UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy has unveiled a series of measures to boost investment into the country’s arts infrastructure, including a £270 million Arts Everywhere Fund.
Delivering the inaugural Jennie Lee Lecture, named after the UK’s first Arts Minister, at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-Upon-Avon last week, the British Indian Cabinet minister stressed the importance of art and culture that reflected and resonated with all communities of the country.
Nandy said: “It is our firm belief that at the heart of Britain’s current malaise is the fact that too many people have been written off and written out of our national story.
“And this is personal for me. I still remember how groundbreaking it was to watch ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ – the first time I had seen a family like ours depicted on screen not for being Asian (or in my case mixed race) but because of a young girl’s love of football.”
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She called upon the creative industries to show us the full panoply of the world we live in, including the many communities far distant from the commissioning room which is still far too often based in London. The minister stressed the importance of resisting the temptation of seeing the arts as a luxury because the visual arts, music, film, theatre, opera, spoken word, poetry, literature and dance are the “building blocks of our cultural life, indispensable to the life of a nation, always, but especially now”.
She added: “I know it’s been a tough decade. Funding for the arts has been slashed. Buildings are crumbling. And the pandemic hit the arts and heritage world hard.
“And I really believe that the government has a role to play in helping free you up to do what you do best – enriching people’s lives and bringing communities together – so with targeted support like the new £85m Creative Foundations Fund that we’re launching today with the Arts Council we hope that we’ll be able to help you with what you do best.”
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Jennie Lee was born in Fife, Scotland, and was elected Labour MP for North Lanark in 1929 – becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Parliament. She was appointed the UK's first Arts Minister in 1964, then part of the Department of Education and Science, and outlined her vision for accessibility in the arts with the whitepaper ‘A Policy for the Arts, the First Steps (February 1965)’ – the first and only such document.
Nandy described the Arts Everywhere Fund as a fitting legacy for Jennie Lee’s vision to begin to fix the foundations of arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage sector in communities across the country.