Section three: Barriers

Inequality of access to cultural services appeared consistently as a challenge for the sector in the evidence given to the Commission.

Financial barriers

• Cost barriers prevent many people from lower-income backgrounds from being exposed to culture throughout their lives and this inequality has only increased as a result of the pandemic and rising cost of living. The Commission heard that this inequality of access to culture had a significant impact on social mobility.
• This is a significant barrier to those hoping to develop careers in the creative industries. The Commission heard from young artists who were unable to access cultural resources to support their studies due to the cost of ticketing for access to cultural venues and activities.
• Council funded programmes and services such as libraries are often free at the point of delivery and therefore provide crucial access to culture for those who would otherwise have none. However, equality of access does not occur automatically and it is important that councils work with under-represented communities to ensure services are relevant and accessible.
• The perceived instability of employment in the creative industries was also seen as a barrier to access for those from lower socio-economic groups. It was reported that parents and in some cases career advice services may not understand the changing nature of the job market and steer candidates away from portfolio and freelance careers.

Physical barriers

• The pandemic has exacerbated existing physical barriers to accessing cultural venues. The 2021 We Shall Not Be Removed survey found that 82 per cent of respondents expressed concern about the continued provision of access for disabled audiences through reopening.
• Physical barriers to culture included access to training and skills development. Young people consulted during the course of this research reported that some college courses weren’t accessible for people with additional needs, limiting their ability to develop their careers: a young person who is a wheelchair user reported being guided away from their first choice Performing Arts course at their local Further Education college because of their additional access needs, without any attempt made to try and accommodate those needs.
• Access to public buildings is important, but rising costs, particularly in relation to energy and capital is making it challenging to maintain these facilities, with news stories beginning to emerge of culture and leisure facilities being mothballed in response to the cost of energy.
• It was noted that barriers to access are often as much attitudinal as physical and that there is still work to be done to ensure staff in cultural services and organisations fully understand the social model of disability. The four UK arts councils and the British Film Institute are working together to develop a National Arts Access Scheme, which will support better consistency of access for disabled people to cultural venues.

Geographical barriers

• Evidence presented to the Commission highlighted the importance of access to culture within a local neighbourhood and the current levels of inequality embedded in geographical and social structures. Cultural infrastructure is often concentrated in urban centres, with those in areas with weaker cultural capacity (often rural and coastal areas and smaller towns) travelling long distances to participate in cultural activity. This raises issues about both accessibility of public transport and the need to invest in cultural infrastructure outside major cities.

Digital barriers

• Cultural services and organisations led the way in taking content online during lockdown and have continued to innovate in this space. We heard evidence that this had opened up cultural content to new audiences and maintained it for groups vulnerable to COVID, for example disabled audiences.
• However, more research is needed to establish the differential impact of digitisation in the context of the digital divide. Six per cent of households did not have access to the internet at home in December 2021 and those more at risk of digital exclusion included older citizens; the most financially vulnerable; those not working; people living alone; and people impacted by a limiting condition such as hearing or vision impairment. A recent report from the Good Things Foundation and Arts Council England found that audiences and participants may face a range of barriers to engaging with arts and culture online such: as a lack of awareness; a lack of digital access; accessibility barriers; a lack of digital skills; a lack of confidence / motivation; or a home environment which is not conducive to engagement.
• Contributors to the Commission noted that digital engagement with council cultural services had declined following the lifting of lockdown restrictions and that people are returning to live forms of culture as they crave human interaction and want to engage with a live experience. The Government’s latest figures for the Participation Survey show that physical engagement in all four cultural sectors was higher than digital engagement between October 2021 and March 2022.

