Now, the good thing about writing this twelve hours after today’s announcement is that everyone else has summarised, pontificated and moved on. I can just link to what they’ve written. Blogging is ace. Anyway, onward…

Here’s the Arts Council’s announcement. Fair play to them for getting this out in reasonably good time following the spending review.

Audiences Central have summarised things and the Birmingham Post has calculated the cuts the region’s orgs are going to face from April 2011.

To skip through the announcement:

• Most regularly funded organisations will have their funding cut by 6.9% in 2011/2012
• By 2014/15 cuts will have risen to 14.9% in real terms (ie. ignoring inflation)
• Arts and Business and Creativity, Culture and Education will have their public funding halved next year and taken away completely the year after that. That’s very bad news for them
• The Arts Council will have to halve its admin costs
• There’ll be a new system for funding from 2012 onwards (arrangements to be announced 4 November 2010). Everyone will have to reapply – some existing orgs won’t be successful, some new ones will
• The budget for budget for ‘strategic opportunities for artistic work’ such as touring, large events and the Cultural Leadership Programme is being knocked down by 64%

Next year will be a ‘transition year’, hence the lower-than-expected cuts, the stay of execution for A&B and CCE and the Guardian describing arts groups as ‘relieved’. So expect things to get worse. Oh, and don’t forget the local authority funding that’s disappearing.

In A&B’s ‘defence’ Colin Tweedy has released an utterly unimpressive statement quoting an easily-swatted away question in Parliament and referring to the generalised views of unnamed ‘private sector partners’. Go get em, tiger.

Still, it’s not all bad news in the arts. Working at the top at the Royal Opera House can net you £630,000 a year.

Here’s the bunny vid:

I went along to see:

• what kinds of issues are being discussed
• how the artistic/cultural/wider creative interests of the city are being represented

As far as the issues being discussed are concerned, things seem to still be at an early stage. The main topic of discussion was what we might want a LEP to be responsible for and the responses were fairly wide-ranging. Bear in mind that the deadline for proposals to government is a month away and that other large areas around the country have already come to agreement and are settled and you start to get the picture.

From my position as a lay person in all of this, there seemed to have been two widely held opinions from the business folk in the room – we need to get on and do something fast and the local political infighting needs to stop.

The latter was put rather more strongly by some, but you didn’t sit through a two hour meeting in which that was the only light relief, so I’m keeping the exact phrases to myself. Next week I’m going to go to a nice exhibition or something and report back on that.

As for creative industries representation, a rough headcount revealed six of us – Lee and Rachel from Fullrange, Julia from Aquila, Lorraine from Weave Marketing and Creative Republic, a lady from Toye Kenning & Spencer (I can’t find her name just now) and myself. There may well have been others.

I also clocked Anne O’Meara who deserves a mention. She’s a fantastically experienced property/regeneration lawyer (and my one-time boss, as it goes) who also chairs the CBSO and has been named by Arts & Business as a Midlands Cultural Champion. She was there too and a good reminder that there are some people on the business/financial side of town that are committed to the arts/culture cause too.

The other week West Midlands Regional Observatory brought out their latest recession snapshot. For the cultural sector the figures weren’t bad:

the cultural sector continued to see increases in numbers of customers through the door in the last three months of 2009, building on the unusually high increase in footfall seen over the summer.

Strong audience figures suggest the value placed on culture by the general population has only increased during the economic troubles

However, people are expecting cuts – 72% of respondents being ‘less optimistic’ about the stability of core funding compared to a few years ago. Quite right too – on a daily basis you hear politicians dodging around the c-word like [insert inappropriate simile here].

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, has gone some way towards setting his stall out (could The Guardian have found a pic of him looking any more smug?), saying (and I paraphrase hugely):

• arts administration costs need to be hacked back to 5% of any cash government hands over
• they’ll introduce a US-style culture of philanthropy by encouraging tax breaks on lifetime giving
• The national lottery would be returned to its original good causes (which includes arts)
• they’d get rid of audience development targets in the arts

Some might find encouragement in some of that, although he did add:

I wouldn’t say that everything that happened under the last Conservative government was good

So nevermind.

The philanthropy thing has been jumped upon and was clearly at the forefront of people’s minds on a recent Cultural Leadership Programme session, as blogged about by Friction Arts in a post called Preparing for a Cultural Nuclear Winter.

On the Stan’s Cafe blog James gives the benefit of their experience and says:

Big UK arts institutions are already doing all they can to raise sponsorship and court donors, it’s not as if a funding cut is ‘required’ to prod them into action. […]

In short, the US model is deeply flawed and we are a million miles away from being able to deliver that model as well as they do.

As things stand the figures, for the West Mids in particular, support him, the Birmingham Post pulling the numbers from analysis by Arts & Business. The headline numbers there being that in the West Mids private investment dropped 25% over the last period, while the national average was a drop of 7%.

A&B chief Colin Tweedy said that:

We would like to be optimistic but predict the worst is yet to come

Here’s the bunny: