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Mr. Smith: I hesitate to correct the quotation that my hon. Friend gave, but the passage from "The Prelude" reads:
- "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"
As well as helping to tackle social exclusion, the arts can have a profound educational benefit. I shall say more about that later. Education is crucial in ensuring that we have the artists and audiences of the future. I am pleased that we were able to establish the National Foundation for Youth Music with national lottery funds. The foundation aims to ensure that young people throughout the country have a chance to learn to play music and to sing. The decline in the availability of musical instrument teaching over the past 20 years or so, especially in the state sector, is extremely disturbing, and I hope that our work will help to reverse it.
Mr. Peter Ainsworth (East Surrey):
Unfortunately, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that now that the National Foundation for Youth Music is providing funds for musical tuition, local authorities are apparently taking the opportunity to reduce their own funding.
Mr. Smith:
That should not be happening, because the Department for Education and Employment has provided an additional £150 million through the standards fund. That money is ring-fenced so that local education authorities can support musical education in schools. The Department is ensuring that the money is not a substitute for local authority support, but makes real opportunities available to pupils. Obviously, we would be concerned if certain authorities sought to reduce their support because of the provision of better Government funding, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment would wish to follow up such cases.
The existence of a thriving arts economy helps the general economy, as well as bringing beauty and inspiration to us all. The creative industries--music, films, publishing and the performing arts, for instance--which depend on the creation of intellectual property for their added value are worth more than £60 billion a year to the national economy. Overall, they are growing at about twice the rate of the growth of the economy as a whole. We as a Government must ensure that those
industries are given enough support to enable them to thrive. Government should not be in the business of creating art, but Government can try to ensure that the conditions are right for art and creative activity to flourish.
That is why we need to ensure that there is proper international copyright protection, especially in this digital age: intellectual property must be protected. It is also why we need to look at the way in which export assistance is provided. I was pleased that we were able, a few weeks ago, to publish a report by the Creative Industries Export Promotion Advisory Group. We also need to consider ways in which the formal education system can assist and how to ensure access to venture capital for small creative businesses.
Against the background of those aims and principles, the Government have achieved a great deal during the past two and a half years. I believe that much of what we have done is of major benefit to the arts. I am thinking particularly of the funding settlement that we provided after last year's comprehensive spending review, which involves an increase of £125 million for the arts and £99 million for museums and galleries over the next three years. That is the biggest ever increase in funding for cultural activity provided by central Government, and it contrasts starkly with the record of the last Government, under whom arts funding fell by 11 per cent. in real terms between the 1992 and 1997 general elections, from £208 million to, at its lowest level, £184 million.
Mr. Ainsworth:
The Secretary of State is choosing his figures carefully. We all know that the 1992 figures reflect what is commonly known as the "Mellor splurge", which was very welcome in the arts world. If the Secretary of State looks at the whole of Government support throughout the years of Conservative administration, he will see that in real terms it increased by 35 per cent.
Mr. Smith:
I am afraid that, even at the time of the "Mellor splurge", the figure for the lead year was £208 million. Thanks to the increase that we have provided, we have achieved that figure again this year, in real terms, and in two years' time it will have risen to £220 million. If the hon. Gentleman does not believe me, I can show him a nice graphic which makes my point very clearly.
Mr. Ainsworth:
I love graphics, but I prefer the truth. There is genuine confusion over the arts funding figures. As I shall say in my speech, there are all sorts of figures flying around. However, I have here a table prepared by the Arts Council, which suggests that in 1993-94 funding reached a peak of £225.8 million.
Mr. Smith:
I think the hon. Gentleman will find, if he looks at the figures for 1992 and the ensuing years on a real-terms basis, that the equivalent to the £208 million that I cited for this year was £207 million in 1993.
As well as providing that increase in arts funding, we have made a firm commitment to providing a one sixth share of lottery funds for the arts--from the good causes fund--over the next 10 years at least. That will provide a solid foundation for planning. We have also created a new audiences fund to enable more people to experience the arts through cheap ticket schemes, vouchers for students,
transport in rural areas, touring grants and schemes to enable schoolchildren to take empty seats at performances.
Together with the Department for Education and Employment, we have established arrangements worth £19 million to enable dance and drama students to obtain proper grants and assistance so that they can undertake courses at accredited institutions. We are removing the difficulty that existed for the previous three or four years, during which lottery funding was used as an inadequate stopgap to deal with the crisis that had developed.
Mr. Ainsworth:
The Secretary of State is being generous in giving way to me, but I must tell him that the problem for dance and drama students has not been solved. If it had been, the Foundation for Sport and the Arts would not have been called in to help tide things over and to bolster the creaking structure of Government funding. The foundation is deeply concerned about the position: it is not sure that it will be able to sustain its current commitment to funds for dance and drama students.
