Crisis-hit councils in Nottingham and Birmingham approve culture cuts

Nottingham City Council and Birmingham City Council are the latest local authorities to confirm sweeping cuts to culture in their 2024/25 budgets.

Both local authorities have been forced to raise taxes and slash funding for public services after issuing Section 114 notices last year warning that they were not able to balance their budgets.

On Monday, Nottingham City Council approved cuts across a range of services in a bid to find more than £36m in savings between 2024/25 and 2027/28. The council is facing a £53m gap in its finances this year.

Commissioners were appointed by the UK Government last month to effectively run the council, with extensive powers to oversee “improvement activities”, including strategies to secure financial sustainability and “plans to transform front line services”.

The cuts include the loss of more than 500 jobs, along with a 100% reduction in grants to cultural institutions, including two art galleries: Nottingham Contemporary and New Art Exchange. The culture cuts will save the council £198,000, or 0.02% of its overall budget.

Neither gallery has commented on the budget cuts, but another venue, Nottingham Playhouse, said on social media: “Nottingham City Council has confirmed its 100% cut of our annual grant of £60,502. Whilst understanding the council’s financial situation, we believe these cuts are short-sighted and will have a negative impact on our work as a charity in the community.”

The budget for Nottingham’s museum service is not yet confirmed; the service is currently undergoing a review to consider alternative delivery models for the “best and most cost-effective way of delivering the museums service moving forward”. 

This work is not yet complete and will report later in the year, a council spokesman told Museums Journal.

'Cultural wasteland'

Meanwhile, Birmingham City Council has been warned the city will become a “cultural wasteland” as it prepares to approve a wave of cuts this week in a bid to plug a £300m funding gap.

The city’s regularly funded cultural organisations, including the Ikon Gallery, face a 50% reduction in their funding for 2024/25 and 100% the following year.

At a budget meeting last week, the chair of the council’s Creative and Leisure Industries Committee, Stephen Brown accused the council of making culture an “easy target for cuts”.

“Do [the council] not realise that people come to visit Birmingham because of these cultural icons? Do the council want to see a cultural wasteland here?,” Brown said.

The city’s museum service, which is run by Birmingham Museums Trust, will not face any cuts this year as its contract with the council runs up until 2026. The trust may receive some support towards inflation and revenue pressures.

However, a council spokesman told Museums Journal: “The council’s financial situation remains extremely challenging and does not allow any capacity for additional funding to be awarded – for example towards refurbishment costs of the reopening of the flagship Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.”

He said the council is working closely with Birmingham Museums Trust and partners to “identify where these funds can be sourced”.

A total of 19 councils, including Nottingham and Birmingham, have been given support for the coming year from the UK Government’s Exceptional Financial Support scheme, which helps councils to manage exceptional financial pressures. The support is not a grant and must be repaid using money raised from asset sales.

Alliance launches

In light of the pressure on funding for culture, a new National Alliance for Cultural Services has been launched aiming to "offer a fresh approach to sustain culture services in the future".

Chaired by the Chief Cultural and Leisure Officers Association (CLOA) and representing local government, the alliance will bring together the principal representative organisations for local government to provide a collective voice for local government cultural services.

The alliance is seeking to inform and influence the development of national policy for publicly funded culture. It is urging central government to provide a long-term, sustainable and multi-year funding settlement to local authorities ahead of this week's budget, to protect continued investment in cultural provision.  

Call for enquiry

Meanwhile the arts charity Art Fund has called for an enquiry as the funding crisis among regional museums deepens.

In a statement, the organisation said: “Art Fund is extremely concerned for the future of local and regional museums due to the crisis in local authority funding, and is calling for an enquiry into regional museum funding.” 

Referring to recent research from Arts Council England, which found that council spending on museums in England has dropped by a “staggering” 43% per head since 2010, Art Fund said: “We realise councils are facing an incredibly difficult funding environment. Yet investment in culture often represents a tiny proportion of overall spending; reducing or removing it has an enormous impact on communities' access to culture and the ability of civic spaces to deliver broader public services.

The statement continued: "Further reducing long-term funding for these vital places of inspiration will reduce the service they can offer and erode the huge advantages that they bring to society. Communities living in all corners of the country deserve to reap the benefits of these public spaces equally across the UK; access shouldn’t be postcode lottery.

“We urge local authorities to prioritise substantial investment in museums and galleries to enable them to continue delivering vital benefits to their local communities.”

The Museums Association is also calling for strategic public investment in the sector.

Director Sharon Heal said: "We are deeply concerned about the future of local museums – more than a decade of cuts is undermining their ability to deliver the amazing and life-changing opportunities for their communities that we know they are capable of."