Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It’s a really remarkable year for British culture and I think the whole cultural sector
deserves credit for that. But at the same time we have to reflect that, a bit like Banquo’s
ghost at the feast, the spectre of very difficult finances is never far from people’s minds
and, to continue drawing on Shakespeare, as he said ‘out of this nettle, danger, we
pluck this flower, safety’ that has been the single focus of our arts policy over the
last two years. To boost corporate philanthropy it is very important to recognise it and make
sure that we preserve what we have. On top of that we have also had a lot of help from
the Chancellor. The introduction of tax relief on gifts of works of art; the first time we’ve
had a version of lifetime giving in this country. The simplification of Gift Aid and the increase
in the amount that you are able to spend on thanking donors without losing Gift Aid eligibility.
The Inheritance Tax breaks which have given us the most generous regime in the world in
terms of encouraging people to give money to charitable and cultural organisations in
their wills. And as Roland mentioned, we owe a great debt to the Chancellor for listening
to the comments made by so many of you about the planned charity tax. And let me use this
moment to make it absolutely clear that David Cameron, George Osborne and I salute our philanthropists.
We think the work you do is incredibly important. We want to encourage it, we want to do everything
we can to recognise it and we will continue to make that a major focus in both the cultural
and charitable areas. And then we have today’s announcement, which in a way is the most significant
of all. Because it is the culmination of a lot of thinking to help our cultural sector
to build long-term financial sustainability. I’ve always looked very enviously at organisations
like the Met in New York that have an endowment of $1.9 billion generating an annual income
of over $100m a year for that organisation. But also, slightly dauntingly, reflect on
the fact that it took them over a century to build up that endowment. But what better
time to start a British endowment century than now? This is our moment in the cultural
sector to do that, and this is not in any way an attempt to replace public support for
the arts with private support and I’m a big supporter of continued public support,
but it is an attempt to reduce over-dependence on any one source of funding as a way of increasing
both the financial resilience and the artistic independence of our major cultural organisations.
There are a number of areas where we need to continue to work as part of the philanthropy
agenda. I just mention three in particular: we need organisations to do a lot more work
to boost legacy giving; we have the tax break but we still have a situation where 74 per
cent of people give to charity in their lifetimes but only seven per cent leave a legacy. If
we could increase that to closer to the 74 per cent we would have a boost to the cultural
sector that would be as big as the national lottery. And I’ve asked Roland Rudd, who
has done more than anyone to champion the cause of legacy giving, to do a report for
me to help the Government understand what we need to do in terms of changes - if necessary
- to legislation to make legacy giving easier. Could we for example make it possible for
people to go onto a website and commit to a legacy gift in a way that makes it simpler
and bypasses the bureaucracy involved in changing your will? Then we need to do a lot more work
than that to understand about digital philanthropy and how we can master getting lots of small
gifts rather than a few big gifts and I know that William Makower who is here this morning
has done a lot of useful research into that. And I have asked Matthew Bowcock who is a
very experienced businessman and also has huge experience from the Community Foundations
world to do a report for me to look at what more the Government can do to boost digital
philanthropy. And the final area which I think we need to do a lot more work on is what we
can do to boost fundraising capacity outside London. Where you don’t have the City of
London and the agglomeration of big companies and high net worth individuals that make the
nature of fundraising in the capital slightly less challenging, and Peter Phillips, the
much respected chair of Birmingham Opera is going to do a report that will look at whether
there is more we can do to make that easier. So, much more work to do. And as we progress
the philanthropy agenda there are just two related areas where I don’t want us to lose
sight of. The first is broadening audiences through massively improving cultural education.
The second is what we do to embrace changing technologies. Let me just talk about broadening
audiences. I believe that it is criminal not to plant the seeds of culture in a young person
as it is not to teach them about history, geography or science. And if a young person
chooses not to make culture part of their lives, that is their mistake, but if they
never get to make that choice in the first place, that is our mistake and we make it
far too often. And that is why I am delighted to see Darren Henley here and I am delighted
that Ed Vaizey, who is also here, and Michael Gove will be taking forward the Henley review
of cultural education. And we will be publishing a national plan for cultural education before
the end of this year but we have to do a lot more work in that area on top of the many
brilliant education programmes that I know cultural and heritage organisations do at
the moment. The second area is about embracing new technology. Again there are some amazing
things happening, whether it’s David Hockney’s iPad drawings or the fact that last month
I went to see La Boheme and the same time as I saw it in the Opera House, eight thousand
people were watching it on 22 live screens throughout the country sponsored by BP. So
technology is doing some amazing things, but still for too many cultural organisations
technology is essentially about having a good website and there’s much, much more we can
do. And I just want to leave you with one idea which I think has got massive potential,
which is this project called The Space set up by the BBC and the Arts Council, which
is a digital, pop-up arts channel, where you can see hip hop at Sadler’s Wells, Brittan’s
War Requiem and a number of the other cultural highlights that are happening this summer.
And the question I want to pose it: should we be even more ambitious about The Space?
Should we turn this into permanent, brand new digital arts channel, with live performances
every single day of the year? And let me say this as a challenge: should we make it a condition
of public funding for the arts that the recipients of that funding provide, free of charge some
of their content for live broadcast on a new digital arts channel as a way of making sure
that that content reaches more of the audiences who are funding it through their taxes? I
leave that as a question with you. But I want to now turn to Michael Portillo who has been
working so hard with his able committee to help us today with this big announcement.
There are really three pillars - what Michael is going to announce, which is the £55m spread
amongst 34 organisations to help them lay the foundations for really the first every
British cultural endowments. But we mustn’t forget there is also what the Arts Council
did a few weeks ago where they allocated £30m to 173 organisations - smaller organisations
- to boost fundraising capacity and help them with a match-funding scheme and also a plan
that they will be announcing in September - and the Heritage Lottery Fund will be doing
something similar - to boost and kick-start fundraising in the very smallest organisations,
particularly those outside London. So this is part of a big plan. But as we are all thinking
about fundraising let me just finish by saying that the best fundraising tool of all is great
culture itself. And we have that in this country. Three of the world’s top five museums; more
world heritage sites than Greece; the biggest arts festival, the biggest music festival
in the world here in Britain. So let’s celebrate that, and what better way to celebrate it
than what Michael is going to announce that will help that great culture go from strength
to strength. Thank you very much.