Should Britain have an OBR for culture?

Sir John Armitt, who is chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, recently argued in the Financial Times for an independent body to oversee Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs, insulating decisions about roads, railways and reservoirs from the short-term pressures of electoral politics.

He wrote: ‘What the country needs is an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) for infrastructure: a credible, independent expert body with clout that reassures investors and tries to stop ministers from making stupid decisions.’

The OBR scrutinises the UK’s public finances independently.

Should culture and the creative industries have something similar – an OBR capable of looking beyond the immediate political horizon?

After all, museums, libraries, arts organisations, creative education, local cultural provision and the wider creative workforce are shaped by decisions whose consequences may take years to become visible. Responsibility for assessing those long-term effects, however, is currently spread across a wide range of institutions. An OBR for culture could take stock of such effects holistically.

Stephen Dobson, director of the Centre for Cultural Value at Leeds University, tells The Art Journal that he sees merit in the idea. He identifies “a significant gap in the UK’s cultural policy landscape” and argues that an OBR-style model could take “a long-term view of the health of the cultural and creative ecosystem, examining the cumulative effects of policy and investment decisions, and providing evidence that is not tied to a particular government, funding programme or electoral cycle”.

The UK is not short of cultural research. The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, Arts Council England, universities, sector bodies and organisations such as the Centre for Cultural Value all contribute to the evidence base. The problem is that the work is spread across organisations with different roles, incentives and funding arrangements.

Dobson notes that Arts Council England is “simultaneously a funder, development agency and policy stakeholder”, meaning it “cannot easily occupy the position of a wholly independent scrutinising body”.

For any new institution to matter, however, it would need more than a worthy mission statement. “A cultural equivalent to the OBR would add value if it had comparable institutional weight, secure long-term funding, access to relevant government data and a formal relationship with Parliament,” Dobson says. “Otherwise, there is a risk of creating another organisation that produces reports without materially changing decisions.”

Alison Cole, director of The Cultural Policy Unit, is also cautious about simply importing the OBR model. The OBR, she argues, works because it has “a very clearly defined statutory function and a relatively narrow remit”. Culture, by contrast, is “broader and more contested, encompassing economic growth, education, place, wellbeing and arguably a wider sense of civic identity, and so the metrics would be far more difficult to define and assess”.

Cole suggests that an independent body could produce regular “state of culture” assessments, examining “the long-term consequences of funding and regulatory decisions” and improving the evidence base available to central and local government.

“One of the recurring themes in our work at The Cultural Policy Unit has been the importance of taking a genuinely long-term view of cultural infrastructure,” she says. “Whether we’ve been looking at libraries, the BBC, museums or local cultural provision, the challenge is often that policy is developed in institutional silos rather than with an understanding of how different parts of the ecosystem reinforce one another over decades.”

Crowds outside Tate Modern. Cultural policy experts say Britain lacks an independent body able to assess the long-term health of the cultural ecosystem, from museums and libraries to creative education and local arts provision. Photo: Tomasz Zielonka via Unsplash

That point connects closely with the view of Elisabetta Lazzaro, professor of creative and cultural industries management and head of the Arts & Creative Ecosystems research & innovation cluster at the University for the Creative Arts. Rather than a body that floats above the sector, she argues for one that connects what already exists.

“Its value would be as connective tissue: strengthening the existing ecosystem of cultural research rather than sitting above it,” she says.

Lazzaro frames the issue “less as creating an ‘OBR for culture’ than as addressing a problem of institutional memory”.

“The UK already has a rich cultural research landscape: government, the ONS, universities, funders, arm’s-length bodies, sector organisations and independent researchers all generate valuable evidence,” she says. “The problem is less the absence of research than its fragmentation and discontinuity.”

Research is often commissioned around particular policy questions or funding cycles. Datasets and initiatives can come and go. A useful institution, in this view, would not simply produce more evidence. It would preserve and connect what already exists, identify gaps, sustain continuity between policy cycles and make accumulated knowledge easier for governments and the sector to use.

The stakes are far from abstract. “The consequences of decisions about funding, infrastructure, skills, education, participation or working conditions may take years to emerge,” says Lazzaro. “Equally, cultural capacity can be lost much faster than it can be rebuilt. We therefore need the ability to look beyond individual programmes, annual funding rounds and electoral cycles, and understand cumulative effects.”

Any new organisation attempting that task would also have to avoid measuring only what is easiest to count. Dobson argues that economic output, audience numbers and employment are important, but “they do not provide a complete account of cultural health”. A long-term body, in his view, would need to consider “participation, cultural opportunity, creative education, workforce conditions, organisational resilience, local cultural infrastructure, diversity, civic value and the vitality of cultural life in different places”.

Lazzaro makes a similar point. “The important thing is therefore not to create a single ‘cultural GDP’ or health index, but to develop a more sophisticated and longitudinal understanding of how these different dimensions interact,” she says. “A cultural ecosystem can appear successful on one measure while becoming fragile on another.”

There is also the question of whether the UK needs a new institution at all. Dobson leaves open the question of institutional form, suggesting that the function could be created through “a properly resourced consortium that connects existing expertise while remaining independent of both government and major funding bodies”.

Internationally, Lazzaro says there are useful examples but no readymade model for the UK to copy. Cultural statistical systems, evidence frameworks, observatories and distributed research infrastructures in the arts and humanities all address parts of the challenge, but none offers a settled template for the kind of long-term evidence infrastructure she envisages. That, she argues, could be an opportunity. Rather than replicate another country’s system, the UK could “bring together some of these principles in a new kind of cultural research infrastructure” that connects existing institutions, sustains evidence over time and provides an independent view of the cumulative condition of the cultural ecosystem.

Such a body would need to be independent enough to scrutinise government policy, while remaining connected to government, researchers and the sector. As Lazzaro puts it, “Independence would be essential, but it should not mean isolation.”