Barriers of perception

• Perceptions of culture and the creative industries. One of the most important access barriers is people thinking the arts and culture are ‘not for them’. An exclusive approach to defining ‘culture’ can act as a barrier to social mobility.
• These barriers also applied to access to creative careers, as set out in our social mobility evidence. We heard that jobs in the creative industries were still not perceived as being on a par with other professional careers, despite the diversity of creative and supporting roles available in the sector. In a rapidly changing job market, careers advisers may not be aware of the potential of roles in this growth sector. We heard evidence from young people consulted as part of this research that they had been steered away from creative careers by teachers and career advisers who perceived them as ‘too bright’ to waste time on creative subjects. Engaging employers early in education is essential to ensure that all children are able to understand the careers available and the skills needed for success in the cultural industries.
• These factors have a significant impact on racial diversity in the cultural sector. Arts Council England’s 2017 report Equality Diversity and the Creative Case found that inequalities were a persistent challenge, but that increasing diversity of access and representation also represented an opportunity for the sector.

Low levels of ethnic and socio-economic diversity remains an issue in the cultural sector and continues to be reflected in the cultural and creative workforce. Research from the Creative Industries PEC shows widespread class imbalances in the UK’s Creative Industries. Only 16 per cent of people in creative jobs are from working class backgrounds, compared to almost a third of all workers from these origins. People who had at least one parent whose job was a managerial, administrative or professional occupation were more than twice as likely to land a job in the industry. The study also highlights a ‘double disadvantage’ in securing a creative job for women, those from minority ethnic backgrounds, those with a disability, or with low skill levels. The findings in the influential Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries also show that the number of employees from ethnically diverse and lower socio-economic backgrounds are significantly lower than for those who are privately educated, from more affluent backgrounds and white British. Research from the Creative Industries Federation noted that the creative industries are “failing to reflect the diversity of the populations where they are based” but that in addressing this disparity, they stand to benefit even more than organisations in other sectors.

The Commission also heard that disabled people are not well represented in decision making structures. Research suggests they are statistically more likely to be working as freelancers which tends to result in them being under-represented in governance structures for cultural organisations and partnerships.

The Commission heard that young people from socio-economically deprived and diverse backgrounds are not always able to see themselves represented in the cultural sector or visualise a future career working in culture. More diverse role models will help to make these roles visible, while recognising the need for wider structural change.

The LGA’s Levelling Up Locally Inquiry heard from Professor Philip McCann who highlighted the ‘A-frame challenge’ whereby the nature of the UK governance system sees citizens at the bottom and central government at the top of the pyramid with multiple degrees of separation between the two resulting in central government only hearing from a subset of life in the UK.

• There needs to be local capacity to set a vision for culture, convene partners and to have the civic infrastructure to deliver the vision. The council is in a good position to play this convening role as the democratically elected organisation with a remit around place, but the lead may be taken by an arts organisation or in some cases by the private sector (although the council will always remain a key partner). There are many excellent examples of councils working together in partnership with their cultural sector to support a positive vision for culture and place.
• Councils are now under considerable financial strain as a result of rising inflation alongside increases to the National Living Wage and higher energy costs, which has added at least £2.4 billion in extra costs onto the budgets councils set in March 2022. Local government is facing a funding gap of £3.4 billion in 2023/24 and £4.5 billion in 2024/25 just to maintain services at pre-COVID levels.
• However, there are significant regional inequalities in cultural capacity and infrastructure across the country. The Commission heard that those areas with existing capacity and developed cultural infrastructure are better resourced to access new funding streams, for example the ‘Levelling Up Fund’, which places areas that are already thinly resourced at further disadvantage. Existing geographical disparities between urban and rural, north and south, coastal and inland play into this challenge, meaning the level of community need is not always aligned with opportunity to develop cultural capacity and leadership.
• In the last ten years, council culture teams have seen significant reductions in scale in many areas of the country. Many councils struggle to resource a more collaborative long-term and strategic place-based approach to support recovery and growth.
• Space for culture: Public spaces for culture have come under increasing pressure in recent years with the rising cost of rental for venues including libraries and village halls highlighted as a particular challenge for smaller cultural organisations and the voluntary and community sector.
• Capacity for skills development. As a sector driven by Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) (the creative industries as a whole average 3.3 FTE per business) business sizes often mean that organisations do not have the capacity to run apprenticeships, or benefit from the Apprenticeship Levy. Though apprenticeships are a great way to support skills development, they can be daunting for small organisations. Targeted programmes such as Curious Minds’ Alternative Saturday Jobs can provide a bridge between cultural organisations and those seeking short or medium term paid work placements.
• Freelancer vulnerability: The creative sector was one of the fastest growing parts of the UK economy prior to the pandemic. However, COVID-19 exposed the fragility of parts of the creative economy, particularly in relation to freelance work. In Creative and cultural work without filters: Covid-19 and exposed precarity in the creative economy, researchers from Kings College London describes employment in cultural industries as precarious and that this becomes particularly obvious in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Collaboration and coproduction with communities is essential in building a shared and inclusive vision for place. national policy making has traditionally been top-down, with decisions taken at the centre filtering down to a local level. To really ‘level up’ places we need local strategies to be set at a local level in partnership with the public, private and voluntary sectors and crucially with communities. Local structures like Cultural Compacts can provide a basis on which to build a shared understanding of culture and place between the council, community, VCS, business partners and wider public sector For example, the West of England Combined Authority established a Cultural Compact in 2021 to ‘focus and amplify the role of culture in the region, as a driver for economic success, placemaking, community cohesion and personal wellbeing’.

