Introduction

This chapter explores the efforts to mitigate the impact and effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the cultural sector in the UK, using a narrative account of policy responses by the national governments and associated arm’s-length bodies within the UK. We consider these responses in relation to two propositions: firstly, that they act as evidence of the values and significance attached to the functions of creative and cultural production in society, and the role of the nation-state within these dynamics. Secondly, they provide an indication of the distinctive relations which are informed by the networks of policy actors within and between different regional geographies in the UK’s overlapping cultural policy territories. The structure of this chapter is as follows. Firstly, we present a timeline of the main phases of government intervention and recovery funding in the UK, before presenting narrative accounts of key similarities and differences between the four nations of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England. We finish by considering the implications of these accounts for the values and rationales for future cultural policy.

With increasing distance from the pandemic, it is easy to assume a smooth journey through the policy landscape, from venue closure and lockdown to emergency funding and recovery plans. However, the reality between March 2020 and the end of 2021 across the four UK nations was a divergence of approaches, mixed messages and measures, with delayed and contradictory announcements. This made decisions for organisations, as well as individual artists and creative practitioners, incredibly challenging. It also discouraged some audience groups from returning to in-person participation (Audience Agency, 2021). To simplify the chronology, we set out three main phases of emergency and mitigation measures below and in Tables 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 with examples of cross-regional interventions designed to support the creative and cultural sectors.

Phase One: locking down

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. On 16 March the UK Prime Minister advised against all non-essential travel, urging the population to avoid gatherings and crowded places, such as pubs, clubs and theatres but did not announce any policy support for affected sectors (Prime Minister’s Office, 2020). By 23 March 2020, the UK Government announced the first formal lockdown, outlawing all social and public gatherings, restricting non-emergency travel and closing schools and other educational establishments with instructions to work from home where possible. This initial three-week lockdown was extended for a further three weeks in April 2020, when the UK Government also announced a series of unprecedented economy-wide financial support packages, including the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (‘furlough’) and the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS). In July 2020, a temporary cut in value added tax (VAT) rates (Cabinet Office, 2020) was subsequently replaced with a 12.5 per cent rate from September 2021 through to March 2022 (Seely, 2022). Each UK nation introduced a business rates relief scheme which gave additional support to retail, hospitality and leisure businesses; in England, these businesses received a discretionary 100 per cent rates holiday for the duration of the 2020–2021 tax year (HM Revenue and Customs, 2021). However, as discussed in Chapter 2, many freelance, self-employed workers were left unable to access state support. Meanwhile, the response of the national grant-giving and arm’s-length bodies was to quickly reprofile funding streams to target artists organisations, with the Arts Council England alone providing over £100m in Emergency Funding to nearly a thousand applicants in Spring 2020, including 7,484 individual creative practitioners and 2,374 organisations) (SQW, 2022, p.1).

Phase Two: attempting recovery

The UK Government eased some restrictions in May 2020 in England as part of a pandemic recovery strategy (Cabinet Office, 2020), however, these were quickly reversed to avoid a potential ‘second wave’ (Home Office, 2020a). Although ‘Cultural Renewal Taskforce’ led by Lord Mendoza was established by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State (DCMS, 2020a) national support did not fully emerge until July 2020, when the £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) was announced, the single largest investment in the creative and cultural sectors ever made in the UK (DCMS, 2020b). Until then, the high degree of uncertainty led to a considerable number of open letters and campaigns by sector advocates which continued to hold the UK governments to account throughout the pandemic period (see, for example, Equity, 2020; The Stage, 2020). The CRF was created in response to evidence of the severity of the impact of the pandemic on the sector, with DCMS estimating that the cultural sector had seen commercial income fall by 95 per cent since March 2020, provisionally aiming to ensure survival of a target 75 per cent of those organisations at risk of falling off the ‘cliff-edge’ of financial failure by September 2020 (NAO, 2021, p.5). Overseen by a new Culture Recovery Board, with revenue and capital grants and repayable loans distributed via the arm’s-length bodies within the four nations, CRF calculations were based on a worst-case scenario assumption that social distancing might remain in place until March 2021. The criteria for shaping funding decisions were established broadly according to two principles: firstly, cultural value and significance, such as organisations recognised as excellent by their peers or assets that are deemed nationally important or irreplaceable and, secondly, by their significance to place, for example, by providing access for participation to audiences or contribution to creative economies and/or local policy agendas (NAO, 2021, p.13). Although the loan scheme remained undersubscribed, the grant schemes were heavily oversubscribed. By February 2021, around £495m had been paid out to recipients, of the total of £830m awarded to the DCMS sectors, which included £622m revenue funding and £120m capital awards, plus a further £100m provided to the arm’s-length bodies as grant in aid (NAO, 2021, p.20); see Table 1.3.

