In July 2024, Labour won the general election, inheriting a crisis in the UK’s culture sector and promising “arts for the people and by the people”.
One year on, Jack Gamble, Director of the Campaign for the Arts, asks: has the government delivered?
“Labour’s first year has been hit and miss for the arts, with rather more misses than might have been expected from their pre-election pledge to put the arts ‘at the centre of a new, hopeful, modern story of Britain’.
Let’s start with the positives. Labour’s 10-year industrial strategy, published last month, homes in on the creative industries as one of eight priority sectors for the UK government. It reaffirms a commitment to give every child in England a high-quality creative education. More strongly than was the case in the last government’s strategy, it explicitly acknowledges the importance of the interconnected ‘creative ecosystem’ and the public investment underpinning it.
But what of that public investment? There were some worrying signs at Labour’s first Budget last October, when the Chancellor said there would be real-terms cuts to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and that she was ‘minded to cancel’ £100m of cultural infrastructure investment (as it turned out, two-thirds of this is going ahead).
There was better news at the ‘Jennie Lee Lecture’ at the RSC in February, when the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced a £270m Arts Everywhere Fund for 2025-26 (of which about £110m was brand new, mostly capital investment). ‘Everyone deserves the chance to be touched by art’, she said, quoting the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. ‘Everyone deserves access to moments that light up their lives.’
But concerning numbers of artists and cultural organisations are struggling to keep the lights on. Employers’ National Insurance has gone up, while business rates relief has gone down. Some extra support for running costs has been earmarked for national and civic museums – but not for the nearly 1000 cultural organisations funded by Arts Council England, over half of which are now in a ‘precarious financial position’ according to a recent Artquest survey. Last month’s Spending Review signalled yet more real-terms cuts to the DCMS over the coming years, despite an increase in overall public spending.
Plenty of Labour’s ministers seem to genuinely love the arts and care about public access to them. But those same ministers are planning to spend well over a third less per citizen on Culture, Media and Sport by 2029 compared with 2010, and that will have consequences.
It’s not too late to turn this around, and the costs of doing so will be far smaller than the costs of inaction. Labour’s second year could be one of progress and improvement for the arts. We really need it to be.”
