Conservatives propose £1bn cut to culture department, with “a big part” to come from the arts

The Conservative Party has pledged to cut £1bn a year from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to help pay for 50,000 new prison places. Where would the money come from, and what could the impact be?

The first detailed answer came at the party’s conference in Birmingham, where the Campaign for the Arts asked the new Shadow Culture Secretary, Rebecca Paul, about the proposed cut. She said that most of it – £700m – would come from cancelling an increase in the department’s budget that has not yet been allocated. The other £300m would come from cuts, and “a big part” of that would fall on arts and culture, with sport and heritage protected.

We have checked these figures against the Government’s published spending plans. Apart from a one-off £400m in 2028-29, mainly for hosting the Euro 2028 football tournament, those plans keep the department’s budget flat from now on. We can find no unallocated £700m to cancel.

Without an unallocated £700m, up to £1bn a year would have to come from cutting existing spending. With sport and heritage protected, the arts could face far deeper cuts than the Conservatives have indicated. We are asking them to publish their workings, and to rethink the cut.

What was announced

On Friday 2 October, on the eve of its annual conference, the Conservative Party announced a policy to build 50,000 new prison places at a cost of £2bn a year. The Telegraph reported that the programme would be part-funded by “slashing the culture department’s funds by £1bn a year”, alongside cuts to foreign aid and to government communications.¹ The announcement did not say which areas of DCMS spending would be affected, or why.

What the Shadow Culture Secretary told us

On Monday 5 October, at a conference fringe event run by the think tank Onward on how to save “the spaces that hold Britain together”, our Director, Jack Gamble, asked Rebecca Paul what the cut would involve and how she felt about its effect on her brief. Onward has released a recording of the event.

Ms Paul said that “really difficult decisions” were needed and that keeping dangerous criminals in prison was her party’s priority. On the cut itself, she said: “we have thought very carefully about how we would do that”. She then set out the arithmetic:

“The Labour government are actually increasing the budget up to 2028-29 by £700 million. So that’s unallocated, so we would unwind that in the first instance. So that’s 70% of the billion. So that’s already… most of that’s not in there already; in fact, the lion’s share of that goes up in the last years, and that’s a few years away.”

That would leave £300m to find. Ms Paul continued:

“A big part of that would come from the arts and culture piece. We would protect sport and heritage, and we would focus on cutting wasteful spend.”

Later in her answer, she said:

“We will still have a huge amount of money left after taking that 300 million off. We will spend that money on high-quality art and culture that actually delivers value for the taxpayer, has an audience, and can drive our economy forwards.”

Where could the £700m come from?

The Conservatives have not published their workings. This is what the Government’s published spending plans show for the culture department:

We can find two routes to £700m:

1. Comparing 2024-25 with 2028-29. The department spent £2.0bn in 2024-25, and its budget for 2028-29 is £2.7bn: an increase of £700m. This fits Ms Paul’s description – an increase “up to 2028-29”, most of which is “not in there already”, with “the lion’s share” coming “in the last years”.
2. Adding in digital. In July, DCMS took over digital policy – including telecoms, online safety and the Government Digital Service – from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which was broken up. DCMS became the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, while DSIT’s science and research work went to the business department, renamed the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST).² The Treasury has not yet published budgets for the reorganised departments, but adding the last planned changes in DSIT’s old budget to the culture department’s also produces £700m. That is the culture department’s £400m rise in 2028-29, plus a £400m rise in DSIT’s capital budget in 2029-30, less a £100m fall in its day-to-day budget in 2028-29.³

Why it doesn’t add up

Neither route produces an unallocated £700m a year. Both depend on the same £400m uplift in 2028-29, and neither finds unallocated money for the rest.

The £400m uplift in 2028-29 is already allocated, mainly for Euro 2028. In February 2026, DCMS told Parliament that it “relates predominantly to additional funding for 2028 Euros” – the men’s football championship the UK and Ireland will co-host in summer 2028.⁴ Ms Paul told us “we would protect sport”, and Neil O’Brien MP has said: “We are not touching the sport budget”.⁵

It is also a one-off. The Treasury itself leaves it out of its growth figures for DCMS, as “expected one-off costs in 2028-29”.⁶ Cancelling it would save £400m once, but the Conservatives’ proposed cut to DCMS is meant to save £1bn every year.

The rest of the £700m is also already allocated:

• On the first route (the change in Culture, Media and Sport spending between 2024-25 and 2028-29), it is money the department is already spending. DCMS spent £2.0bn in 2024-25, and its budget this year is £2.3bn – £300m more. Taking that £300m away would mean cutting current spending, not cancelling an increase that has yet to be allocated.
• On the second route (adding in DSIT’s old budget), it comes from a rise in DSIT’s capital budget, which was mostly for science and research – £15.2bn of £16.2bn in 2029-30⁷ – and that is now the responsibility of BIST, not DCMS.⁸

So unless the Conservatives can point to another source, the £700m they said was “unallocated” would have to come from cutting existing spending.