The headlines may say that the Government have solved the problem, but that is simply not the case. The truth is that many dance and drama students are still not obtaining places, and they face a very uncertain funding future.
Mr. Smith:
First, it was thanks to the changes that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer made to tax treatment of the pools that the Foundation for Sport and the Arts has been able to continue its extremely valuable work in the past year--and will do so into the future.
Secondly, the September intake of dance and drama students under the scheme that we established was 830--10 more than we envisaged when the scheme was announced.
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman was getting at the fact that, since the scheme is about securing places on accredited courses at accredited institutions, institutions which are not accredited may well not form part of it. The scheme was designed particularly for centres of excellence in dance and drama tuition. Those 830 places are now filled, and students are benefiting directly from the measures that we put in place.
Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross):
Will the Secretary of State say whether all the students in England and Wales who were offered places at such accredited institutions for accredited courses were able to take up the places offered as a result of the additional funding?
Mr. Smith:
The right hon. Gentleman may have identified one particular problem--which is that, although higher education students were able, once they obtained an accredited place, to have access to student support arrangements for maintenance and subsistence that were available generally to higher education students, such access was not necessarily available to further education students. After the first few weeks of the scheme's operation, it became apparent that there was a problem in student living support for further education students who had been helped by the scheme to obtain places and to fund tuition costs.
We recognised that there was a problem, and we have taken action to deal with it. I am pleased to be able to tell the House that we have agreed, with the Department for Education and Employment, to provide additional funds to help further education students with their student living expenses as they take their places on those accredited courses.
The increase is necessary because awards to accredited places have attracted considerably more talented students from lower-income families than ever before. Over 20 per cent. of this year's intake of further education students on dance and drama courses on the scheme are from lower-income families--which is a direct result of the policy shared by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment and me, to ensure that access to those courses is based on merit alone. I am delighted that the scheme is drawing from all parts of society.
The initial hardship fund that was established as part of the scheme when we first announced it was not sufficient to cope with the unprecedented demand. Therefore, the Department for Education and Employment has now increased the fund, to increase awards by up to £2.6 million. Consequently, there will be an increase of up to 300 per cent. in funds available to individual students, with up to £3,000 of student support being available to some. Interim arrangements will be available to students on the current intake, and the increases to them will be paid before Christmas.
Additionally, I am delighted to repeat that we have established the National Foundation for Youth Music. The aim has to be that--with the additional £150 million from the DFEE--every child has the chance to learn to sing or play a musical instrument.
We have provided funds so that, from April 1999, every child has been able to go to all our national museums and galleries for free. From next April, every pensioner will be able to do the same. From the year after that, still wider access provisions will be made.
We have introduced a £15 million fund for the 43 designated museums across England--museums which have a collection of pre-eminent worth but which until now have been ineligible for central Government assistance. We have ensured that they now are eligible.
We have ensured that the provisions of the new deal are appropriate to the needs of young musicians wishing to seek a career in music. With the DFEE, we have insisted that art, music and drama must remain a statutory part of the national curriculum.
We have established the national endowment for science, technology and the arts, to provide a national fund to support talented individuals.
We have created substantial incentives for film making in Britain--with new tax reliefs; the ending of the Channel 4 funding formula; a new, agreed skills investment fund for training in the industry; the establishment of a British film office in Los Angeles; a new definition for British film; and the establishment of the new Film Council.
We have also consistently emphasised the crucial cultural importance of the BBC, and the need for it to operate as a true benchmark of quality in broadcasting.
All that has been done in the past two and a half years, and it is a record in which I take a little pride.
I pay warm tribute to Gerry Robinson and Peter Hewitt for their work in modernising the Arts Council. I regard the Department's relationship with the Arts Council as a partnership, with agreed objectives for the arts, but with the council itself responsible for individual funding decisions and strategies. As a result of the changes that they have made, bureaucracy has been substantially reduced. By the end of this Parliament, they will be saving £2 million in running costs for the overall arts funding system, against a 1997-98 baseline before restructuring started. Every year, therefore, £2 million will not have to be spent on administrative overheads but may instead be spent on supporting the arts directly.
The Arts Council is devolving decision making, both for grant in aid and for lottery funds, to the regional arts boards, to bring decisions closer to those most affected by them. Although initiated and led by the Arts Council, the process of delegation chimes well with the Government's own emphasis on the importance of regional decision making.
The Arts Council has also established a new set of strategic priorities, including new work; experimentation and risk; the centrality of the individual artist; new art forms, often using new technology; cultural diversity; social inclusion; children, young people and lifelong learning; and touring and distribution. Those priorities dovetail well with the Government's own objectives for the arts.
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