The other various NLDBs such as the Community Fund, the Heritage Fund and the New Opportunities Fund also occasionally support the arts however only in certain circumstances and not when funding for a project is clearly the responsibility of the Arts Council.
The management of the National Lottery Distribution Fund has come under scrutiny this past year who believe that the high levels of finance in the fund has been caused by inefficient management and an overcomplicated application procedure. The changes made in the National Lottery Act 1998 partly improved this due to a simplification of the procedures, however in some cases these funds have still been slow in getting to the projects that they have been allocated. This has a negative impact on the arts due to an unnecessary delay in projects being finished, and the public reaping the benefits. The NLDBs however defend themselves by claiming that when the fund is high, it is due to the money not being needed all at once, and the tax and interest benefits of keeping the money in the NLDF make it sensible not to simply distribute the whole grant into the project accounts immediately. The National Audit Office is currently making a detailed evaluation of the balances and flows out of the NLDF in respect of each of its distributors. (Reform of the National Lottery, 2004, ) It is however evident from the Arts Council Annual Review that efficiency is increasing with regards to the application process, as the target for 2003/2004 for the average cost of each application (a performance measure used by the council) was £5000, yet it only actually cost £3831 (under half of what each application cost on average the previous year) despite processing well over double the number of applications. (Arts Council Review, 2004, )
The Culture, Media, and Sport Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and its associated public bodies (House of Commons, 1994) In volume 1 of the printed report, The Reform of the National Lottery (1994), the committee voiced its concerns that the principle of additionality that the Government insisted it was committed to in the White Paper concerning lottery funding (1992) was not being adhered to properly, and that “funding from the National Lottery has meant that there has been an erosion, in real terms, of the DCMS core funding” (pg 53) The concept of additionality is that funds from the National Lottery should not become a replacement for contributions that would normally be made by the Government in their mainstream spending plan. The best example of the idea that this concept is not being applied to a strong enough degree, although only indirectly related to the arts, is the creation of the Olympic Lottery to fund London’s 2012 Olympic bid. An article in the Guardian explains that “the concern is that this sets a precedent, with lottery funding priorities being set by the Government, rather than the independent distributors, and lottery players ‘choosing’ their cause by playing a certain game” (Shifrin, 2004, ) However the Government argue that it does not breach the additionality principle as this “has consistently been that Lottery money should add to, it should not substitute or supplement services that are already provided by Government and it should allow things to happen that would not happen if it depended simply on Government funding alone” (Healey, 2004) The accusation that the additionality principle is being eroded continues to be put forward by the Culture, Media, and Sport Committee however it seems a valid point that without lottery funding, the 2021 London Olympics bid would never have been possible, and the Government should not have to bear the entire cost of this venture. Charles Saumarez Smith believes that “the lottery fund was meant to be additional to and distinct from the money they get from the Treasury, but basically, they’ve amalgamated it.” (Saumarez-Smith, 2004, cited in Moss, 2004, ) He also believes the public are being somewhat misled as “it has become blurred in the public mind the specialness of lottery funding as a distinct type of funding that was supposed to enable institutions to do things that couldn’t be done through standard revenue funding” (Saumarez-Smith, 2004, cited in Moss, 2004) The Secretary of State has been called upon in the meantime to make an annual report to Parliament on how the additionality principle has been applied.
The impact the National Lottery has directly had on the arts in England and Wales can clearly be seen by identifying some examples of how lottery funding has been used. Three examples will be looked at, namely the Angel Of The North, The Lowry, and the Northern Quarter, all in Manchester.