The timing and policies for reopening cultural venues differed across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, primarily driven by monitoring of localised case rates, with venues in Northern Ireland and Scotland reopening in July 2020, while those in England were delayed from reopening until mid-August 2020. By September 2020, as new variants of the virus emerged, national and localised restrictions were reintroduced, lasting throughout the winter into 2021, and despite attempts by the four nations to harmonise regulation over Christmas (Welsh Government, 2020a) there remained distinctive approaches across the UK. A 10pm curfew for pubs and restaurants, the ‘rule of six’ (Home Office, 2020b) and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme (Hutton, 2020) were introduced in England in quick succession, creating further confusion, and in some cases further spikes in cases. On 31 October 2020, the UK Prime Minister announced a new England-wide lockdown, Wales moved in and out of localised lockdowns (Welsh Government, 2020b), while Northern Ireland saw restrictions introduced for a four-week ‘circuit breaker’ which forced cultural venues to close on 19 November 2020 (Executive Office of Northern Ireland, 2020). In Scotland, restrictions on social gatherings were reintroduced with local lockdowns from November 2020 which, coupled with a national lockdown coming into force over the new year, encouraged the launch of specific funds targeting Scottish cultural venues (Creative Scotland, 2020).

At this time, it remained unclear when the furlough scheme would end, and there was continued lack of guidance on how venues might reopen safely. Reopening with reduced capacity but a full staff complement placed a huge financial strain on cultural organisations that were already facing further loss of income at a traditionally busy time of year. The furlough scheme was eventually extended in November 2020 through to March 2021, with calls to extend and plug the ongoing gaps in the SEISS left unheeded despite growing lobbying from pressure groups, workforce networks, arm’s length bodies, funders and cultural organisations (Bectu, 2020). Attempts to support workforce development were hindered by these turbulent conditions; for example, the launch of the UK Government’s ‘Kickstart’ scheme which encouraged young people to take up apprenticeships, including in the creative and cultural sectors, yielded mixed results (Powell, 2022). Meanwhile, financial support through grants and loan schemes continued, with the opening of CRF Round 2 in January 2021 (Arts Council England, n.d.).

Phase Three: continuing uncertainty

In February 2021, a further roadmap out of the lockdowns was published by the Prime Minister’s Office (2021), with sector-specific guidance added by the DCMS (Woodhouse and Hutton, 2021). The government budget statement in March confirmed an extension to the SEISS and an uplift in funding for the culture department (DCMS, 2021a). A research programme was launched in April 2021 to test the impact of holding large-scale events under certain conditions, and underpinned further guidance as new variants were beginning to take hold in the UK (DCMS, 2021b). By May 2021, Wales and most of Scotland had moved into Level 2 restrictions, allowing theatres, cinemas and live venues to re-open (Welsh Government, 2021). However, full reopening across the whole of the UK was not permitted until the summer, when the so-called ‘Freedom Day’ on 19 July 2021 saw the removal of all Covid-related restrictions in England against a backdrop of increased transmission rates and a prime minister in quarantine (James, 2021). This apparent change in logic was tempered politically by a broadly successful rollout of the vaccination programme, and a high uptake of ‘booster jabs’ reducing the risk of serious illness and hospitalisation. It also provided the means to propose safer venue opening, with vaccination certification schemes trialled in Scotland and Wales in ‘high-risk venues’ such as theatres, cinemas and music venues (Morris, 2021).

