The Sound of Silence

Who public funding works for, who it doesn’t, and why that question keeps getting parked.

Baroness Hodge has published her independent review of Arts Council England, and it arrives with the calm authority of someone who genuinely believes she is doing the right thing.

Let’s start with the good bit; in many ways, and for many of the organisations she has chosen to support in this report, she is. The review is careful, respectful and protective of the existing arts establishment. It understands the value of stability, of institutions that have carried artistic heritage through decades of political indifference, austerity and sudden fashion. It recognises that theatres, orchestras, galleries and major producing organisations are not indulgences, but public goods that need long-term support, insulation from shocks and a funding system that does not jerk violently every time a minister changes.

That matters. It matters a great deal. There is good work in this report, and it should be said plainly. And I’ve just said it, really clearly, so please don’t get all up in yourself that this column is not perfectly on message and end up leaving a comment saying that I am being too negative. The defence of public funding, the acknowledgement that market forces alone cannot sustain culture, the clear appreciation of how fragile even the most established institutions are, all of that is welcome and necessary. In a climate where public subsidy is often framed as optional charity rather than civic infrastructure, the review does important holding work. It shores up what exists. It makes the case, once again, that this part of our national life is worth protecting.

Breathes in… and yet.

Reading the review from the perspective of the rest of the cultural ecosystem, the feeling is not hostility so much as frustration. Not anger, exactly, but a kind of quiet disbelief at how close it comes to saying something much bigger, and how carefully it steps away at the last moment. This is not a report that misunderstands culture. It understands one part of it very well. Its failure is that it never quite accepts that this part is no longer the whole.

The clearest example of this sits in plain sight, in the section on tax reliefs. The report rightly praises the impact of Theatre Tax Relief and Orchestra Tax Relief. It notes, approvingly, that these mechanisms have stabilised organisations, supported employment, enabled planning and protected output through periods that would otherwise have been catastrophic. This is all true. These reliefs work. They are one of the most effective policy tools government has deployed in the cultural sector in recent years. So it is great to see that stated clearly and plainly. And a sadly missed open goal of an opportunity to see that this is where the the report stops.

There is no leap made from this success to the obvious next thought. If tax relief works for theatres and orchestras, why would it not work for other forms of cultural production? If it is legitimate to recognise that some art-forms cannot survive on ticket income alone, why does that logic not extend to the places where new work is developed, new audiences are formed and new talent is trained? The review describes a solution, proves that it functions, and then quietly limits its application to the existing beneficiaries.

This is the missed opportunity in miniature, and it is, regrettably, repeated in almost every section of the report. Repeatedly, open doors are identified, the mechanism is tested, the argument is put forward and won. All that is required is the willingness to say that the same principle applies elsewhere. Instead, the report treats too much government support or public funding opportunities as specialist tools for specialist institutions, rather than as a model that could be adapted to reflect how culture is actually made in 2026.

That pattern repeats throughout. Grassroots culture, contemporary music, DIY spaces, informal venues and hybrid organisations are not attacked or dismissed. They are simply never fully brought into the room. They appear as context, as participation, as community activity. They are rarely described as core cultural infrastructure, even though they perform precisely that function. The review preserves the castle very effectively, but never quite acknowledges that most culture now begins outside its walls.

It is important to say that this column will not be popular with the authors of the report, or with large parts of the arts establishment more broadly. There is an unspoken rule in publicly funded culture that criticism must always be carefully rationed and preferably conducted in private. People will tell you, quietly and with good intentions, that speaking up risks undermining what we already have. That the funding is fragile. That the political climate is hostile. That now is not the time.

This is how a conspiracy of silence forms. Not through malice, but through caution. And that’s wrong, because the truth is everyone knows the system has blind spots. Everyone knows whole areas of cultural production sit outside it, underfunded and undervalued. But everyone is also aware that existing funding has been hard won, and that challenging the framework might threaten it.

The tragedy here is that this review was precisely the moment when those changes could have been made quietly, sensibly and without drama. This was the chance to say that the success of public funding should be extended, not merely defended. That the logic underpinning tax reliefs, long-term investment and institutional support applies equally to other parts of the creative industries. That protecting the old world does not require pretending the new one is peripheral.

Instead, the report chooses reassurance over evolution. It strengthens the centre while leaving the edges exposed. It does good work for the institutions it understands best, and misses the chance to bring a much wider cultural reality into the tent of being properly respected, recognised and supported.

That is why the review feels less like a failure than a hesitation. It is careful when boldness was possible. It is generous to what exists and almost entirely silent about what has emerged and is continuing tor emerge. The good work it does makes the missed opportunity to talk about that developing picture harder to ignore, not easier to forgive.

What makes all of this genuinely frustrating is that the moment we are living through is the exact opposite of what the review imagines. The old cultural mono-culture is gone. The walls between high and low art collapsed years ago. New forms, new voices and new audiences are not waiting to be invited into the existing system. They are already operating, largely without it. The energy, relevance and global impact of British culture is being generated in the least funded, least protected parts of the ecosystem. And the most frustrating part of all of this process is that the organisation that Baroness Hodge is reviewing, Arts Council England, is stuffed full of people who absolutely understand this and have been making important in-roads into embedding it into their practice in recent years.

There was a chance here to recognise that and act accordingly. To say that the pipeline matters just as much as, if not more than, the palace. That a national culture worth having is messy, noisy and slightly out of control. That excellence might mean impact, connection and longevity rather than polish and heritage. That if you want world leading culture in twenty years, you have to keep the doors open now.

The review could have taken the time to endorse a simple contribution from the most commercially successful parts of live music to support the grassroots that feed it. Silence. It could have demanded protected funding for the places where new work actually begins. Now even a footnote. It could have redefined excellence in a way that reflects how culture is actually made in the twenty first century. Instead it carefully reaffirmed the existing hierarchy and congratulated itself for doing so politely, going so far as to suggest that no currently funded high arts organisation should ever receive less than 80% of the funding it currently receives in any existing settlement round. Okay… so how would any newly emerging art-form or brilliant arts organisation get access to funding then?

The final irony is that the whole report is presented as some sort of challenge to London centrism. As though moving the same existing, outdated assumptions about what is and is not culture around the map somehow changes them. A locally administered version of the same historical snobbery is still snobbery. A regional committee making conservative choices under financial pressure is not cultural democracy. It is austerity with better geography.

Culture in this country is not dying because it lacks boards, frameworks or strategic visions written in careful language. It is struggling because the places where it begins are being starved of oxygen. They are under-funded, over-regulated and constantly asked to justify their existence to systems that fundamentally misunderstand what they do.

So, with apologies for being negative about it, but this is a huge missed opportunity and we should be talking about it. The Hodge review offers comfort to those already seated at the table and a flashing neon No Vacancies sign to everyone else. It is a plan for maintaining appearances while the real work happens elsewhere, unpaid, unsupported and increasingly fragile.

That opportunity was not missed by accident. It was walked past, politely, with a clipboard in hand and an unshakeable belief that everyone already agrees what excellence is and where it lives.

Well, I beg to disagree.