The Angel of the North, Gateshead
Gateshead Council received £584,000 to construct the controversial 20-metre-high sculpture with a 54-metre wingspan, by artist Antony Gormley. It has had a huge impact on the arts community in the North-West as the immense popularity of the sculpture has encouraged further investment in projects in the area and has helped attract additional direct private sector investment in the arts. The status of the area of Gateshead has also been significantly raised, with the Angel of the North putting the town on the map. It has helped change the areas image as perceived by tourists, and has even claimed to have as much local identity to Gateshead as the Statue of Liberty has to New York. (Arts Council England – National Lottery Projects, 2004, )
The Lowry, Salford
Since opening in April 2002, the Lowry (consisting of two theatres, exhibition galleries, shops, cafes, restaurants and conference facilities) has been a catalyst for regeneration in the former dock area of Salford, proving to be one of the most successful projects of its kind in Europe. Receiving a total of £75million of lottery funding, it has achieved its objectives of bringing international quality arts and entertainments to the local residents as well as people all over the North-West and the UK, even abroad. By constructing the Imperial War Museum and shopping centre, the Salford Council has created a state of the art leisure experience in an area that had been derelict for almost 20 years. This has provided a immense effect on employment opportunities for the area, as well as other social and economical benefits, for example increased consumer activity in the Manchester area and the development of luxury apartments around the Quays, giving the area a higher prestige. Helen Buchanan, (2004) the head teacher of a local Salford primary school claimed “the Lowry has changed many of her young pupils lives”, which is hard evidence of the impact the lottery funding within the arts is having on the communities of England. (Arts Council England – National Lottery Projects, 2004)
The Northern Quarter, Manchester
With a £200,000 lottery grant allocated from the Arts Council England, the area that had been segregated from the rest of the city centre and left empty and derelict has been transformed with the help of a site specific art scheme involving artists led by Liam Curtin (from a local ceramics business) including Peter Freeman (designer of the Neon Light Tower, left), Tim Rushton and Majolica Works. The local community have also made a significant contribution to the regeneration of the area by the effective use of participative workshops. With the help of lottery funding this beautiful area of Manchester has become “an epicentre for some of the city’s most talented and successful musicians, designers, and artists” (Arts Council England – National Lottery Projects, 2004)
In evaluating the impact of the National Lottery on the arts, there is an extensive amount of information emphasizing the benefits it has brought, as identified previously. However there are some very strong criticisms of the way the National Lottery has been run, how the funds have been distributed, and the plans for the future. Richard Morrison (2004), a former arts editor for the Times said that “the audience for ‘serious’ music is no bigger or more diverse than it was ten years ago, and performance standards are no higher…the British people have been hoodwinked out of an astonishing £40billion that many could ill afford to squander” (cited in Moss, 2004) When the lottery was introduced, money was thrown about with such haste and enthusiasm that not enough thought was going into the future of these new developments. The best example of this was the Millenium Dome (that received £628million from the Millenium Fund) which everyone could see was a great development as a huge theatre, but nothing was ever planned to go in it after the the Millenium exhibition. The excitement of this new supposedly bottomless pit of money caused “a lot of budgets to be put together as if by eight-year-olds planning a children’s party” (Dominic Dromgoole, 2004, cited in Moss, 2004)
The early decisions on capital funding were to keep building new institutions rather than providing more funding for existing institutions to help them run better. The arts in England has received £1.86billion, of which £1.3billion has been used to create 100 new venues and refurbish 500 others (Moss, 2004) After 1997 when Labour came into power, the National Lottery Act 1998 was created which changed the was lottery cash was handled substantially. The approach was much more strategic with regional arts boards being delegated with more powers to coordinate projects, and capital funding was reduced as the government wanted to spread funds more widely. Proof of this come from figures collected by Graeme Evans (2002) in his report ‘Evaluating the UK Lottery and the Arts’, where he identifies that over the period since the National Lottery Act 1998, “680 arts venues in England were awarded Lottery grants, of which only 60 were new-build” () With the emphasis off capital projects, it was switched to arts with a social function, “giving children the opportunity to ‘interface’ with professional musicians, making the arts an intergral part of health care, putting them at the centre of urban renewal, showing greater commitment to cultural diversity.” (Moss, 2004,) This was not an entirely welcomed change as Mary Warnock (2004) pointed out “the concept of accessibility became an obsession and we lost sight of the criterion of instrinsic artistic value”. (cited in Moss, 2004). Evans (2002) believes that the Lottery “still suffers from an interventionist and initiative-led government now presenting a dense patchwork of schemes and short term programmes for which Lottery funds have become and all too convenient ‘off balance sheet’ source of finance”