The third round of the CRF opened in August 2021 and saw a further £100m in continuity and recovery grants. The autumn budget in October 2021 included funding to boost culture in local communities and on the high street. It also confirmed temporary extensions of tax reliefs for theatres, orchestras, museums and galleries, plus further support for creative industries through schemes such as the Live Events Reinsurance Scheme and the Film & TV Production Restart Scheme, which were successful in reinstating cultural production (RSM, 2022) despite the initial delays in their inception. However, after eighteen months of turmoil, in November 2021, the first cases of the Omicron variant were detected in the UK, and transmission rates soared back up. Despite the substantial injection of public funds, evolving models for safe return to cultural venues, and growing understanding of the specific issues caused and revealed by the pandemic concerning workforce and business model precarity, the uncertainties for arts and cultural producers and consumers, as well as the challenges for policy-makers, were set to continue.

In the next section we examine further the variety of policy responses, beginning with the distinctive challenges in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, before considering the significant and central role of Westminster in setting policy (and rhetoric) not just for England but across the UK. We then turn briefly to discuss the implications of these responses for understanding cultural policy in the UK context.

Tailoring interventions in Scotland

The Scottish Government’s ambitions for culture prior to the pandemic were laid out in a new cultural strategy, published on 28 February 2020. The result of lengthy sector stakeholder consultation lasting several years (Scottish Government, 2020), the policy articulated a nuanced vision for culture that is responsive to the diverse histories, geographies, cultures and communities of the national population (Scottish Government, 2020, p.3). Although derived before the beginning of the pandemic, the policy provided a template of stated aims and action planning, and principles of place, inclusion and cultural democracy, which were used to guide the national response.

Much of this was delivered through the national arm’s-length body for culture Creative Scotland, who distributed £85.3m in emergency funding on behalf of the national government between 2020 and 2021 (EKOS, 2022). As with Arts Council England in England, Creative Scotland was able to act ahead of national legislative policy, relaxing delivery restrictions for their portfolio of Regular Funded Organisations (RFOs) and redirecting existing funds to provide emergency support for the sector, with £11m of funding announced on 27 March. However, where analysis of emergency funding in England has confirmed that ‘relief flowed disproportionately to institutions’ (de Peuter, Oakley and Trusolino, 2022, p.8), Scotland’s initial emergency response prioritised support for individuals, with further funding decisions detailing significant distinctions across the devolved national responses within the UK.

Predominantly funded by £97m released to Scotland through the Barnett formula following the announcement of the Culture Recovery Fund,¹ the period after July 2020 saw a programme of eight rolling funds targeted at different areas of the sector. Some outcomes of these interventions are unsurprising. Glasgow and Edinburgh, the two largest cities in the country with the highest concentration of RFOs and the largest creative workforce, benefitted from the most funding, receiving over 50 per cent of the total amount distributed across all funds with the two highest levels of inward investment per person (see Figure 1.1). Beyond these headline figures, however, the picture is more varied. While Glasgow and Edinburgh dominated general funds, such as the £28m Cultural Organisations and Venues Recovery Fund which was open to commercial and publicly funded organisations, targeted funds, such as the £24.5m Performing Arts Venue Relief Fund for publicly funded theatres and performance venues or the £5.9m Culture Collective Fund for local creative networks, reached different areas of the sector, with a higher proportion of funds going to a wider range of local authorities. Direct support for freelancers also continued, with two in-parallel hardship funds, totalling £17m, replacing the emergency support established in the first month of the pandemic. Delivered in partnership with sector bodies such as Craft Scotland and Help Musicians Scotland, these programmes offered support for freelancers until the end of March 2021, accounting for 17 per cent of the total spend across all funds (EKOS, 2022, p.33).

Figure 1.1Distribution of emergency cultural recovery funding per head across Scottish local authority areas, analysis by Mark TaylorSource: Creative Scotland

A number of these programmes ringfenced grants for non-RFO organisations, reaching beyond existing funding patterns to protect local cultural infrastructures alongside the nation’s flagship assets. Alongside this expansion, there was notable recognition of cross-sector support through the establishment of the Scottish Tourism Emergency Response Group (STERG) with a £25m fund to support the recovery of the tourism industry (STERG, 2021). Projects that impacted culture and heritage through this fund were primarily concerned with enticing audiences through days out schemes and holiday vouchers. However, the group was also concerned about longer term infrastructure and capacity building around sustainable travel to the more remote areas of the highland and islands particularly for festival attendance.

