The Department of Culture badly needs a sense of direction

Rumours of the demise of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) are, it seems, greatly exaggerated. When the arts minister, Chris Bryant, was asked about them in parliament last week, he said that abolition would be ‘absolutely madness’, but this doesn’t explain all the speculation.

Fears remain that the responsibilities of the DCMS could be redistributed to three other ministries: Business, Education and the Treasury. One factor giving rise to the rumours is the government’s ‘Plan for Change’, which wants to reduce numbers in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called the ‘overstretched, unfocused’ civil service. It is, for example, planning to abolish as many as 300 quangos. The unofficial reason is that by scrapping the department, it would also get rid of the Secretary of State for Culture, Lisa Nandy.

Nandy, MP for Wigan, has not been a conspicuous success, appointed only after the intended holder of her post, Thangam Debbonaire, lost her seat to the Greens in the General Election. She has been struggling with the issues of copyright and artificial intelligence and has been criticised for being prepared to allow foreign financial interests to take up to 15 per cent in British newspapers. Most of the work on the arts within DCMS has been done by Minister of State, Chris Bryant, who is also a Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

That the government should even contemplate abolishing the Department for Culture, Media and Sport shows how low the arts are in the government’s concern. But the history of DCMS has rarely been a happy one. Although the state began to take on a small responsibility for funding music, theatre and contemporary art at the outbreak of the Second World War, what was then the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) was formed in 1946, receiving its funding first from the Treasury and the Department of Education. Labour’s appointment in 1964 of the energetic Jennie Lee as the first Minister for the Arts transformed the landscape. In 1965 she published the first ever policy document on the arts and culture, which is still referred to warmly today. More importantly, she trebled arts funding and, for the first time, provided money for building arts facilities. But she remained a junior minister, nowhere near the cabinet.

Jennie Lee, the first UK Minister for the Arts, photographed here in 1967. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The economic downturn and changes of government in the 1970s meant that cultural policy failed to prosper. It fared even worse under Mrs Thatcher, with an increasing emphasis on commercial sponsorship rather than public investment. However, in 1992, her successor, John Major, was persuaded to bundle the responsibilities of half a dozen ministries together to form the Department of National Heritage. The term was backward-looking but the arts at last gained a seat at the cabinet table. Under its first Secretary of State, David Mellor, this was to be the Ministry of Fun, but Mellor’s own fun led to a rapid resignation and under his successors it became the ‘Department of Nothing Happening’. In 1994 the ACGB was separated out into councils for England, Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland has had its own arts council since 1962.)

The Department of National Heritage’s great, and long-lasting, achievement was to establish the National Lottery, which, though originally intended to be additional to cultural funding, has become a transformative means of providing for the arts. This was achieved by two long-serving Labour Secretaries of State, first Chris Smith and then Tessa Jowell, who refocused the use of the National Lottery and changed the ministry’s name to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (between 2017 and 2023 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport). But when the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 came in after the financial crisis, arts funding, at both national and local level, was cut by a third. There followed 12 Secretaries of State for culture in 14 years.

At the time of writing, DCMS (and Lisa Nandy) are still at work but, as a Ministry with an un-ringfenced budget, unlike Health or Defence, it could well be sacrificed as a contribution to the cuts in day-to-day expenditure that the government wishes to make. The department has already had an estimated six per cent cut this year. More will be clear when the government announces its spending plans on 11 June.

And what a disaster abolition would be. It took 50 years for Britain to catch up with countries such as France and Germany in terms of the government taking culture seriously. It is folly to go backwards. There must be an official cultural policy, and it should be delivered in a clear and organised way, however badly that has been done in the past. The arts should not go to a non-spending ministry like the Treasury, nor to Business or Education. To go to Communities would be a mark of low esteem at a time when the creative industries, to which the arts are vital, are a rare success story. This is not to argue for a massive, Soviet-style arts bureaucracy, but we need a mixed cultural economy, not a muddled and mediocre one. Starmer made a commitment to the arts and culture when coming into office. He should be made to keep his word.