It is interesting to see how the Arts Council of Wales has approached funding to the arts in a very different way to the Arts Council England. They have almost opposite approaches to funding projects, as the Arts Council England have concentrated on funding major projects run by established organisations with the Capital Arts Programme (£1.3billion out of a total £1.86billion), for example the Royal Shakespere Company who received £8.6million, the Royal Albert Hall, awarded £20.2million, and the Royal Opera House that controversially received £78.5million, raising fears that the lottery was according to Doward (2004) “simply a tax on the poor to benefit the rich” (The Observer, Sunday October 24, 2004, pg 28). The Arts Council of Wales has instead strategically invested to address the identified gaps in art in geographical provision, with more awards of a smaller scale of funding per project, and more funding for existing organisations to aid them with making arts more efficiently run. This has made them less supsceptable to the accusations of not adhering to the principle of additionality that the DCMS has received in England. Wales’s capital strategy from between 2002-2006 also focuses on refurbishment of current arts facilities, with approximately 75% of registered projects falling into this category. The smaller number of potential new developments are driven by established organisations, rather than those set up with the sole aim of creating new facilities. Priority is given to areas which have attracted low levels of funding in the past. (Arts Council of Wales, 2003, )
In conclusion it can be seen that within the arts communities of the UK presently, the efficiency and effectiveness of the the DCMS and government’s policies behind its distribution policies for National Lottery funds is one of the most controversial and widely disagreed upon topics.
With regards to the principle of additionality that was the underlying policy of the National Lottery, the DCMS believe that the principle is still being adhered to in all areas, many people believe that the concept has become totally eroded and the government are using the lottery funds as a way of spending less of general taxation money. Others however understand the additionality principle is slipping somewhat, although they do not dispute the pressure put on the government to convert capital into revenue. There are many arguments on both sides and it will be interesting to find out the results of the report being conducted by the Secretary of State on how the principle of additionality has been applied.
The issue of how the lottery has been managed, presently and in the past, has also been under scrutiny. The early decisions on capital funding to invest heavily in new institutions at such a fast rate was clearly a mistake, but understandable due to the ideas the Arts Council must have had about turning every one of their dreams into reality. After 1998 this attitude on how to spend the lottery money within the arts changed dramatically and now funding is distributed on a much wider scale. However many people think that too much emphasis is being put on getting arts into every possible community, and not enough on developing artistic excellence. Mary Warnock (2004) has spoken out about this, saying that “demographic participation in the arts should be a reaction to it, not a premises for the art…we need to create more distance between the Arts Council and the people who produce the arts; otherwise we will get dull art.” (cited in Moss, 2004)
The impact the National Lottery has had on the Arts in England and Wales can best be seen by looking at actual examples, rather than annual reports, sceptical criticisms and published figures. The four lottery funded project focused on previsouly are perfect examples of how the National Lottery has positively benefited the communities, the tourism, the employment opportunities and national perception of areas.
The one worry however that is lingering on everybodies mind, is the question of the future. It is no secret that the lottery sales are decreasing, and despite promising new re-branding strategies and new games to entice us into buying tickets, many are doubtful that this is going to have any major effect. Once the new Gambling Bill is passed and the eight new super casinos planned for the UK are up and running, people used to buying lottery tickets may well cease purchasing them in favour of spending their money in these new casinos where the chances of payouts are much higher. This obviously is only relevant to the people who buy tickets soley for the chance of winning, and not for the thought of helping good causes around the UK. Also with London’s Olympic bid for 2012 looming, the other good causes, including the arts, are bound to suffer a cut back in funding in order that the bid has a chance of being successful.
No doubt when the National Lottery Licence expires in 2008 and other companies bid for it, there may well be another shake up, and more promises will be made by the successful bidder. In the mean time, the arts in England and Wales are certain to benefit from the National Lottery, alongside other good causes, and one can only hope that this benefit will continue for as many years in the future as possible.
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