Libraries, museums and art galleries across England have had their funding slashed by nearly £400m in the past eight years, forcing hundreds to close, The Independent can reveal.

Leaders of county councils, which are mainly Conservative-run, say spending cuts have been made to the arts and education to ensure there is enough funding to provide care for the elderly and the vulnerable.

It comes as Essex County Council plans to close a third of its 74 libraries, while Birmingham City Council is looking to reduce its grants to arts and cultural organisations by nearly 50 per cent.  

Councils will be forced to make even more cuts to cultural services unless more funding is awarded to local authorities for care services in the spending review, county council leaders warn.

Figures reveal that council spending on museums, galleries, libraries, and local arts support has already reduced by more than £390m since 2011.

Original article

Asking people for money is considered a dirty, shaming and unrewarding job: graduates with romantic notions about a career in the arts all want to go into production or performance rather than income generation, while anyone with financial savvy is going to look askance at the lousy salaries that arts organisations offer and take their services elsewhere. Nobody, in other words, wants to be a fund-raiser, and that seems daft at a time when interesting and challenging jobs for young people are so thin on the ground.

So it’s good news that next month the Arts Council addresses this problem head on, with the establishment of an Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy Consortium aimed at offering “11 entrepreneurial self-starters with a passion for the arts the chance to take part in an intensive 12-month training programme”, with secondments to such organisations as Opera North, Tate Liverpool and the Roundhouse.

The state will not, and cannot, provide in the way that it used to, and the days when a theatre company or art gallery could look to the Arts Council for 60 or 70 per cent of funding will never return. Self-reliance and self-help is going to be ever more vital, and at this crucial point in time, the arts desperately needs to nurture a new class of motivated and imaginative people who understand that persuading others to part with their money is as essential to the creative process as painting the scenery or dancing the dance.

One problem remains: how to pay these fund-raisers sufficiently competitive salaries to keep them happy (current rates of payment in arts administration being so dismally low) and stop them taking their skills elsewhere. If Peter Bazalgette can insert that piece into the jigsaw, then this faint ray of hope could turn into a burst of unexpected sunshine.