Pioneering Places was a partnership between cultural organisations and multiple councils across Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone and Ramsgate. The award-winning project highlighted the benefits of collaboration across these sites whilst giving each its own focus, drawing on the individual strengths of the local communities. They worked with over 140 local partners and community groups, 11 university partners and three further education colleges involved in delivery, and had more than 1500 schoolchildren participating across 30 local schools.

The brief was "to make East Kent an even better place to live, work and visit by exploring civic pride and connecting artists and communities". Uniquely amongst the Great Place Schemes, Pioneering Places delivered outcomes focused on four different heritage sites/locations, each of which had been abandoned, fallen into disuse or was otherwise not meeting its full potential for development, cultural or community use. 

• In Canterbury, they worked with young people to repurpose a medieval property in the city centre, in an area of low footfall. 
• In Dover, opportunities were identified to develop Fort Burgoyne and its surrounding landscape as a new public realm. 
• In Folkestone, possible new uses for the disused brownfield site of the former gasworks were identified, building from community memories surrounding the site. 
• In Ramsgate, Turner Contemporary worked with the council to find the right site for a new public artwork, commissioned and led by local primary schoolchildren and delivered by world-renowned artist, Conrad Shawcross.  

Overall they recorded more than 60,000 visits to projects, events and activities. Pioneering Places delivered clear benefits to council partners and to communities, including: 

• five new public artworks commissioned 
• over 29,000 community participants, reporting a measurable boost in civic pride 
• previously disused or forgotten heritage sites unlocked with an estimated development value in excess of £39 million.  

• City of York Council is funding ‘York Life’, a new, free music festival with family-friendly events, organised by a partnership between Make It York and York Music Venues Network. The festival in April 2022 brought together over thirty local artists and performers in music, comedy and theatre, providing a high-profile opportunity to showcase local talent, supporting creative freelancers and live music venue recovery from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  
   
• The London Borough of Lewisham successfully bid to be one of London’s first Creative Enterprise Zones (CEZs), boosting the creative sector in Deptford and New Cross and developing an aligned strategic vision across a wide range of partners. Lewisham was then awarded the coveted Borough of Culture for 2022. They supported creative businesses and freelancers through the SHAPESLewisham platform, a network of over 300 creative businesses and freelancers across the sector and the borough. Over 600 businesses were engaged during Lewisham’s year as Borough of Culture. Almost 100 businesses received grant funding to deliver cultural events and activities, with an expected total attendance in the tens of thousands.  

Core versus restricted funding

• Once a strategy is set, a local area needs to be able to resource its delivery. This is likely to be from a range of sources, including the council, arms-length bodies, central government, trusts and foundations and private investment, but it needs to have some degree of stability and longevity to make the plan deliverable and sustainable.
  
