Its also worth remembering what’s unique about arts work, that will help your case

• Your arts work impacts directly on local people. Local people often shape the work
• Councils believe a quality of life is important to local people – your work contributes to that
• The arts creates an emotional response – its what makes us human
• Generally speaking, small budgets but high impact
• Arts services are good at levering additional finance to support services.
  A national study last year by nalgao concluded that for every £1 spent on arts, an additional £3.33 is raised in leverage
• The arts impacts on important local agendas and crosscutting agendas regionally and nationally (health, young people, education, public order, regeneration, transportation, the environment, tourism & visitor perception, and so on) – it makes people feel good about their area and improves the quality of life for communities
• The arts are often delivered in partnership with other agencies
• The arts offer opportunities for people to make choices
• The arts can help put over a message about Council priorities – green issues, for example
• There is an economic impact of cultural industries (and is a growing industrial sector nationally)
• There is a high social impact of arts and culture (ref. R. Florida & R. Puttran)

B.6 How the arts delivers Local Strategic Partnerships,
Community Plans and Local Area Agreements

Local Strategic Partnerships
are non-statutory bodies, which bring together key partners in an area; these partnerships cover a number of different strands of activity, addressing the area’s health and wellbeing, economic priorities, protection of natural resources, community safety, or youth engagement. For example, there may be a “safer and stronger” focus, which will have a number of different partnerships working together to deliver community development programmes, such as crime reduction, cross-generation awareness, and the like.

The arts may find a natural home within one strand or another, but it will contribute in partnership across different strands; the structure will vary with different authorities. Arts participative projects are often contributing to the ideals of “safer communities”, or “social cohesion” which are important priorities of local government.

By supporting local participation in the arts, such as banner-making, village maps, or youth theatre, your work is bringing people together, often across generations, reducing their sense of isolation, and fear of, or engagement in, anti-social behaviour. Similarly, support for your creative industries, by building up local data, supporting retail opportunities or developing niche networks of arts providers will impact on the economic growth strand of your LSP. It helps to make the officers responsible for the strands you can work within, aware of what you do. Again, work through your line manager on this.

Courtesy: Bodies in Flight

Community Plans
are similar in structure, but are often more visionary, i.e. they look to the future to set a path for how an area will develop over the next 5 to 10 years. They will be agreed, again, by a number of local public, private, voluntary and community agencies that you can find common ground with. Community Plans are seen as the trunk of the strategic Plan “tree” in local authorities; all other strategies, in theory, spring off the trunk.
Common Themes of Community planning in different authorities will be:

• Children and young people
• Health and Well-being
• Community Safety
• Improved access to employment
• Improved access to education and learning
• Improved Housing
• Creating an environment where people want to live

Local Area Agreements (LAAs)

Are three year agreements, based on local Sustainable Community Strategies, that set out the priorities for a local area agreed between Central Government, represented by the Government Office, and a local area, represented by the local authority and other key partners through Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP).

The Arts can play a major role in helping to shape places and deliver positive outcomes for local communities.  Arts Council England is therefore pleased to have a legislative duty to co-operate in the drafting and delivery of new style Local Area Agreements.

Arts Council England acknowledges the importance of Local Area Agreements (LAAs) along with Sustainable Community Strategies as the key documents setting and describing delivery of the collective vision for an area. Arts Council England believe the arts are intrinsically and instrumentally important in all areas, although the role they play will vary according to local need and priority. 

There are four principal ways Arts Council England would like to see the Arts profiled within Local Area Agreements:

1) Arts delivering on Broader Priorities

Currently around England the arts are being used as a key instrument to deliver broader outcomes in many LAAs.  Examples include:

• Increasing the number of volunteers
• Increasing the number of young people who obtain accredited learning outcomes
• Increasing physical activity levels
• Engagement of older people in learning
• Developing an enterprise culture
• Improving the public realm
• Positive activities for young people

2) Use of new national arts datasets for optional Local Performance Indicators: ArtsMark and Young People’s Arts Awards

3) Use of Indicator NI110 - Young people’s participation in positive activities and/or Use of Indicator NI6 - Participation in regular volunteering

• Cultural activities account for a large proportion of the regular volunteering in England.  Whilst the majority of engagement is currently around sport, the arts still play a significant part and there is significant further potential.  For LSPs who see volunteering as a key tool in building community cohesion, there is significant scope for engagement with the arts. This indicator will be measured through a new dataset.

4) Use of Indicator NI11 – Engagement in the Arts

Go to next Section B page