Cultural devolution: Public ‘should be involved’ in arts funding decisions

A major report into the future of cultural devolution in the UK is calling for the public to be engaged in decision making relating to arts and culture across all tiers of government.

The research, led by policy design and advocacy organisation Culture Commons, is the cumulation of a year-long programme of engagement and research into the future of local cultural policy, backed by research institutions, city councils, combined authorities, arts organisations and funders including Arts Council England (ACE).

Its findings, published today, feature a suite of policy recommendations aimed at empowering local decision making across the cultural, creative and heritage sectors. 

Among the recommendations are calls for national arm’s length bodies and grant giving bodies to explore supporting public involvement in decision making at different tiers of governance.

The bodies should come together and fund a national programme led by policy specialists, researchers and the public, according to the suggestion, to pilot new decision making forums at different tiers of government and spatial scales, on topic areas including the co-design of local cultural plans and the setting of budgets.

It suggests pilot forums take place at street, town, local authority, regional and national levels, and cater for in-person, digital and hybrid decision making activities. 

While public involvement in cultural decision making is still in its infancy in the UK, the number of initiatives involving the public is slowly rising. 

Earlier this year, Nottingham-based gallery New Art Exchange integrated a citizens’ assembly into its leadership structure, while selected residents in West Cumbria helped decide how £100,000 would be spent on the development of local creative projects.

The UK’s first citizens’ assembly in arts and culture is thought to have been Art for the People in Coventry, which helped decide on programming during the city’s tenure as City of Culture.  

Focus on funding

Several other recommendations in Culture Commons’ research refer to funding and the financial pressures facing local authorities.

The UK government is asked to redress the underfunding of local authorities to enable them to meet statutory obligations across health and social care, education and transport, one recommendation says, which adds that a lack of resources is forcing local authorities to cut local cultural offers.

The research also features calls to move away from purely competition-based models of funding for local authorities. One recommendation says competition-based models “exacerbate disparities and prevent a more balanced development of the ecosystem”, as well as discourage collaboration between regions and stifle innovation.

National governments are asked to develop non-competition-based models of funding, that are both multi-year and flexible, across the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem to support places with comparatively low levels of investment.

Once such fund should be a cultural and heritage infrastructure fund distributed based on need, rather than competition, according to another recommendation. 

It suggests the fund is multi-year and flexible enough to deliver both capital and revenue grants in support of physical infrastructure, programme activity and place-based capacity according to the needs of individual areas. It adds the fund could be financed by the partial harmonisation of existing funding pots that are currently distributed via competition.

Other recommendations

Elsewhere in the recommendations, national governments are tasked with enabling local authorities to develop statutory creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem plans. The plan should set out how local authorities will support their ecosystems and should feature a commensurate uplift to local government finance settlements.

The Northern Ireland executive, Scottish government and Welsh government are called upon to help develop regional structures that support cultural decision-making to take place over wider than local areas, akin to how combined authorities currently operate in England.

Meanwhile, a small number of combined authorities are being asked to work alongside UK government and DCMS arm’s length bodies to test an advanced cultural devolution deal. 

The recommendation says the selected areas should receive all funding that would have come into the combined authorities from arm’s length bodies over a financial year to create one ‘single settlement’ pot ring-fenced for their creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. These authorities would be given responsibility for distributing the investment across the area, based on a multi-year settlement and with the arm’s length principle in place.

Other recommendations aimed at the national level include refreshing the Culture and Creative Industries Inter-Ministerial Group to ‘reset’ relations between the four UK nations.

The UK government and devolved governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are also urged to build a fuller picture of funding within the UK’s creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. This should move beyond an assessment of national arm’s length bodies in isolation and bring the private sector trusts and foundations and local government funding into scope, the research says.

This recommendation falls largely in line with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s intention to conduct a wide examination into the funding environment for arts and culture organisations.