COVID-19: the culture and entertainment sectors, House of Commons, 2 March 2021

• Councils are the biggest public funder of culture in the UK, spending over £1.1 billion a year supporting a range of cultural organisations and activities. They also play a key role in delivering cultural services, running over 3,000 libraries, more than 350 museums, public archives, theatres and galleries, and many monuments and historic buildings. These services provide essential infrastructure and digital access, improve public health and educational outcomes, and will be critical in driving inclusive economic recovery post COVID-19.

• While the Government’s £1.57 billion support package for the arts and culture sector was welcome, the sector is still facing significant financial difficulties. Councils face significant additional cost pressures as a result of COVID-19 and this will directly impact council’s ability to fund discretionary services in the culture sector, at a time when the sector is in urgent need of investment.

• The culture sector contributed £34.6 billion to the economy in 2019 and will play a critical role in driving economic recovery post COVID-19. Culture and leisure organisations have been proven to stimulate local economic growth and regeneration, drive footfall into towns and city centres; generate jobs and investment, and support the rejuvenation of other co-dependent industries, such as hospitality, retail, public transport and taxis. Thriving culture and leisure opportunities are increasingly vital to meet growing demand for experiences and revive struggling highstreets across the UK.

• As leaders of place, councils are uniquely situated to respond to the needs of their communities and deliver a culture-led economic recovery. Councils were not involved in the targeting or distribution of the Cultural Recovery Fund, despite being well placed to target the funding to organisations that are critical to the local cultural offer. To deliver the maximum benefit for local communities, the Government should adopt a place-based approach to recovery, that utilises councils’ expertise and involves them in strategic decisions about place-based cultural investments, including those related to heritage and the visitor economy.

• Libraries have an important role to play in bridging the digital divide, upskilling the workforce, supporting pupils to catch-up from missed learning and supporting start-up businesses and entrepreneurs. We are calling for libraries to be fully enabled to support economic recovery, through further investment and the rapid rollout of next tranche of Business and Intellectual Property Centres.

Background information

Councils are the biggest public funder of culture in the UK, spending over £1.1 billion a year. Councils also play a key role in delivering cultural services, running over 3,000 libraries, more than 350 museums, public archives, numerous theatres and galleries, and many monuments and historic buildings.

While the Government’s £1.57 billion support package for the arts and culture sector was welcome, the sector is still facing significant financial difficulties. Cultural organisations have adapted imaginatively, providing new and innovative services for their communities, but they have been unable to generate income during repeated lockdowns putting many at risk of closure. Many councils rely on income generated through culture and leisure services, which has in turn increased pressure on councils’ budgets and their ability to invest in cultural services.

It is vital that funding dedicated to COVID-19 in both the remainder of 2020/21 and in 2021/22 is kept under review to ensure councils are compensated in full for the financial impact of the pandemic, as set out in our 2021 Budget submission. We are also calling for councils to be supported by Arts Council England to develop more cultural compacts, supported by £400,000 in revenue funding. In 2019, Arts Council England and the Department for Culture Digital Media and Sport (DCMS) funded the creation of cultural compacts in 20 areas. This established formal, goal-driven partnerships between councils, local cultural sectors and wider stakeholders to co-design future cultural offers and deliver prosperity through cultural investment. The review of the compact programme found that they have delivered value in the areas they were introduced in.

According to the most recent DCMS estimates, the culture sector alone contributed £34.6 billion to the economy in 2019 and will play a critical role in driving economic recovery post COVID-19. It is positive to see culture referenced in Levelling-Up and UK Shared Prosperity Funds, recognising the importance of cultural infrastructure in economic recovery. We hope this will form an integral part of both funds, to support the sector in a time of need and generate jobs and inclusive growth across the UK.

