Cash alone won’t solve regional imbalance, says Forgan
Wider infrastructure must be in place, says former ACE chair
Increased investment in the regions cannot succeed without the infrastructure to back it up, according to the council’s former chair Liz Forgan in her evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
But Forgan added that the case for more money had been "enormously strengthened" by the progress made in the regions in the past 10 years.
The select committee is currently investigating the work of ACE in light of the Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital report, which laid bare a significant imbalance in arts funding between London and the regions.
Forgan agreed that there was an imbalance, but said “it is no good just throwing buckets of money at somewhere” and that the arts council had to be judicious in its investments to ensure long-term sustainability.
She said: “You do not put £20m in somewhere that you do not think is going to be sustained. You put a modest investment. You grow it. You make it develop.
"Cornwall is an example. The wonderful Lost Gardens of Heligan and the [Eden Project], then the Falmouth Museum and Tate St Ives, and you start gradually to build up.
“Each of those is quite risky, but then you start to build up a critical mass so that tourists go and they do not just have one thing to go to, they have three things to go to... Then you gradually grow a cultural economy.”
Forgan said there had been several “very well meant decisions to put lottery money into places that really needed investment, and in the end, for all the will in the world, they did not succeed because there were just too many problems around them”.
Forgan added: “The case for investing more money outside London is enormously strengthened by the fact that the investment that has gone on to date outside London has produced a richness, quality and range of artistic and cultural life that has grown dramatically in the last 10 years.
“It would have been quite difficult to argue for investing in large tracts of England 20 years ago. But if you look now, there is a real infrastructure.”
The authors of Rebalancing our Capital Cultural, Peter Stark, Christopher Gordon and David Powell, also gave evidence during the session.
In response to Forgan’s statement, Stark said that while the arts council's investment in capital and institutional development was welcome, "they have not followed it through with investment in production resources in those usually core city centres and those clusters of cultural production”.
Stark said the report did not advocate that arts funding to be distributed on a per capita basis, but described the scale of the imbalance as "indefensible".
The select committee will sit again shortly to hear evidence from ACE’s current chair Peter Bazalgette and others.
But Forgan added that the case for more money had been "enormously strengthened" by the progress made in the regions in the past 10 years.
The select committee is currently investigating the work of ACE in light of the Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital report, which laid bare a significant imbalance in arts funding between London and the regions.
Forgan agreed that there was an imbalance, but said “it is no good just throwing buckets of money at somewhere” and that the arts council had to be judicious in its investments to ensure long-term sustainability.
She said: “You do not put £20m in somewhere that you do not think is going to be sustained. You put a modest investment. You grow it. You make it develop.
"Cornwall is an example. The wonderful Lost Gardens of Heligan and the [Eden Project], then the Falmouth Museum and Tate St Ives, and you start gradually to build up.
“Each of those is quite risky, but then you start to build up a critical mass so that tourists go and they do not just have one thing to go to, they have three things to go to... Then you gradually grow a cultural economy.”
Forgan said there had been several “very well meant decisions to put lottery money into places that really needed investment, and in the end, for all the will in the world, they did not succeed because there were just too many problems around them”.
Forgan added: “The case for investing more money outside London is enormously strengthened by the fact that the investment that has gone on to date outside London has produced a richness, quality and range of artistic and cultural life that has grown dramatically in the last 10 years.
“It would have been quite difficult to argue for investing in large tracts of England 20 years ago. But if you look now, there is a real infrastructure.”
The authors of Rebalancing our Capital Cultural, Peter Stark, Christopher Gordon and David Powell, also gave evidence during the session.
In response to Forgan’s statement, Stark said that while the arts council's investment in capital and institutional development was welcome, "they have not followed it through with investment in production resources in those usually core city centres and those clusters of cultural production”.
Stark said the report did not advocate that arts funding to be distributed on a per capita basis, but described the scale of the imbalance as "indefensible".
The select committee will sit again shortly to hear evidence from ACE’s current chair Peter Bazalgette and others.