News

Bectu highlights Culture Recovery Fund concerns to Oliver Dowden

12 August 2020

Bectu has written to culture secretary Oliver Dowden outlining challenges theatres and the live events industry are facing despite the Culture Recovery Fund being announced.

Grphic showing photo of Philippa Childs with quote saying: "We must ensure that as well as saving buildings that we also support the creatives and crew that make our culture industries truly world beating."

The money from the package is not due to be released to organisations until October. Applications for the first round of grants, as opposed to loans, opened on Monday (10 August) and applications will be accepted until midday on 21 August.

Head of Bectu Philippa Childs wrote to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to outline a number of pressing challenges these industries – and in turn Bectu – are dealing with as the funding process starts up.

The main concerns Childs highlighted include:

  • Theatres are not halting redundancy consultations as they don’t know if they will be eligible for grants or loans and precisely when the money will be paid out.
  • Large theatres will need more than £3m, the current cap for grants, and so will only be eligible for loans, and the details on how to apply for a loan have not been released.
  • Theatres need a similar insurance guarantee to that provided for film and TV for productions to resume.
  • The focus is for the fund to be used for theatres to “mothball” rather than start planning for future productions.
  • The furlough scheme is coming to an end when the money from the recovery package has still not been made available.
  • There is no guarantee that money from the package will be used to support freelancers who make up a significant amount of the workforce

August payments needed to save jobs

As well as highlighting these key concerns Childs went on to urge that the funding is made available in August, which would allow the sector to “halt redundancies and support their workforce, both employees and freelancers, whilst the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and the Self-employment Income Support Scheme are phased out”.

Providing theatres with this certainty at an earlier stage of the recovery process “would enable them to focus their thinking on the future for their venue and how they might innovate to bring performances back in an imaginative and safe way”, Childs continued.

“Theatre and live events contribute a huge amount to the UK economy and we must ensure that as well as saving buildings we also support the creatives and crew who make our cultural industries truly world beating.”

Official figures from the Office for National Statistics released on 12 August show that cultural activities are deeply constrained compared to other sectors of the recovery that are starting to show signs of recovery.

With social distancing in place and no official date for when theatres and live events can start to conduct indoor performances again, that trend is set to continue.