The delivery of these policies and the efficiency with which they were able to achieve their aims was significantly affected by networks, knowledges and individual and organisational capacities as they existed before the pandemic. Primary research into how festivals in Scotland fared throughout 2020 helps illustrate these dynamics, discussed below.

The restrictions on social gatherings had particularly acute impacts for festivals. Additionally, while other areas were served with bespoke funding programmes, there was no targeted support for festivals, leaving many organisations feeling overlooked and under supported. Many of the interviewees from festivals expressed frustration at a lack of coherent messaging from the Scottish Government, particularly in relation to eligibility and to changing health and safety guidance, leading to concerns that the Scottish Government did not understand how the festival sector operated. In the absence of policy leadership, networks of rural and smaller festivals resorted to pooling resources and knowledge, disseminating advice from other festivals and individuals that had managed to receive guidance from civil servants.

One of the major communication issues concerned the eligibility criteria for emergency funding and the employment of freelancers. For many festivals, the collapse of box office income meant that they were applying for and receiving more public funding than before the pandemic. One effect of this influx was that organisations were working with unfamiliar financial restrictions, and festivals found themselves having to seek clarification from the government and funders, with irregular working patterns and portfolio work of creative and cultural freelancers proving a particular challenge (Tsioulakis and FitzGibbon, 2020; Jones, 2022). This caused major delays for some festivals and logistical problems when it came to hiring seasonal workers, whose numbers were already depleted due to restrictions on movement and travel. Eligibility criteria also differed between emergency funding programmes without explanation, leading to frustration for festival organisations desperate to receive funding to stop them from going under.

Of course, these experiences are not universal. Throughout the pandemic, local authorities acted as a proxy for national government, and several festivals reported that they received substantial support and advice, linking these experiences with long-term relationships with local authority departments and officers. Where present, established relationships with local authorities helped mitigate the tensions and challenges associated with the delivery of these policies; however, they also relied on resources and capacities that not all festivals possess, and on a local authority that values culture. A consultancy report published just prior to the pandemic (EKOS, 2020) observed that ‘comparatively small services such as culture can end up in very large portfolios where they have low visibility’ (p.17), noting also that ‘Creative Scotland (2020) has a diminished visibility with many local authorities’ (p.72), highlighting long-standing challenges and uneven capacities that disadvantaged some festivals during the pandemic.

Ahead of their 2022–2023 annual budget, the Scottish Parliament opened a public consultation, inviting responses from sector stakeholders on how investment should be prioritised and managed to best support the sector, and whether a more substantial rethink of the relationship between national government and the sector might be required in light of the pandemic (Scottish Parliament, 2021). This openness to consultation and critical reflection on the possibilities raised by emergency responses to the pandemic is striking and signals further commitment to collaborative policy-making that seeks to incorporate sector knowledge into national decision-making. As our research partners observed, the pandemic has also underlined the need to strengthen and rebalance relationships with local authorities. A new programme called Culture Collective was designed to address these issues and inform an internal review of relationship management between Creative Scotland and local government. Finally, the pandemic brought new urgency to long-standing discussions around the economic conditions of work in the cultural sector and, as Doustaly and Roy observe (2022), increased support for Scottish Government intervention, potentially through a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for culture. However, as they note, early experiments in UBI have been frustrated by the conditions of the devolution agreement (2022, p. 13), and further investigation would require leadership from Westminster.

Future-proofing in Wales

As with elsewhere in the UK, policy statements pre-pandemic for the devolved Welsh Government characterised the creative industries as important because of their rapid growth, potential contribution to national economy and importance to ‘brand’; a new sector development agency, Creative Wales, launched in January 2020 with a focus on music, film and TV, digital and publishing sectors, and connecting policy approaches to theatre, festivals and grassroots music activities (Elis-Thomas, 2020). Creative industries and cultural sectors were calculated to contribute around £1.5bn and 85,000 jobs annually to the Welsh economy, based on the DCMS Sectors Economic Estimates in 2019, with an estimated £100m financial impact caused by the pandemic, particularly affecting micro-businesses and the self-employed (Parkinson et al., 2022, p.13). At the height of lockdown, survey data from the Film & TV Charity suggested that 93 per cent freelancers in the creative industries were not working, with a staggering 74 per cent ineligible for SEISS and the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) (Welsh Parliament, 2020).

