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: