On the 17th October I wrote to the Arts Council drawing attention to the fact that their own statistics, reported in the PRS magazine for the summer of 2014, stated that jazz received just two percent of the available monies for music. Opera received a percentage increase of 22.5% which gave opera and music thatre 57.9% of the total budget.
I had to write a number of reminder letters and then pin them down to get a straight answer. The answer to my enquiry of “I would be grateful if you could let me have a copy of the Arts Council’s policy for music” was “I have checked all of our internal resources and there is no policy in the way that you may be expecting to see”. The blunt and unpalatable fact is that the Arts Council does not have a music policy nor does it have other art form policies. However it does have a policy for opera touring called “Spheres of Influence”. What a way to run a railway? The latest round of National Portfolio Organisation bids was not based on, or informed by a concrete, coherent policy for music or the other art forms, as they have not got one. NPO bids were based on a specious set of Arts Council goals that do not reflect the art forms. The tax payer deserves better than this.
Click on “An enquiry to Arts Council England regarding a policy for music” to see the correpondence