As with Scotland, emergency funds were made available to the sector most rapidly by the devolved government when, in April 2020, the Welsh Government announced an £18m rescue fund. The Arts Council of Wales administered £7m of the package via an Arts Resilience Fund, with approximately £1.5m allocated to individuals and £5.5m for organisations (Arts Council of Wales, 2020). Both funds were further divided into two types of grant: ‘Urgent Response’ and ‘Stabilisation’, offering immediate hardship support and funding continuation of work. The rescue package included a targeted £1m fund for grassroots music venues which was separately administered by Creative Wales, a £1m ‘Cultural Resilience Fund’ for museums, galleries, archives and libraries, and a further £750,000 fund to support the smallest and most vulnerable independent sport, museum and heritage organisations (Welsh Government, 2022).

Wales received £59m of the UK-wide £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund announced in July 2020 and was able to allocate the second highest per capita figure of £18.71, after England’s £25.37 per capita (Wright, 2020). The first tranche received in July 2020 led to an announcement of £53m funding for arts and culture in Wales, distributed by Welsh Government (£18.5m) and administered by Business Wales; £27.5m via the Arts Council of Wales, and £7m targeting individual freelancers, which was administered by local authorities. In November 2020, the Welsh Government contributed a further £10.7m due to high demand, taking the total to £63.7m, and in January 2022 a further £15.4m was released as part of the CRF round 3 (Welsh Government, 2022). Evaluation of the CRF rounds 1 and 2 suggests the approach in Wales, informed by its smaller-scale and close relationship with local authorities, permitted targeted interventions to the micro-businesses and freelancers identified as most vulnerable. Of the £71.6m awarded, 90 per cent of funds were awarded to ‘micro-businesses’ and £10.39m to the 3,783 freelancers supported across both rounds (Welsh Government, 2022), contrasting with England’s initial prioritisation of ‘crown jewels’.

The vulnerability of the freelancers who make up half of the cultural workforce in Wales, many of whom were working full-time equivalent prior to the pandemic, was noted by an in-depth report which surveyed a cross-section of the sector (Donnelly and Komorowski, 2022). The report found that the negative impact of the pandemic on the wellbeing of freelancers had worsened between 2020 and 2021, and that, as detailed in Chapter 2, freelancers with protected characteristics and/or who had caring responsibilities in 2021 had less access to support and were at greater risk of leaving the industry. It also found the Welsh Government-run Freelancers funding was the most successful in terms of eligibility, access and satisfaction, followed by Universal Credit and SEISS, supporting the recommendation for a Welsh Government UBI pilot scheme, which targeted theatre and performance freelancers, following the call from a new role in Wales, the Future Wellbeing Commissioner (Howe, 2020; Donnelly and Komorowski, 2022).

In contrast to other nations, Wales embedded its distribution of recovery funding in its sustainable development legislation, the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), described as a ‘possible roadmap to future-proofing the sector’ post-COVID-19 (Wright, 2020, p.12). The legislation lists ‘thriving culture’ as a wellbeing goal, identifying participation in arts, culture and heritage as a national indicator, vital to achieving the other wellbeing goals such as prosperity, resilience, health, equality and cohesive community (Welsh Government, 2015). Followed by the Prosperity for All – Economic Action Plan (Welsh Government, 2019) which threaded culture through its policy aims and justifications, the Wellbeing of Future Generations legislation asks those in public service to collectively consider the longer-term impacts of their decision-making in relation to societal challenges. It aims to pre-empt future outcomes for Welsh people through convening ‘big’ and ‘simple’ change projects, led by a Future Wellbeing Commissioner.

