Following the launch of their Cultural Industries Action Plan back in March, I reached out to the Labour Party to discuss how Outdoor Arts can contribute to their Plan. I subsequently met with Paul Hillier on 10th May. Paul is the cultural and creative industry outreach lead for the party’s External Relations team.

We primarily discussed Labour’s plan to enable every primary school child to experience the arts, and how Outdoor Arts is best placed to achieve this. Paul was very interested in working with our sector to meet this plan – the majority of our festivals are free-to-attend with plenty of participatory opportunities. Paul understood that we are very good value for money for delivering creative experiences to a cross section of underserved communities. Let’s hope that if Labour forms a government, they will support our sector to enable us to do this better and bigger.

Paul and I also spoke about:

  1. Returning the arts as a core subject in schools.
  2. The need for Local Authority funding framework to be fixed.
  3. Make it explicit that Theatre Tax Relief can apply to non-ticketed free events and explore how individuals could benefit from this Relief.
  4. How access to the full range of EU funding and markets need to be resolved to increase artform development and touring opportunities.

I have communicated the summary of our engagement to Simon Mellor (Deputy Chief Executive of Arts Council England) and Jen Cleary (Director of Combined Arts). They thanked us and said they recommended us to work with ACE’s team who are leading on engaging with the political parties. I look forward to promoting Outdoor Arts to whichever Government we will end up with. You can also promote your work, and Outdoor Arts to your local MP too. Here’s the link to a toolkit and the value of doing this.

Thank you to everyone who fed information and ideas to my engagement with the Labour Party. Having access to success stories, data and evidence of impact was crucial in making a good pitch, so I urge members to keep on evaluating their work and supply us with reports!

OAUK Members can find the Let’s Talk Resilience blog about doing good evaluation here.

-Sho Shibata, OAUK Director