   
• While councils remain collectively the biggest public funders of culture, core funding for these services has declined significantly over the last ten years. Increasing pressure on public spending and rising demand for statutory services like social care, meant that council’s net spend on culture and heritage decreased by 35.5 per cent between 2009/10 and 2019/20, while spend on libraries decreased by 43.5 percent. The pandemic and subsequent cost of living crisis has only served to exacerbate these pressures. Councils have also been hard hit by the cost of inflation. Alongside increases to the National Living Wage and higher energy costs, inflation has added at least £2.4 billion in extra costs onto the budgets councils set in March 2022. Local government is facing a funding gap of £3.4 billion in 2023/24 and £4.5 billion in 2024/25; a gap which poses a major risk to cultural services.

• By contrast new and significant funding opportunities for culture, including most recently the Levelling Up Fund and UK Shared Prosperity Fund have been announced by national government in recent years and welcomed by the sector. However, the general shift has been away from core funding by the council and towards a greater number of restricted and project-based funding pots. Some services rolled out into trusts have become leaner and more entrepreneurial in response to financial pressure, national policy direction and the best evidence at the time, but this has been adversely affected by the pandemic resulting in an impact on their ability to meet increasing community need.

Funding challenges

In addition to this context there are also challenges with the fragmented, short term and competitive nature of access to funding of any type.

• Fragmentation of funding. Funding for culture is frequently project-based and short-term, which does not allow for long-term strategic planning. Often it is capital-focused, as seen in the Levelling Up Fund, leaving significant revenue problems for the sector.
  
   
• Competition. Competition for funding is also experienced as a challenge within local areas, where cultural organisations often work together in partnership but are also regularly in competition with one another for limited funding. This raises challenges for the council and other cultural leaders in mobilising partners to work together collaboratively. As set out in this Centre for Cities article, competition is not always helpful, and developing a common view of what we want to achieve in a place and equipping people with the tools to deliver will maximise value.

• Funding timescales and structure differ greatly between sectors, for example the NHS and local government services, with the latter legally required to set an annual budget. There is a need for longer term investment in cultural programmes targeted at addressing health inequalities to embed best practice and provide continuity of service.
  
   
• Funding and support is typically geared towards formal structures/groups at a national and local level – the cultural sector is dominated by creatives and freelancers who have found it more difficult to access support.

The evidence presented to the Commission highlighted a recurring theme on the difficulty of aligning plans for culture with other policy areas, including health, economic development and culture. These challenges existed both at a national and local level.

Health, wellbeing and culture:

• Differences between health and council services can result in local structures being siloed in some areas of the country, making it difficult for cultural services and organisations to know where and how to engage with health (and vice versa).
  
   
• The preventative role of culture is well understood, but it remains difficult to move NHS funding up stream because of the necessary focus on acute provision. Models of cultural commissioning from public health are not embedded everywhere.

• At a local level, social prescribing has huge potential for supporting links between cultural provision and health systems, but the activity associated with the programme is largely unfunded, placing strain on the organisations providing services. Questions remain about how we systematise social prescribing; what should be ‘prescribed’, rather than universally available; and the role of culture within these systems. There is still untapped potential in cultural services, for example opportunities to place link workers within library services.

Economic development and culture:

• There is sometimes a lack of internal alignment between culture and economic development objectives at a national, regional and local level. Cultural leaders are not always included in broader conversations about the economic future of an area and culture is not always acknowledged as a driver for economic growth.
  
   
• Economic development strategies have historically tended to be top down in approach and focused on infrastructure rather than community assets.
  
   
• Many of the levers for skill development in place are still heavily centralised.

Education and skills and culture:

• Centralisation of employment and skills policy. Councils can perform a wide range of functions to support social mobility in culture. But employment and skills funding and provision is still fragmented and centralised, and councils could achieve more with appropriate devolution.
  