This fundamental shift in policy planning can be seen in both the rhetoric and administration of funds during COVID-19. On the practical level, the receipt of Culture Recovery Funds required participating organisations to commit to a ‘Cultural Contract’ as part of their application. An extension of the ‘Economic Contract’ (proposed in the Prosperity for All plan) and accompanied by a corresponding ‘Freelancer’s Pledge’, the Cultural Contract required an evidenced commitment to a series of principles. These included the promotion of diversity, health (with a special emphasis on mental health) and workplace skills training, progress in clean growth, climate resilience and reduced carbon footprint, and encouragement for retained staff to take part in broader public service, for example, contact tracing to support COVID-19 case tracking and social prescribing to promote and support health and arts initiatives (Business Wales, 2020). These essentially non-economic policy measures were also reiterated in the Arts Council Wales Re-setting the Dial report, which articulated similar principles, extolling the importance of systems change for a fairer, more just sector, and celebrating both the particularity of the Welsh language and the creativity of the individual artist over the arts institution (Arts Council Wales, n.d.). As discussed above, the Future Generations commission was an early advocate for a UBI for artists and creatives on the basis that artists can help support recovery by bringing creative skills to societal problem-solving and should be valued as exceptional since they cannot be replaced by automation (Howe, 2020). However, the eventual UBI pilot, launched in 2022, focused not on creatives but on young care leavers, and has been dogged by central government rules which mean that participants may lose some benefits as their allocation is not devolved (Morris, 2022).

Networks and power in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland received £33m of the UK-wide £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund. Of this funding the Executive allocated £29m for arts, languages, heritage and culture in September 2020. The remaining £4m had already been allocated as part of emergency funding by the Executive in July 2020 (DfC, 2020). The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) and the Department for Communities (DfC) also committed an extra £1.5m to the initial £4m emergency fund to help support organisations and individual artists. Notable among initial emergency funds was the Deaf/Disabled Artist Support Fund, which was the first of its kind in response to the pandemic in the UK (ACNI, 2020).

Policy responses within Northern Ireland can be characterised as a series of interventions at different levels of government, driven both by necessity and by a growing sense of collaboration across the cultural sector. These policy decisions were not uniform or cohesive, taking different strategic approaches and models at various stages, revealing tensions between policy-makers, stakeholders and cultural sub-sectors which are deeply rooted in entrenched power structures. They were not triggered solely in response to the impact of the pandemic, but rather recognised a publicly funded sector in Northern Ireland already suffering underinvestment, with a 40 per cent decrease from the ACNI’s exchequer budget for arts and culture in Northern Ireland over the last ten years (ACNI, 2022, p.4). The lack of public funding is highlighted by comparison with the Welsh and Scottish arts and culture budgets, which were found in 2017 to be over twice those of Northern Ireland’s budget when expressed as per capita figures (FactCheckNI, 2019). This is partly due to the value of grant in aid determined by the Barnett formula, which is calculated against what is spent by the UK Government per capita (Cheung, 2020).

Interestingly, in terms of cultural spend the Northern Ireland Executive has marginally more control than Scotland or Wales. However, since culture sits under the DfC there was also real fear that the initial COVID-19 recovery package for culture would not fully filter through to the sector and instead be used for housing or other areas. Against this context, the mobilisation of networks of influence became vital from the initial response to the lockdown measures and some perceived ACNI’s response was far too slow. Indeed, one interviewee stated that ‘the uncertainty that it’s caused has really made planning impossible’. Coupled with fears about the direction of the CRF and a decision-making vacuum, this became a strong mitigating factor in the galvanisation of several networks of influence from the culture sector itself. Some of these networks existed prior to the pandemic but others developed as a direct result. However, what is significant in policy terms is that they became lobby groups directly feeding evidence and recommendations into the DfC.²

The shift in relationship between the cultural sector and policy was also noticeable in some local authorities. Significantly, Belfast City Council changed their policy direction, bringing in a directly funded bursary scheme for artists which was not based on project outcomes. Instead, the Creative Practitioners Bursary scheme offered a £10,000 grant to ten individual artists for one year to support their practice (Journal of Music, 2021). The initial grant was oversubscribed, and was eventually distributed to five musicians and five creative practitioners across various art forms. While the direct state funding of artists without specific output requirements is not new, it is increasingly rare within arm’s length bodies in the UK (Jackson and Devlin, 2005; Jones, 2019). The DfC has taken on elements of the model for national rollout through the ACNI after consultation with Belfast City Council, although specific conditions relating to output remain for national schemes (ACNI, 2022).

