Tim Cornwell: Poor strategy a blot on creative landscape

On Thursday the agency announced that 49 Scottish arts organisations – from the Hebrides Ensemble to the St Anza Poetry Festival to theatre companies and well-known galleries – would no longer be funded with two-year grants to their companies. Instead they will have to apply for one-off grants for individual projects.

Here’s the rub: institutions like the award-winning Grid Iron Theatre, say, or the popular St Magnus Festival in Orkney, formerly got between £55,000 and £300,000 in regular (but not guaranteed) funding for their organisations.

They will now have to put their money together piecemeal, asking for cash for individual projects – a big production, a series of plays or concerts – and then balance it up.

They will have to come forward with requests for individual projects to be financed (answering about 30 questions on each). Their initial reaction: it’s confusing, uncertain, and very likely unsustainable, when it comes to maintaining their companies, or their staff.

Creative Scotland replaced the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, and it’s now trying to make its mark. CS staff say the changes are driven by two reasons.

First, they want to be “strategic”. But secondly, practically, that grant funding to Creative Scotland is falling, while lottery funding is increasing. Lottery funding can’t be given out in annual funding tranches: it has to go to projects.

To be specific, between 2010 and 2014 CS grant-in-aid funding falls from £35.5 million to £33.4m. That’s a substantial fall, in real terms. Lottery income in contrast will jump from £18m to £32.3m; people are buying lottery tickets and the arts will get a bigger share after the Olympics. The total has gone from £66.5m in 2010 to £79.25m in 2014.

At one level, CS may have simply failed to explain well to companies that there is potentially more money available. Or that the lottery cash can be assigned, effectively, over two years.

But does it justify this wholesale shift? The answer has to be no. There is actually more money. Couldn’t it have been rebalanced to provide lesser levels of annual funding, with the extra project money on top, in a vastly more simple and coherent scheme?

What makes CS different from the former Scottish Arts Council? It is not “an organisation that just signs checks”. It’s an “advocate, promoter, celebrator”. It’s going to be “strategic”, to look at the “cultural economy”.

With respect, it is an organisation that hands out cheques. If it didn’t, no one would care about it. The question is whether it’s doing it well, and giving them to the right people, and having the courage from time to time not to give them out at all, even to old friends in a small country.

They used to give them out for things like visual arts or literature. Now there’s the suspicion that its multi-tasking portfolios, that were introduced when CS was formed a couple of years back, are simply confusing the picture.

In the six months ending December 2011, according to its website, Creative Scotland made 576 awards. Of these, 340 were individual project awards. Take a look at some of the awards on their web page, under headings like “cultural economy”, “innovation”, or “quality arts production”. Then replace your head.

Before Creative Scotland, it appears that civil servants chiefly had the job of picking companies and assessing whether they were any good, and should keep their cash. Now, increasingly, they have the job of picking projects. They are to be given extra powers, apparently, to give over £100,000 in a single signature; more than that and it’s a decision for a “senior team”.

That rather matches a growing concern about centralisation. Whose calling the shots? Are they any good? Are there enough of them to handle it? Don’t the companies do it better?

Why are “networks and agencies” getting more steady support than the artists and creators on the coalface of art, who are being consigned to a bear pit of competing for an open pot?