   
• Lack of alignment in creative skills policy. Government policy in recent years has deprioritised creative courses in favour of STEM subjects in schools, Further and Higher Education and adult education. While STEM subjects remain vital, a more rounded and inclusive education including cultural experiences would better support the future potential of creative jobs, and the ambition to grow the creative economy as acknowledged in the Government’s commitment to develop a sector specific vision for the creative industries. The upcoming Cultural Education Plan represents an opportunity to align these two policy areas.
  
   
• The Commission heard that the direction of travel in adult education has been towards focusing on cultural learning that is seen as delivering employability outcomes, as outlined in the latest consultation on a new national outcomes framework. A broader interpretation of skills pathways with multiple points of access into education and skills training would be more aligned to wider priorities around developing skills for the creative industries and a commitment to levelling up local places.
  
   
• Centralisation of employment and skills policy. Councils can perform a wide range of functions to support social mobility in culture. But employment and skills funding and provision is still fragmented and centralised, and councils could achieve more with appropriate devolution.

• Lack of alignment in creative skills policy. Government policy in recent years has deprioritised creative courses in favour of STEM subjects in schools, Further and Higher Education and adult education. While STEM subjects remain vital, a more rounded and inclusive education including cultural experiences would better support the future potential of creative jobs, and the ambition to grow the creative economy as acknowledged in the Government’s commitment to develop a sector specific vision for the creative industries. The upcoming Cultural Education Plan represents an opportunity to align these two policy areas.
  
   
• The Commission heard that the direction of travel in adult education has been towards focusing on cultural learning that is seen as delivering employability outcomes, as outlined in the latest consultation on a new national outcomes framework. A broader interpretation of skills pathways with multiple points of access into education and skills training would be more aligned to wider priorities around developing skills for the creative industries and a commitment to levelling up local places.

Northumberland County Council: Evidencing impact on wellbeing in Northumberland 

The Warwick and Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) has been used on the advice of Northumberland County Council Public Health to build quantitative evidence of the positive impact on wellbeing of taking part in arts and culture. This has enabled Museums Northumberland bait, which is the Creative People and Places programme in South East Northumberland, to demonstrate how they are fulfilling their ten-year mission to have a “demonstrable effect on the well-being of local people and levels of social energy and activism within communities”. 

The dataset built up over eight years consistently demonstrates 72-75 per cent of participants reporting an increase in wellbeing through interaction with the project, with a 15 per cent overall increase in wellbeing observed across the whole sample. 

Comparisons with UK population samples highlight the positive impact of the programme on wellbeing relative to national averages (the top 15 per cent of UK scores range from 60-70 and the bottom 15 per cent from 14-421).  

• The proportion of Museums Northumberland bait participants with scores equivalent to bottom 15 per cent of the UK sample decreased from 35 per cent to 16 per cent. 
• The proportion of Museums Northumberland bait participants with scores equivalent to top 15 per cent of the UK sample increased from 13 per cent to 25 per cent. 

• The Commission heard that it was difficult for councils to collect and access high quality data on culture. This included: challenges in collecting standard core data on cultural services and organisations that would allow for effective benchmarking; access to consistent methods of evaluating the impact of cultural activity on communities; and access to methods of measuring the impact of their own interventions for the purpose of better targeting their investment.
  
   
• Different data requirements from the organisations/sectors that cultural services are seeking to partner with also posed a challenge. There is a significant opportunity for greater levels of health commissioning of cultural services, for example. However, evaluation is commonly delivered on a shorter timeframe for culture than for health: methodology differs between the two areas and there is not yet a shared language, which can create barriers.
  
   
• Because a lot of cultural activity and facilities are free to engage with at point of use, it can mean their economic contributions are undervalued. There needs to be step change in techniques for capturing the value and aggregating locally collected data at a regional and national level. Adoption of DCMS’s AHRC funded Culture and Heritage Capital Framework by councils could represent an opportunity to develop a more consistent methodology across local areas.