Elliott Keck is Head of Campaigns for the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
Local government funding was very much one of a whole kennel of dogs that didn’t bark during the general election campaign. With attention turned on gamblegate, D-Day-gate, the Channel 4 did they or didn’t they plant an actor-gate and the many other gates that defined that pretty sordid six weeks, many key policy areas went largely ignored. No longer. With Angela Rayner now ensconced in the department for (levelling up?) housing, communities and local government, the pressing problem of local government’s cash crisis cannot be put off anymore.
Rayner is certainly ambitious. At an all-staff meeting, she committed to “rebuild local government, with integrated, long-term funding settlements to local leaders, giving them greater certainty and the ability to plan for the long-term.” But let’s give credit where credit’s due because in a number of areas, town halls actually are already surprisingly good at thinking and planning for the long term, albeit not always in top priority areas.
Because research from the TaxPayers’ Alliance has revealed that UK councils have built up an art collection with a combined total of 1,854,518 pieces of art, worth almost £1.5 billion. This is a truly vast portfolio – far more than just a few portraits of local mayors past and present, or a local art gallery.
To dig into the numbers a bit, the average art collection for a UK council is made up of 6,265 pieces of art worth at least £8.7 million, a figure that is certainly a significant undervaluation, given many councils were unable to provide the value of their collections.
This headline number of 1,854,518 is skewed by some particularly mammoth collections. While only thirty of the 339 councils replying to an FOI request confirmed that they didn’t have any artwork, including Dorset council and Slough council, the top three collections made up just shy of half the total collection. Durham council had an astonishing 500,000 works of art, followed by Middlesbrough council with 250,000 and Norfolk with what by comparison is a paltry 162,378 works of art. But even while the data is skewed by these Louvre-level collections, 23 councils had more than 10,000 works and 127 had more than 1,000.
Louvre-level is not even much of an exaggeration, at least not in quantity. The iconic French art gallery has 500,000 works, the same as Durham. In quality terms, I doubt of course that there are many Da Vincis, Vermeers or Caravaggios in Durham’s collection, but the point stands. And with the National Gallery in London’s collection sitting at 2,600, the absurdly large collections in UK town halls becomes starkly apparent.
Many bridle at the proposal to sell off these cultural assets. Macmillan’s “selling off the family silver” speech, in reference to the privatisations of the 1980s, comes to mind. This was Bristol council’s pushback after it was revealed that their art collection was valued at £134 million, the council having previously refused to reveal this figure (meaning it isn’t part of the £1.5 billion initially uncovered in our research). They argued that the collection is a “vital part of the city’s cultural and educational offer, with a value that extends beyond an insurers’ estimate.” In the case of Bristol, much of this is held by a council-owned art gallery. Other councils also own art galleries, explaining part of the overall collection across the UK.
But setting aside whether town halls should have any family silver at all, what’s really indefensible is how little of it is on display. Going back to Macmillan’s point, when so much of the family silver remains locked away unused, and with the family finances in such a perilous state, surely it is time to start selling some of it? In the case of Bristol a ridiculously low 11.2 per cent is on display. Yet they were far from the worst of the bunch. Norfolk Council owns 162,378 pieces of art, with just 735, or 0.5 per cent, on display; Cambridgeshire owns 68,557 and has just 17 on display. 12 councils owning a total of 3,765 pieces of art have nought per cent of their collection on display.
Across all councils, an average of just 28 per cent of art is on display, meaning there is potentially hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue available for town halls to draw on while allowing them to retain smaller, more focused collections which are genuinely used to spruce up council buildings and maintain local art galleries. Councils have done a remarkably good job over the long term in building and maintaining these collections. But with budgets now at breaking point, and council tax up by more than 79 per cent in real terms since its introduction, surely it’s time to cash in on this investment?