Martin Tod

One of the most staggering moments of last Thursday’s full meeting of the County Council was when Ken Thornber announced that he intended to go ahead with the transfer of the Tower Arts Centre to King School without a business plan.

He explained that he would not be looking for a ‘business plan’ from Kings School for the Tower Arts Centre – but rather a ‘business case’. And then, to the amazement of most of the Councillors who attended the Hampshire Action Team (HAT) meeting on November 8, 2007 to review the current proposed plan, he went on to say that the presentation made at that meeting counted, in his view, as a ‘business case’.

Except that there was no serious “business case” presented to the Hampshire Action Team committee for Winchester.

So either Ken has been misinformed. Or he intends to transfer the Tower to Kings School without any proper evaluation.

Given the way the original proposal was put together, I strongly suspect the latter.

The County Council issued a press release about the future of the Tower Arts Centre – which is remarkable for what it doesn’t say – as well as what it does say.

The County Council says:

Leader of Hampshire County Council Ken Thornber said: ‘We have a very real demographic pressure in Adult Services. The number of vulnerable adults in Hampshire is continually growing year on year. We need to ensure we have the resources to be able to support them and provide for their care needs – this is a statutory responsibility that the County Council has, as well as the duties to look after children and young people and the environment.
‘This pressure has meant that I have had to ask all departments within the County Council to make budget reductions and savings in order for us to meet these responsibilities and indeed our duty of care. This includes the Recreation and Heritage Department which incorporates arts, and they too have to make their share of savings.

What they don’t say:

According to the latest figures, Hampshire County Council spends less on social services per head of population than any other county council in the country. They are in the bottom 20% of spending on adult social care.
The Tower represents less than 0.02% of total County Council funding and 0.3% of the culture budget. Despite receiving the lowest county council subsidy and the highest contribution from a district authority, the Tower is being cut harder than any other Hampshire County Council owned Arts Centre. All other arts centres are being given time to develop alternative funding.

There have been a few attempts to use the analysis in Caroline Felton’s report on the Tower Arts Centre to argue that a small minority of users make up a disproportionately large proportion of visits to the tower – and that therefore it does not deserve public funding – most memorably by Conservative City Councillor Harry Verney at the public meeting in the Guildhall.

Unfortunately, these attempts are wrong – or, to put it more charitably, based on a superficial estimate of how the numbers are calculated.

The analysis was based on the statistics in the Tower’s database, but there are two groups of people who aren’t counted under this system:

• Guests of the person buying the ticket.
  When I buy tickets for Michaela and I to go to the Tower, that counts as two visits in my name. If I bought tickets for a group of six people (even if we all settled up later), that counts as six visits in my name.
• Some of the people who pay cash.
  Most people who pay cash get entered in the database. However, if someone arrives late, or if it’s one of the big youth rock events where people pay on the door, then their purchase may not get entered in the database.

Including both of these factors significantly increases the number of people using the Tower and dramatically reduces (by a factor or two or more) the proportion of visits made by the most active users of the Tower.