Birmingham cuts ties with the CBSO
OrchestrasBirmingham city council, which has declared itself bankrupt, will cut grants to its major arts companies by 50 percent this year and 100 percent in the next financial year.
Victims include City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham REP Theatre, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Birmingham Opera Company.
The loss represents about five percent of the orchestra’s budget. Emotionally, however, it severs a tie with the local authority that founded and financed the CBSO in 1920.
The announcement comes on a day when an official report predicts that the Midlands will reap £10 billion over ten years from the opening of the HS2 rail link.
Richard Bratby tweets: ‘Most Birmingham classical music orgs have long seen the way the wind was blowing & planned accordingly but the principle involved – the end of a century of cultural patronage from the City Council – is still deeply regrettable.’
Such a dire situation, the council have supported the CBSO in particular for 105 years! When will councils and other public funders see the return on investment they get on this money. We all know the importance of these organisations not only culturally, but socially, on well being and for sheer entertainment. Even if the councilors don’t, they should surely see the money that get’s put back into the local economy, and would help Birmingham recover!
For clarity, a more comprehensive list of arts organisations that are funded by the council and will experience cuts:
CBSO
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (who receive a small portion of CBSO’s grant)
Birmingham Royal Ballet
Ex Cathedra
B:Music (who run Symphony Hall and Town Hall)
Birmingham Opera Company
Birmingham REP Theatre
IKON Gallery
FABRIC
Sampad
Legacy Centre of Excellence
Excellent point. There is work underway on the economic and social impact of what are being called scale deep businesses. The definition is a business rooted in the place and by doing what they do creating and enabling jobs locally and where the money goes round the local economy 4x. CBSO is such an example.
Is this important? Yes because governments love scale up business- look it up- because they think these high growth ventures create lots of jobs and money. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t but since they plough all the resources to scale up and not scale deep we get situations like the one we have now with cuts to really vitally important organisations- which are also businesses that strengthen the economy.
And no-one mentions the role of the CBSO in the Shireland Academy in an impoverished area of Sandwell……but that is in Birmingham and so perhaps it does not count!
It’s not in Birmingham; as you say, it’s in Sandwell and has quite separate sources of funding.
Under normal circumstances one suspects the Council would have loved to continue contributing, but the usual local government financial woes, with the extra whammy of the gender pay gap compensation payouts a few years ago, make it an obvious axe to fall. As for £10 billion from HS2 to save us – seriously?
Increased prosperity for the region can only be beneficial for the arts, and perhaps – given their recent history of stewardship of the city’s finances – it might be a good thing if relatively little of that money finds its way directly into the Council’s coffers.
But it doesn’t solve the immediate problem.
What were the salaries paid to council members over the years?
Not very much
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/27923/payment_of_allowances_annual_schedule_2022_to_2023.pdf
You need to look behind those, at the salaries of executives…
This raises the whole question of local authorities and how they are governed. Birmingham is only one of several local authorities in dire financial straits just now whose situation is the result of mismanagement by amateur local politicians with personal and political interests over and above serving the people they supposedly represent. A difficult dilemma! Democracy only works if the elected representatives then represent those who elected them rather than their own interests. National government should hold them responsible – except national government is just as corrup! Come the revolution . . . !
Just an ignorant response. Local Govt finances are in disarray because of years of cuts to their funding by Central Govt in an austerity drive combined with increases in need for the provision of social care, emergency housing and special educational needs and other statutory services that local authority budgets have to meet.
It’s only 5% of the budget sure but it’s also 10-15 players’ salaries. Whatever gloss management may come up with this is a catastrophic crisis. We are sh*tting outselves about the future and worried about how our inexperienced new CEO will handle it. Oh and Symphony Hall also receive Council funding so will we even have a Hall to perform in?
The CBSO has faced much bigger shortfalls than this in the past (for instance, at the end of the Rattle era, when the finances were absolutely shot) and has worked hard – and usually successfully – to replace them from other sources. This is a grim situation, for sure, and it’s going to cause painful headaches, but it’s hardly a catastrophe – in the short term at least.
It’s tougher for B.Music because they’re losing about 13% of their income and have historically been weak at fundraising. But whoever ends up running the building they are unlikely to want to lose their single biggest rental client, the one which supplies 25% of their entire rental income, namely the CBSO.
B:Music should be losing less than that. The main part of their BCC grant gets handed by them to the US-owned NEC group (as part of the deal under which the NEC was sold by the council); that amount (£1m+) has been ring-fenced in these proposals so isn’t affected.
Thank you Stephen, that is reassuring (kind of), though I can’t imagine how we are going to continue given how hard everything was even even before the cut. A number of us wish you were still here to get us through this.
The destruction of local democratic traditions is something we will all regret. The historic pay settlement won’t mean that future school dinner supervisors will paid equally with bin persons, because the reality is that emptying bins is job that requires greater reward to motivate people to do it. It was the folly of job graders and the institutional stupidity of our judiciary that has in large part created this situation along with the short sightedness of trades Union litigants who whilst gaining remuneration for a few have consequently removed work for a great many more.
10 billion worth of economic uplift promised but the HS2 Birmingham link is costing 65 billion. The country is living on borrowed money and growth is not enough to offset the debt. Birmingham is a Labour council by the way. The financial problems go well beyond party politics.
Yes. Most recent data showed a shrinkage in the UK economy (aka “recession”). How’s that Brexit working for ya?
Well, since you ask, still outperforming the Eurozone’s biggest economy, for what it’s worth.
But not the Eurozone as a whole…………….and one country’s data (albeit a big country) isn’t about the economic effect of Brexit on the British economy. Where’s the “deal” with the US? Nowhere.
5% of their budget shortfall can easily be made up through clever fund raising. More and more British arts organizations have moved towards American style fund raising to keep themselves flush. Even the French are doing it now. As an example, a large portion of the formerly heavily state funded Musee D’Orsay’s budget now comes in from American donors who are able to deduct as the money goes into an American 501(c)(3) not for profit called “The American Friends of the Musee D’Orsay”.
“Even the French are doing it now” – excellent! But you’re right. There is an “American Friends of the Royal Philharmonic” which has helped fund two US tours in two years (with Petrenko). Lovely to see them here.
Birmingham is only one of several Councils to fail. Shropshire is on the brink, having to find £60m of cuts in the coming year, having already realised £30m in the current one.
It’s due to 80% of its annual government funding being required to be spent on social care, leaving 20% for all other Council services.
Others will shortly follow.
Meanwhile is this a good use of diminishing funds?:
“The CBSO Youth Orchestra musicians are working with a creative team to develop a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony that draws out the inherent emotions and themes present in the music.The concert itself is likely to include elements of movement, lighting, and creative staging that help to highlight these emotions and themes.”
I went to the concert Excellent playing and a intriguing new percussion concerto
The concept was rather an anticlimax after the first
It basically lighting some I must admit quite atmospheric it neither added anything or distracted
Maybe the cuts will see this new concept shelved
Utterly disgraceful. Bloody useless Labour council. I bet they find money for diversity projects
Obviously, serious and worrying circumstances all round.
I wonder if there is anything that can be done, collectively or otherwise to help improve the situation for the CBSO and the other Arts Organisations in Birmingham?
Despicable.
Maybe the orchestra can now drop th e ‘City of’ and become the Royal Birmingham Symphony Orchestra after ll we have the Duke of Edinburgh as the patron