‘The council’s funding delay threatens the future of the arts in Bristol’

Right now, artists in Bristol are furious about a decision which has just been announced by Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees.

It’s a decision which has put creatives’ work and contracts at risk, and which makes it impossible for them and the companies they work with to plan ahead – threatening the future of all those working in the performing arts and the wider arts community.

I’m a Bristol-born and Bristol-based actor who has worked with grassroots theatre companies in the city.

I’m also a long-term campaigner and member of the Bristol & West of England branch of Equity, the trade union made up of 47,000 performers and creative practitioners – actors, singers, dancers, designers, directors, stage managers, puppeteers, comedians, voice artists, and variety performers.

Actor and Equity President Lynda Rooke, with actor and activist Gerard Cooke, standing in solidarity with striking teachers and other workers at a Bristol demo in March 2023 – photo: Gerard Cooke

I know that artists, arts organisations and major cultural events have been led down the garden path. Bristol City Council was originally due to tell them whether they’d been successful in their funding bids last October, but this was postponed to last month, June 2023.

However, they’ve just been notified that they’ll now have to wait until March 2024 to find out how much money they’ll receive – or if they’ll receive any money at all.

Sadly we’ve been here before; arts and culture funding in Bristol has been systemically eroded over at least the last ten years, and Equity has been on the front line of every battle.

In 2014, council members proposed a 10 per cent cut of £100,000 from the city’s arts budget, but this was overturned due to an Equity campaign. However, since Marvin Rees became mayor of Bristol in 2016, arts in the city have been under a sustained attack.

In 2017, the council’s arts budget was just over £1m, but a 26 per cent cut in 2018/19 meant a £190,000 reduction to this, followed by a cut of the same amount in 2021/22. This included a funding cap of £100k on all arts organisations, meaning Bristol Old Vic alone lost £188,000.

Some of the companies affected have already been overlooked and left in peril by the recent withdrawal of funding from Arts Council England. This is an industry for whom the pandemic was cataclysmic.

So this decision and delay by Bristol City Council is a triple whammy which leaves them all the more on the precipice – I can only ask mayor Rees this: without council support right now, how does he expect these companies, and the people who rely on them, to survive?

Bristol City Council have responded to our concerns by saying: “We have continued to fund culture organisations and rolled over last year’s funding to ensure there were no gaps”.

However, if you look into the detail then this is only half the story, and doesn’t cover the complexity of the issue.

There are three streams of arts funding in the city – which have the catchy titles: Originators (one year of funding), Imagination (two-year funding), and Openness (four-year funding).

But we now know that the interim funding that’s coming from the council only covers the Openness stream. The companies who rely on the other two funds have had no such support. So the council’s suggestion that there are “no gaps” seems disingenuous.

At its best, Bristol’s arts and culture is world class, but this doesn’t happen by chance – it happens through on-going dedication and hard work – crucially supported by financial investment.

Bristol needs leaders who believe in our cultural and artistic potential, who support it with pride and allow the whole region to reap the rewards – both socially and economically.

But without continued and renewed investment – locally and nationally – the benefits of all the work so far will be thrown away and the city will fall behind.

Used wisely, public investment in the arts can lead to work which is anti-elitist, which supports working-class creative workers, and those from minority and oppressed groups.

It has a positive knock-on effect in local communities – improving social cohesion, and makes places worth living in. The creative economy pours money into local services, such as cafes, bars, restaurants, shops, hotels and transport.

For every £1 pound invested into it, arts and culture generates between £4 to £7 back into the wider economy and latest figures show that the creative industries generate £116bn a year for the UK economy.

On every level, cultural investment just makes sense, while cuts and delays make no sense at all and cause real damage.

So we demand that mayor Marvin Rees restores our arts funding. No delays, no cuts.

You can join the call by signing our petition, and by joining our demo on College Green on Thursday, July 6 at 10:30am.

Gerard Cooke is an actor and activist and a member of Bristol & West of England branch of Equity.

Main photo: Gerard Cooke

Read next:

• Bristol creatives to protest ‘reckless’ council funding delay
• ‘The saga of Bristol Beacon is a lesson in how not to invest in arts and culture’
• Queer indie comic art festival launches fundraiser

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