Prince Charles to rescue arts body from axe
Independent on Sunday, 27/11/11
Merger of funding agency with business charity will make up for ~£3m government spending cut
By Simon Tait
The Prince of Wales has personally intervened in a growing row over arts funding by taking the doomed sponsorship agency, Arts & Business (A&B), under his wing.
A&B had been funded by the government through the Arts Council but lost its entire grant earlier this year. It was preparing for closure.
Instead, on Prince Charles’s own initiative, the organisation will merge with the charity Business in the Community of which he is president. “The Prince of Wales personally urged this as an alternaive solution and convinced me that it was the right one”, said A&B’s chief executive Colin Tweedy, whose own resignation after 28 years in the post is part of the arrrangement.
The merger is in effect a takeover by Business in the Community (BITC), created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses.
It will be formally announced at the BITC annual meeting on December 1, but Prince Charles himself revealed it on Thursday at a private ceremony at Clarence House to present his annual medals for arts philanthropy, a scheme he devised four years ago with A&B of which he is also president.
His intervention will fuel a disagreement over arts funding between the government, which has slashed its cultural subsidy by 33% and believes a revival of arts funding lies in philanthropy, and those who are convinced with A&B and the prince that the business community’s contribution can be more effective sooner. He is expected to strike a much higher profile in promoting business sponsorship of the arts.
“People don’t realise Prince Charles’s understanding of the zeitgeist, he has the ability to get people to listen and his brand is a very powerful one,” Tweedy said. “The business community respects it enormously.”
Arts & Business was founded in 1976 under the chairmanship of the late Lord Goodman, a former Arts Council chairman, to introduce the concept of business sponsorship of the arts when it registered an annual corporate contribution of £600,000. A&B established the “mixed arts economy” for the arts whereby funding is roughly a third earned income, a third public subsidy and a third private sector support. By 2007 the private contribution had risen to £700m a year, but since then it has fallen back to around £600m.
In 1984 the organisation developed the idea of matched funding, whereby business contributions would be matched from a government fund run by A&B. Between then and 2008 £90m of public investment was matched by £1 billion from the private sector, but that year the scheme was scrapped and A&B’s government grant cut from £7m to £4m.
A&B had been highly respected in government circles, with George Osborne on its board for four years before last year’s general election, and its research was the basis for much of the current cultural policy. This year, howeve, it learned that all its subsidy was to go and its official responsibilities taken over by the Arts Council.
Tweedy was called to a private meeting with Prince Charles who urged him not to close but to join BITC, now a global operation. A&B’s operations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have become independent, though still funded by their regional governments.
Ironically, it was Arts & Business that revealed the unsuspected significance and potential of private giving to the arts in 2004 when research showed that an astonishing £236m a year was coming from individual giving compared with £111m in business sponsorship, and the figure continued to grow over the next five years. It has since faltered and is dwindling at a rate of 7% year.
The govenment, however, believes private philanthropy is most likely to help arts funding to recover, and last December Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt launched a campaign to encourage more private giving, declaring 2011 to be the Year of Corporate Philanthropy.
“I sense the Year of Corporate Philanthropy has been written off,” Tweedy said. “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two – and nothing can be done in a year. The government was right not to exclude the arts from subsidy cuts, but we believe the government has a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons why people give. Philanthrophy will kick in again but it will take much longer than the government thinks, and most people who give privately in this country earn less than £50,000 a year and go largely unrecognised”. Subsidy will take at least a generation to recover, he said, but the business community’s contribution is already recovering.
Moving A&B into BITC will mean the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising and acting as a broker between the arts and business, though retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaiging organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.
Tweedy, 58, who was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, the personal gift of the Queen, in 2003, will to be replaced by a campaign director who will report to the BITC chief executive, Stephen Howard. Tweedy will become a fund-raising vice-president alongside celebrity supporters Stephen Fry, Lord Mandelson, Joanna Lumley, Dame Diana Rigg, former Arts Council chairman Sir Gerry Robinson and Lord Puttnam.