The pandemic brought closer consultation and collaboration between policy-makers and the cultural sector in Northern Ireland, characterised by the development of a cultural taskforce. The Arts Collaboration Network (ABNI) had been lobbying during the early stages of the pandemic for this form of action (ABNI, 2020). In summer 2021, the taskforce was formed by the DfC, comprising sector representatives of organisations and freelancer communities, and with the goals of formulating recommendations for opening up the cultural and heritage sectors in the short term and the production of a cultural strategy for Northern Ireland in the medium to long term (DfC, 2021a). Through an intensive consultation period with various organisations, institutions, networks and individuals, the taskforce published a report with nine evidence-based recommendations for policy (DfC, 2021b) The main focus of this report highlighted the interconnections between freelance creative practitioners and the health of the wider cultural ecology in Northern Ireland. As a result, its recommendations are practitioner focused and deal with long-standing issues around inaccessible and inflexible funding (p.18). This approach was notably different to that of the DCMS but had similarities with the general consensus in both the Welsh and Scottish Governments’ commitments to freelancers and individuals through more collaborative policy-making. This closer engagement with decision-makers and successful lobbying for more experimental and risk-taking investment has led to schemes such as the £4.7m Future Screens Northern Ireland Art Works programme, which aims to increase the attraction and retention of creative workers in local arts organisations by creating three-year posts (Moore, 2022).

Policy, rhetoric and Westminster

The timeline and accounts of the devolved nations above recognise the dominant role of government in Westminster. It sets levels of budgets and direction of travel for policy approaches and fiscal interventions which were distributed by the devolved and local governments and arm’s-length bodies. It also offered guidance from newly established bodies such as the Cultural Renewal Taskforce, with some variations in the timing of restrictions and in the distribution and allocation of funds. While at the time of writing the efficacy of both process and outcome for the arts and cultural sector is still being evaluated, within the moment these interventions received intense scrutiny and prompted debates on social media and within sector publications, which we argue are indicative not only of policy rationale but of rhetoric. Amid the eddies of uncertainty and continual pressure of funding applications for stabilisation and recovery funding from national and local sources, certain discursive moments rose to the surface which revealed prevailing attitudes and tensions concerning the value of arts, creativity and culture within national public life. These were articulations of crisis, but like the outcries and movements coalescing around the contemporaneous activism of Black Lives Matter, following the murder of George Floyd, and the toppling statuary and culture battles pitched against the National Trust (see, for example, Henley, 2020; Aaronovitch, 2021; The Guardian, 2021; Adesina, 2022), these mediated moments punctured any sense of coherent and consensual national policy for the arts and cultural sector in England, despite the vital importance and magnitude of the CRF and other public funds.

For example, the Arts Council England’s Emergency Fund scheme, rapidly established within weeks after the first lockdown, included the earmarking of £90m out of £160m for its national portfolio, the organisations who are in receipt of regular funding from the arm’s-length body. This provoked debates about the fairness of the funding formula and eligibility criteria, and accusations that these favoured trickle-down economics which neglected organisations and places outside of the regular funding ringfence (Hill, 2020). Similarly, the announcement of the CRF scheme was accompanied by a mis-stepped statement of commitment by the UK Secretary of State to prioritise the (predominantly London-based) institutions who were ‘the crown jewels of our national life’ (Evans, 2020). Such utterances opened old wounds about the metropolitan bias of arts funding, but also represented concerns for the precarious position of creative freelancer ecologies who were perceived to be doubly neglected by general fiscal policy and targeted sector funds (Thompson, 2020). This concern seemed justified as the pandemic wore on, when those responsible for these policies appeared to undermine the case for sector support further. In October 2020, a poorly considered campaign to encourage people to retrain in digital technologies featured an image of a ballet dancer with the caption ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber’, causing acute embarrassment to Secretary of State Oliver Dowden (Bakare, 2020) and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, to back-track on comments about adaptation for survival (Snow, 2020). Meanwhile, those who received CRF funding were required to share assets across their social media channels, publicly thanking the government for support through a #HereForCulture hashtag, and tagging arm’s-length bodies, the Treasury and the DCMS (Arts Council England, n.d.).