As leaders of place, councils are uniquely situated to respond to the needs of their communities and deliver a culture-led economic recovery. Councils were not involved in the targeting or distribution of the Cultural Recovery Fund, despite being well placed to target the funding to organisations that are critical to the local cultural offer. To deliver the maximum benefit for local communities, the Government should adopt a place-based approach to recovery, that utilises councils’ expertise and involves them in strategic decisions about place-based cultural investments, including those related to heritage and the visitor economy.

Councils have been at the forefront of successfully developing leisure and cultural activities to stimulate inclusive and sustainable economic growth, as we explored in our 2019 report on culture-led regeneration. Culture and leisure organisations, including theatres, live music venues, galleries and museums, have been proven to act as ‘anchor’ institutions, driving footfall into towns and city centres; generating jobs and investment, and supporting the rejuvenation of other co-dependent industries, such as hospitality, retail, public transport and taxis. The pandemic has led to an acceleration of trends in consumer habits; with fewer people visiting town centres to shop, high streets increasingly needing to compete on the experiences they offer. Before COVID-19 councils were already working to repurpose high streets, and the pace of change now needs to rapidly increase to meet the scale of current challenges.

Through the pandemic, an increasing number of councils made use of empty commercial units on high streets to establish ‘pop-up’ cultural attractions and creative workspaces, allowing for their return to retail or other functions when required. We are concerned the measures proposed in the Supporting housing delivery and public service infrastructure consultation will limit councils’ flexibility to utilise spaces in this way. We would like to see measures introduced to encourage innovative use of empty units and facilitate their use as creative facilities and spaces. Likewise, we would like to see the protections from permitted development, that are afforded to live venues, extended to other anchor culture and leisure institutions to ensure they are not permanently lost from our towns and cities.

Councils are working to support their local economies, to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic and to grow a local, flexible, resilient workforce. Libraries have an important role to play driving recovery through bridging the digital divide; upskilling the workforce; improving educational outcomes and tackling social isolation. At the beginning of the first national lockdown, libraries responded quickly and innovatively to move services online with 120,000 people joining their local library in the first three weeks of the first lockdown, demonstrating the significant demand for, and value of, these services.

Council’s library services are an essential infrastructure, providing access to broadband and digital equipment, job clubs, CV writing support, skills training and targeted support for start-ups through Business and Intellectual Property Centres. These services are invaluable to groups that would otherwise be locked out of the job market and will be increasingly important in the wake of the pandemic and rising unemployment.

Business and Intellectual Property Centres (BIPCs) have delivered extraordinary results in supporting entrepreneurs and will be critical in re-establishing a thriving ecosystem of small businesses and freelancers post pandemic. Between 2016 and 2019, BIPCs have generated £6.95 for every £1 of public money spent and have supported the creation of 12,288 businesses - 47 percent of which were in the North - and helped businesses create an estimated total of 7843 new FTE jobs. BIPCs have also been particularly effective in supporting entrepreneurs from minority groups: of the BIPC service users who went on to start a new business, 55 per cent were women (compared with 22 percent of business owners nationally), 31 per cent were from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background and 17 percent had a disability. 

Access to libraries contribute greatly to improving children’s educational outcomes and can play an important role in helping pupils’ recover missed learning and addressing the widening attainment gap. Evidence from a British cohort study found that visiting a library regularly and reading contributed four times more to pupils’ educational outcomes than having a parent with a degree. Likewise, 89 per cent of parents reported that the Libraries Summer Reading challenge, which went digital this year, helped their child to engage with reading.

We are calling for the contribution of libraries to be fully harnessed to support economic recovery and the levelling up agenda, through:

• Kick-starting the rapid rollout of next tranche of Business and Intellectual Property centres. Alongside this, a specific cultural and creative support offer should be developed, similar to Arts Council England’s digital champions.
• Investing £30 million capital funding in libraries to develop a network of makerspaces and public access computers to turbocharge our country’s recovery, close the digital skills divide in many of our most deprived areas, and grow the entrepreneurs and innovators in every council area.
• Providing councils with £500 million to invest in providers of social prescribing facilities, which would include investment in libraries.