A response to the Suffolk arts funding cuts
If you care about art and culture in Suffolk, please show your support by joining the protest against Suffolk County Council’s decision to eliminate 100% of core funding from nine of Suffolk’s leading cultural institutions.
It is crucial to refute the Council’s explanation of its decision, articulated in a public letter by Councillor Richard Rout on 10th January. In that letter, he states that the funding in question - £528k is equivalent to “12 elderly people to be in residential care for a year” or “23 children in foster care for a year”.
Spending money to save lives needs no justification. But what is evidently missing from the council’s budget deliberations is a more fine-grained analysis of what Suffolk needs over the short, medium and long term in order to flourish.
Like many rural areas in the UK, Suffolk County is suffering from depopulation and the ageing of its population. Both factors equate to a shrinking tax base. (For the period of 2011-2021, Suffolk’s population grew by 4.5% in comparison to the national average of 5.9% and 8.3% for the East of England, a difference of -24% and -46%, respectively? Contrast Norfolk during the same period, which grew at 6.8%, significantly faster than the national average. The basic demographic facts alone foretell a vicious, reinforcing cycle - a smaller tax base results in reduced municipal services making the County a less attractive place to live or work, let alone raise a young family – unless of course the Council takes active measures to counteract the county’s decline.
There is no doubt that culture makes a huge difference to the vibrancy and appeal of a destination. Besides providing entertainment, cultural institutions and events enhance health and well-being, social inclusion and create local social capital. Moreover, culture has major downstream economic benefits by stimulating inbound tourism and providing custom to the hospitality and retail businesses. But those are just the most obvious, direct benefits of culture. Longer term, culture makes an economy more robust and value-added. A 2021 OECD report on the contributions of culture to the economy enumerated its salutary long-term effects:
The culture and creative sectors drive innovation across industries and workforces because critical thinking and creativity are crucial for innovation
Industries with stronger links to the creative industries had considerably stronger innovation performance.
Creative jobs tend to be more high-skilled and better-paying than average, and many creative occupations are at lower risk of automation. (According to a report by the Department of Education published in 2017, “New Anglia is over-represented in lower-to-mid skill occupations and under-represented (quite significantly) in higher skill occupations in relation to the national average.”)
Despite abundant evidence that culture drives innovation, growth, and value, the county has suffered from long-term underinvestment in culture. The museum sector, especially in comparison to Norfolk, is emblematic of this phenomenon. Quoting from the analysis of the Food Museum, one of the nine organisations affected by the cuts –
“Suffolk County Council does not have its own museum service. It appears that its annual budget for museums is approx. £250,000 to cover staff, some activity through the Association for Suffolk Museums (£2,000) and direct grants: £102,500 to us, £28,500 to Gainsborough’s House and £13,500 to the Long Shop in Leiston. In comparison, Norfolk County Council runs 10 museums directly, and has a multi-million-pound budget. Suffolk’s residents are not getting as good a deal as their neighbours (except perhaps in Ipswich, where Ipswich Borough Council supports Colchester & Ipswich Museums Service with an annual grant of just under £1 million).
The average spend per head on museums by district and county councils across the UK is £3.54. (2019-20 figure from ‘Local Authority Investment in Museums after a Decade of Austerity’). Suffolk has a population of c.760,000, which should equate to a spend of £2.7m if we want to be at least average.”
One has to ask, is long-term underinvestment in sectors like culture (and entrepreneurship) one of the reasons that Suffolk is languishing? One thing is sure, the Council’s clear signal that it does not care about culture is a turn-off for artists and creative professionals contemplating a move to the County, besides making it more difficult for those who have already settled here, to survive, not to mention flourish. The net result will be a County that is less liveable and attractive to newcomers and residents, ensuring that towns and villages become sparser while the median age continues to climb and municipal services dwindle.
Sadly, Suffolk County Council’s most recent decision is not a sudden reversal of its long-term support for the arts, but simply the nadir of its longstanding neglect of the culture sector and the natural result of its simplistic and unsophisticated understanding of the preconditions of economic development - that, or just a total lack of vision and leadership.
