Imagine a small music venue. There are many such places dotted around the UK, the sort of spot where you might catch an up-and-coming band, some folk or jazz, the occasional standup comedian. I’m thinking of a real venue, capacity 500, in the south of England. There’s nowhere else to see live music in this town, and it’s been going for decades. Only it may not be around for much longer. It’s just had its electricity bill, from the largely state-owned French company EDF (fill in your own ironies). That bill is 640% higher than the last one.
There’s no energy price cap for businesses such as this – that’s just for households. They’ve pulled in a broker to try to get them a better rate, without success. The extra £31,000 for putting the lights on is more than what the boss is paid. They’re worried that if they go public, the landlord and their suppliers will panic and pull the plug. Which really would be the end.
One possible solution is to increase ticket prices from £8 to £12.50. Another, to put up a pint of lager from £5.70 to £8.20. But the last thing any of them wants to do is pass on costs to an audience who are already tight for cash, with inflation at a 40-year high and the real value of workers’ pay falling at its fastest for 20 years.
But what’s to do? Covid was a nightmare for venues such as this, but the government did eventually step in with the cultural recovery fund. Mark Davyd, who runs the Music Venue Trust, told me that 50 to 100 members of his network are facing a “frankly imminent crisis” – one that is even more threatening than the pandemic, because this is happening completely outside the political conversation, which is focused on household bills. “It is oddly and tragically likely to close more music venues than Covid,” he told me.
It’s not just small music venues. Thousands of small businesses and shops are going to be clobbered by massive energy bills and the result will be job losses and high streets yet more desolate than they are now. Let’s bring it back to the arts, though: the Lowry, Salford’s arts centre, has already gone public with its tripled energy bill – pushing £1m. There’s a similar picture at Sadler’s Wells in London, Britain’s national dance theatre, where it has just heard its energy costs are also likely to triple, to £900,000. That’s on top of a dozen years of standstill funding – which in real terms means a cut in its Arts Council grant of around 25%. It will be happening all around the country, and to your local arts centre, unless it is lucky enough to be locked into a long-term deal that doesn’t expire yet, or is part of a government energy-purchasing scheme.
“Frankly, we are looking at ticket prices. And that’s difficult,” Sir Alistair Spalding, the theatre’s boss, told me. He’ll probably hike up the top end of big popular shows, leaving the cheaper tickets be – but even that policy, progressive in its way, letting the rich absorb the cost, is not an ideal vibe for a supposedly inclusive, welcoming theatre.
Inflation and its consequences, as they filter through cultural organisations, will hit people hard: lives actually do get worse, more impoverished, when the Christmas show at your local theatre, a treasured family ritual, becomes unaffordable; when your teenager can’t watch bands in her home town; when the museum gets shabbier and cuts its opening hours and there’s nowhere warm and free to take the kids for a few activities. When arts organisations are under this much pressure, whole communities suffer.
Of course, the long tail of Covid is making this much worse. Staff are exhausted by the constant crisis mode. Workforces are still getting hit by outbreaks. For many organisations, ticket sales have yet to recover fully. No one really knows if a whole tranche of people will ever kick the comforting Netflix habit and venture out again. The Proms, for example, are not alone in being around 20% down on sales compared with 2019. Audiences are also booking tickets later, hedging their bets. One folk musician, who’s embarking on a tour this autumn, tells me that venues are almost begging people to book early. Without enough advance sales they can be pushed into cancelling shows for fear that they won’t make back their costs.
It’s not just energy bills that are going through the roof: at Theatr Clwyd, in Mold, Flintshire, Steve Eccleson is head of workshop, in charge of building sets. He is staring inflation in the face through the huge hike in the cost of materials. An 8ft x 4ft MDF sheet has gone from £6.79 in July 2020 to £17 in January this year. Plywood has leapt from £29.98 a sheet in January this year to £43.75 in June. The tubing they use for scaffolding was £17.84 in 2020, but £64.90 now. That means the cost of a set – say, for the theatre’s new musical, The Famous Five – is up by between 30% and 40%. The theatre is also at the start of a big capital redevelopment, the cost of which Liam Evans-Ford, its executive director, is projecting to go up by 20%, but who knows?
In the long term, there are investments that can be made to mitigate the worst effects of costly energy: insulation, LED lighting, solar panels and the rest. A decade ago Glyndebourne plunged £1m into a wind turbine that, having paid for itself in six years, is shielding it from the current crisis. (At times the opera house does have to buy energy, but it also exports to the grid, meaning it actually benefits from rising prices.)
The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has a £4.3m government grant to help it decarbonise – in the future, its sprawling buildings and historic working machinery will get their energy from a water-source heat pump. Hampshire Cultural Trust, which runs the county’s museums, has used the same grant scheme, designed to decarbonise public buildings, to put solar panels on four of its buildings. In truth, though, this kind of thing could have been done long ago; energy efficiency should have been higher up the political and cultural agenda. (A non-profit, Julie’s Bicycle, has been agitating for increased sustainability in the arts for 15 years.)
The situation, in the short term, demands urgent political attention, and an energy price cap that goes beyond households. The organisations that survive this will be those that ruthlessly adapt, focusing entirely on “how we sustain people – through their souls as well as their stomachs – in difficult times”, as Elizabeth Newman, artistic director of Pitlochry Festival theatre in Perthshire, told me. Sustaining people and giving places identity and pride are precisely what is needed as the country teeters between a pandemic and a recession. The trouble is, it’s just got much harder to do.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
