And Now Northampton
I learned today that the local authority funding for the Royal and Derngate in Northampton is under threat of cutting. No decision has yet been made (it will be next month) but cutting £900,000 from their grant over the next three years is a possibility - and this after the council had invested £900,000 in the venue’s recent refurbishment. And they’d only just announced part of their new season last week.
According to council officials, the cut is just one of a number being considered because the council has a £3m shortfall in its budget - just like Wandsworth Council has a £5m hole which they propose to lessen with, essentially, a £270,000 per annum cut in fuding to BAC.
Of course, at the moment councils throughout the UK are trying to set their budgets for the new financial year and I would imagine that every one of them has a shortfall, so we can expect more theatres to come under threat and certainly some of them will have to, at best, reduce their programmes or, at worst, close.
The situation is made worse by the fact that it is unlikely that ACE will be able to bale them out because, although we have no figures yet, a lot of Lottery money which would have come to ACE at regional level is likely to be taken to pay for the massive increase in the costs of the 2012 Olympics.
The Olympics, we are told, will be very profitable for Britain - but for who? It certainly won’t be profitable for those organisations and companies which may be forced to close because of the unavailability of Lottery money, and it is highly unlikely that those who do manage to hang on by the skin of their teeth will get any benefit from the Games.
In the next couple of years, the arts are going to experience squeezes such as we have not seen since the days of the Thatcher government. We need to protest loud and long, but we also need to steel ourselves for the effects, for let no one imagine that there will be a governmental change of heart in favour of all those organisations, arts and non-arts, which rely upon Lottery money. Anyone remember the Millennium Dome?