proceeds of the public’s gambling habits), so maybe it is time to reverse the funding structure to place the audience at the top. As those with long memories will recall, I have long argued that it’s the audience that matters – isn’t it?