What the cuts could mean

Even the £300m of new cuts that Ms Paul described would be very substantial. She said that “a big part” would fall on arts and culture. For scale:

• £300m is two-thirds of what Arts Council England invests each year in its National Portfolio: £445m in 2025/26, supporting 982 theatres, orchestras, galleries, museums, libraries, festivals and arts organisations in every part of England.⁹
• It is nearly three times the £102m cut to Arts Council England’s government grant during the austerity years, when the grant fell from £452m in 2009/10 to £350m in 2014/15.¹⁰

That is hard to square with the assurance of “a huge amount of money left”. And £300m is the best case: if a further £700m had to be cut from existing spending, the total would be £1bn – the equivalent of most of what the Government spends on Arts Council England and the national museums put together.¹¹

A cut on that scale could not be found in “wasteful spend” or a handful of individual grants. It could only be made by cutting deep into the institutions the public use in their millions, and the local organisations in every constituency that depend on public funding.

Why it matters

A cut on this scale would come on top of fifteen years of cuts. Councils’ day-to-day spending on culture, heritage and libraries per person in England has more than halved in real terms since 2009/10. DCMS has been cut in real terms at each of the last two spending settlements, as we pointed out at the time. Leaving aside the one-off for Euro 2028, its day-to-day budget is set to fall by an average of 1.2% a year after inflation.¹²

On current plans, the Government will be spending more than a third less per person on culture, media and sport in 2029 than it did in 2010. The UK already has one of the lowest levels of public spending on culture in Europe.

Deeper cuts would also be a false economy. In 2024 the creative industries grew by 4.6% and the cultural sector by 2.4%, in a year when the economy as a whole grew by 1.0%.¹³ Public investment underpins that commercial success. It also sustains the “common ground” that Ms Paul rightly championed at the Onward event: the theatres, museums, libraries and arts centres where people meet, belong and feel better, at a time of costly strain on wellbeing and on community cohesion.

All of this is supported by a culture, media and sport budget that accounts for around 0.3% of government departments’ day-to-day spending.¹⁴

What we are asking for

We do not believe that the Conservatives intended to propose cuts to the arts of this magnitude. The last Conservative government created the £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund, the largest one-off investment in UK culture ever made, and set permanently higher tax reliefs for theatres, orchestras and exhibitions. This proposal is out of step with that record.

We are asking the Conservative Party to:

• Publish the workings behind the £1bn figure, including the source of the £700m “increase”.
• Rethink the proposed cut to DCMS.

We have written to Rebecca Paul to share this analysis and have offered to meet her. If there is a source we have missed, we will update this article.

We will apply the same scrutiny to the Chancellor’s Budget on 28 October, which is expected to set out spending plans for the reconfigured DCMS.

A note on the ‘arm’s length principle’

Separately, the Shadow Culture Secretary echoed comments made by the Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development, Neil O’Brien MP, suggesting that some projects funded by Arts Council England are undeserving of public investment. Scrutinising public spending is part of an MP’s job, but we have set out our concerns about politicians singling out individual projects over political differences. For over 80 years, governments of every party have upheld the arm’s length principle: ministers set the overall budget, while decisions on individual grants are made independently by bodies such as Arts Council England. That independence protects artistic freedom and the public’s access to different and challenging perspectives. We call on MPs in all parties to defend it.

1. The Telegraph, “Tories pledge to end early release with 50,000 cells”, 2 October 2026[↩]
2. Prime Minister’s Office, Machinery of government changes: fact sheet, 22 July 2026[↩]
3. HM Treasury, Autumn Budget 2025, Annex C, Tables C.1 and C.2; HM Treasury, Spending Review 2025, Table 5.21[↩]
4. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Supplementary Estimate memorandum 2025-26, 4 February 2026, paragraph 1.10[↩]
5. Neil O’Brien MP, in an exchange on X with Anna Sabine MP, 3–4 October 2026; see also Arts Professional, “Arts bodies criticise proposed Conservative cuts as MP accuses ACE of funding ‘drivel'”, 9 October 2026[↩]
6. HM Treasury, Spending Review 2025, Table 5.22, footnote 4[↩]
7. HM Treasury, Spending Review 2025, Table 5.21 and paragraph 5.108[↩]
8. UK Research and Innovation, About UK Research and Innovation, accessed 9 October 2026[↩]
9. Arts Council England, Annual Report and Accounts 2025/26[↩]
10. Full Fact, “The arts – how big have the cuts been?”[↩]
11. DCMS provided Arts Council England with grant-in-aid of £666m in 2025/26 (Arts Council England, Annual Report and Accounts 2025/26, Strategic report, p. 134); the national museums and galleries received over £490m (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25)[↩]
12. HM Treasury, Spending Review 2025, Table 5.22[↩]
13. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Economic Estimates: GVA 2024 (provisional), February 2026[↩]
14. HM Treasury, Autumn Budget 2025, Annex C, Table C.1: £1.6bn of £537.1bn in 2026-27[↩]