Why Did the Budget Leave Visual Arts Out of Its Growth Plan?

The Autumn Budget took place a short walk from the Theatre Royal Haymarket in Piccadilly, where James Graham’s The Standard of Living, about John Maynard Keynes, is currently being staged. I wonder whether John Healey has taken the time to see the play. 

Keynes was a pioneering economist who moved between Whitehall and the Bloomsbury circle of artists and writers; both inspired his thinking on public policy. During the Second World War, he chaired the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts before becoming the first chair of the Arts Council in 1946.

Keynesian economics holds that public spending can sustain demand and jobs when private investment falters. Economists working in Keynes' slipstream have argued that the government can act as an early 'angel' investor by taking risks on infrastructure and skills, giving budding innovation the room to grow – the entrepreneurial state.

Healey’s Budget, delivered yesterday, promised “growth in every postcode”. Yet he set out no clear plan for how visual arts might contribute to that growth. In fact, the sector received virtually no mention.

There was not a single mention of the arts, culture or creative industries in his Budget speech. The Treasury’s accompanying document identifies the creative industries as a growth sector, but not until page 114. It details more than £75m for CoSTAR, a network of research and development labs developing technologies for the creative industries, and £20m for a Liverpool campus focused on film, television and gaming. Yet the Budget sets out no dedicated programme for visual arts, equivalent or otherwise.

The omission is striking. The visual arts sit within a much larger creative economy. Provisional estimates from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) put the creative industries’ contribution to UK gross value added at £145.8bn in 2024, or 5.5 per cent of the economy. Their real-term growth was 4.6 per cent over the year, compared with 1 per cent for the UK as a whole. But the figures cover everything from software to advertising and architecture. The department’s headline statistics do not isolate visual arts.

But separate, privately commissioned research enables us to understand the strength and scale of the UK art market. Art Basel and UBS ranked the country second globally in 2025, with sales of $10.5bn, behind the US and ahead of China. While sales rose by just 2 per cent and remained below 2019 levels, and while many UK gallerists detailed a sweep of rising costs for doing business, the report still found a reputed, fertile and internationally-connected market. British art is a small but buoyant sector, primed to achieve more.

"Invest, recruit, expand"

This doesn’t mean British artists have it easy. A 2024 survey by the University of Glasgow’s CREATe centre, commissioned by DACS, found that visual artists whose primary occupation was art had median self-employed earnings of £12,500 a year. More than 80 per cent of respondents described their earnings as unstable or very unstable; artists working several jobs had median earnings of £17,500. The findings are a stark counterpoint to the market’s global ranking, underlining how a buoyant trade can coexist with an endemic culture of insecurity for the people who create the work.

Healey said he wanted businesses to "invest, recruit, expand". He would undoubtedly argue that his measures will aid the sector indirectly. He announced business-rates support for certain retail, hospitality and leisure properties, which could also apply to some gallery premises, depending on their classification – although it is notable that galleries are not actively named in the policy. Healey's measures may ease particular costs for certain people working in art, but they do not amount to a standalone, fully thought-through visual-arts policy.

Budget box of William Gladstone, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times between 1852 and 1882.

Lisa Nandy’s most prominent cultural announcement this autumn was to confirm that national museums in England would remain free to enter. This is welcome, but it is hardly news – it continues a policy introduced in 2001 under New Labour. Free admission protects public access; it does not pay for maintaining buildings, caring for collections or producing exciting new exhibitions. The Museums Association’s 2025–26 members’ survey received 705 responses from people working in or with museums. Fifty-eight per cent said their museum planned service cuts, down from 61 per cent the previous year. Among respondents whose museums faced cuts, 41 per cent anticipated job losses and 35 per cent a reduction in public programming, also lower than the year before. The survey is a snapshot of members’ experiences, not a census of the sector. Yet it still points to significant pressure: a museum sector free at the point of delivery is still a museum sector operating under high stress.

Artists and museums are not asking for a hand-out. But the case for public spending on visual arts is practical. What could targeted investment do? It could repair and upgrade cultural buildings by commissioning construction and specialist conservation work. It could offer paid training in installation, fabrication and collections care that offer open routes into skilled employment. Affordable studios and temporary exhibition spaces could help artists produce and show work, while public commissions and regional programmes could bring activity to places that attract less private investment. These measures could support jobs, skills and local economic life across the UK, and the returns for the Exchequer would surely soon be felt.

"Not sentimentality, but supply-side economics"

That agenda could connect to the Government’s concern about young people and work. Healey’s Budget says ministers will consider Alan Milburn’s interim report on people not in education, employment or training. It also commits £3m to help NEET young people in Plymouth move into the local defence industry. The question for Lisa Nandy’s DCMS is whether visual arts will form part of a similar response. Apprenticeships in a hundred cultural or culture-adjacent jobs could link young people to skilled work. Done well, they could lead to long-term opportunities and help address the creative industries’ longstanding issue with access points.

There is a regional argument, too. In his account of “Manchesterism”, Andy Burnham has argued for public intervention where it can help places set higher ambitions. Public commissioning and regional exhibition programmes could support activity beyond the centres where private money already concentrates. Museums and galleries employ people. They commission, develop and share new work, as well as caring for established collections. The Government has yet to explain how they fit into its place-based growth plans.

Healey called his approach “not sentimentality, but supply-side economics”. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s small print sets out the spending pressure behind that ambition. Its illustrative scenario suggests that unprotected day-to-day spending–just over a quarter of departmental spending–could fall by an average of 2.6 per cent a year in real terms over the final three forecast years. This is not a forecast of cuts to particular departments: budgets beyond 2028–29 have not yet been allocated. The scenario points to a risk of further pressure on DCMS: if increased revenues remain elusive, the department may soon find itself a victim of a new age of Labour austerity.

This would be a myopic decision. The strength of the UK’s art market should qualify visual arts as a credible candidate for a national growth strategy. If “growth in every postcode” is to mean more than a promise, this Labour Government will need to show how the places where art is made, exhibited and encountered can contribute to–and share in–the growth it wants to create.

For the First Annual Report of the Arts Council, on which Keynes served as the first chairman, he wrote: “The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

A government serious about growth should recognise the arts as both an economic asset and a public good. The day is yet to come, but joined-up, serious thinking will perhaps usher it closer to reality.