Responses from within arts commentary showed the exasperation of a sector who was watching its business model slip through its fingers. At times those with leadership roles seemed to simply misunderstand how creative production works, for example, underestimating the lead time for ‘opening up’ required for theatres and performing arts in recovery roadmaps (Billington, 2020), or providing cripplingly delayed and inadequate policy levers to help festivals and events with cancellation insurance (Jowett, 2022). The importance of arm’s-length bodies in providing expertise and relationship management at a local level, in partnership with local government arts officers, anchor institutions and local networks, was underlined by the frustration with centralised policy, as discussed in Chapter 5.

As the pandemic progressed, Westminster turned to policies for regeneration and economic recovery, which aimed to address geographical inequalities in productivity under the banner of the idea of levelling up (DLUHC, 2022). A cluster of funds for capital projects and infrastructure investment was brought together under this agenda, organised by place-based eligibility criteria and prioritising projects with culture and heritage themes. The rationale for allocation of funding shifted from the need to stabilise a critically undermined arts and cultural sector to the leverage that arts and culture can provide in aiding place recovery:

Furthermore, the renewed focus on place, signalled also in the criteria of CRF allocation, was identified in the Levelling Up White Paper as a requirement for delivery by Arts Council England, who were compelled to increase the number of sites for targeted investment in their Priority Places scheme, from the fifty-four identified by their Delivery Plan to 109 local authority areas, all outside of Greater London (ACE, 2022; DLUHC, 2022). While addressing long-standing issues of place inequality in arts investment in ‘left behind’ places, this was a clear example of centralised government intervention with ramifications for the sanctity of the arm’s-length decision-making of Arts Council England.

Implications and conclusion

As outlined above, the unfolding timeline of the pandemic shows the unevenness and fragmentation of decision-making and policy interventions across the UK, at times rapid and timely but often frustratingly delayed. The waves and spikes of coronavirus cases driven by new variants were interwoven with shifting public health restrictions and fiscal policies, in attempts to control the spread of the virus and mitigate its impacts on the nations’ economies. For creative workers, organisations and arts leaders this meant successive appraisal and reappraisal of business models, audience confidence, operational structures and value propositions, plus continuous lobbying and bidding for emergency funding. For policy-makers this meant decisions on the borrowing and distribution of public spending, making calls on what levels of attrition were palatable among the hardest-hit sectors and the forms of mitigation that would protect both publics and economic futures. It also repositioned the role of expertise and evidence, within a climate of suspicion of the former and cynicism about the latter, following the clamouring rise of ‘fake news’ and ‘culture wars’ in post-EU-referendum UK.

The policy responses that emerged over the course of the pandemic demonstrate different approaches and capabilities within statecraft at national, regional and local levels. They reveal dissonance between public health strategies, economic policy and the mitigation of the impact of these strategies on the arts and cultural sector. However, commonalities between the four nations’ responses can be characterised broadly within the following categories:

• Unprecedented injections of funds to secure the survival of the sector through emergency and recovery funding primarily at the national level, but also locally.
• Relaxed criteria for eligibility and use of funds, although with anomalies and controversy for freelancers and for prioritising places.
• Policy interventions to support innovation and experimentation with new business models – e.g. hybrid delivery, commercialisation of streaming and other assets.
• Ad hoc strategies repurposing arts and cultural activities and spaces to cater for new needs and values revealed by the pandemic – e.g. Cultural Care Kits, food banks and ‘Nightingale Courts’ in theatres.
• Policies that continue to instrumentalise the value of culture and attach it to other policy objectives – e.g. levelling up, creative improvement districts, local high street recovery plans.

There were variations however, which we argue reflect the distinct policy assemblages (Prince, 2010) which advocate and mediate specific rationales for decision-making, and which have direct and indirect consequences for cultural and creative industries. At different moments in the pandemic these rationales were drawn on and instantiated within policy guidance, such as the levelling up prospectus, and interacted with local recovery plans which highlighted the role of cultural and creative industries in attracting inward investment and agglomeration. The turmoil of the pandemic has also brought together, or perhaps more aptly collapsed the boundaries between, discrete rationales for cultural policy-making. For example, the aspirations of the devolved nations for UBI for artists prioritise particular rationales for policy interventions within creative and cultural industries that were embedded in their policy assemblages, even when frustrated by the centralised control from Westminster. Ultimately, COVID-19 proved to be a device for revealing the divergence of cultural governance across the regions and nations of the United Kingdom, as well as the unequal capacity of different places to support strategies for recovery.