What’s your evidence? Responding to the government consultation on culture and sport

Jasmine Donahaye

It’s rare that a government announcement can be genuinely moving, but the recent declarations on culture policy by the Minister for Culture and Sport made me a little tearful.

I am referring to the new Welsh Government, in which the Minister for Culture and Sport is for the first time a Cabinet-level role.

This in itself signals there’s something more than political rhetoric in the declaration that ‘in 10 years time, Wales will be a nation where culture and sport are not seen as optional extras, but as an essential part of national life’.

Certain phrases in the press release in June – for example a belief in ‘the power of culture and sport to transform lives’ and a determination ‘to build a Wales where creativity thrives’ – sound genuinely hopeful and inspiring.

I have no particular view on this statement as it pertains to sport, but I have a strong response to the position on culture: it feels like recognition and validation of our collective importance as writers and artists. I confess that reading it made me feel, as they say, seen.

To me, the centrality of culture to a healthy, thriving, functioning society is self-evident and inarguable, as is the necessity of public funding to support it. Yet in recent years, to make any claim like that publicly has felt like mounting a hopeless rearguard action. Of course that’s not true just for Wales: political support for public funding of the arts is in retreat much more widely.

In Wales we’ve been on the back foot for decades, clamouring to retain ever-diminishing resources in competition with urgent budget priorities like health and education. Those are impossible conditions in which to mount a defence of funding for culture.

And yet because of the financial corset in which Wales struggles to breathe, cultural organisations have increasingly had to frame their provision with misshapen ‘value for money’ measurements in order to justify financial support.

Now, suddenly, this has apparently all changed.

In my first joyful reaction to the news, I wondered whether other countries might follow Wales’s lead. But once those warm feelings wore off, I began to wonder what a policy statement like this might really mean in practice.

Fortunately, we can all help determine the answer to that question, because there is a public consultation on the new policy on culture and sport, and we are invited – individuals, organisations, ‘stakeholders’ (ych a fi) and beneficiaries – to respond.

The emphasis in the consultation is on evidence. As the consultation document explains: ‘We are particularly interested in evidence that helps us understand what is working, what is fragile, what is missing, and what could be scaled or strengthened with the right support.’ The guidance on how to respond also stresses providing ‘evidence that is clear about what action is needed, who needs to be involved, what government can do differently, and how progress could be measured’.

Clearly if we want to influence the direction this takes in practice, how we respond to the consultation needs to be more robust than opinion: lived experience, yes, but informed by evidence and understanding.

I am a writer, and I work with writers, so my interest is in what it means specifically for us – and I wonder, with a certain amount of trepidation, how writers might respond to the consultation, and what evidence about literature and publishing might be given weight.

One of the key areas that the call for evidence document asks about is the current situation, and where there are the most significant evidence gaps.

Although there have been occasional exercises in information-gathering about writers by various literary organisations, their reach is limited, and the results have certainly not been representative.

As writers we have no representative body to communicate what we want and need, what the gaps are as we see them, nor what our priorities might be. It’s no surprise that we have not organised ourselves this way, really: we’re a disparate bunch of mouthy folk with a lot of diverging opinions and writing practices, with relatively little in common except that we write, and seek to communicate what we write.

With no collective mechanism to communicate our needs, we need to do this individually, or else others will do so on our behalf, possibly representing their own organisational priorities rather than our interests.

Based on some twenty-five years of working with writers, publishers and literary organisations, I’d venture to say that on the whole we are not particularly well informed about one another. Writers in particular often operate in the dark about how publishing works, and about how literary and publishing organisations are funded and what their roles are.

This gap in knowledge is not limited to Wales. I have found the same is true for writers I’ve worked with throughout the UK and in the US, Canada, Israel and elsewhere. Nor is such information easy to access.

Lacking that knowledge, we often have expectations that are not met, and can’t be met. While some writers raise legitimate concerns about literary organisation and publishers and funding decisions, many level criticisms that are misplaced.

In the context of Wales in particular, the gap in knowledge has been exposed every time that there have been cuts in public funding, whether for the Books Council or by the Books Council, or, for example, when Literature Wales was in the cross-hairs back in 2017.

Doing damage

I worry therefore whether we might miss the opportunity that this consultation offers – or, worse, whether we might we end up inadvertently doing damage to ourselves as writers, and to publishers and funded literary bodies as well.

Richard Lewis Davies’s article ‘For love and money’ in Nation Cymru on the 11th of August was an instructive intervention in this respect, detailing the realities of publishing, particularly the realities of book production costs and payments to authors. I think it’s also instructive for those who don’t write for a living to see the reality of author income as detailed in earlier articles by Julie Brominicks and Gosia Buzzanca, to which Richard’s article responds.

We need more of this kind of information in the public domain, so that we can make a better case for ourselves individually and collectively as part of this consultation, but also so that we can develop a more constructive and robust way of dealing with the challenges we face as writers in Wales.

We have time, because the consultation doesn’t close until December, and I hope that we might have some public exchange about it before then.

Of course the remit of this consultation is much wider than literature: I am focused here on writing and publishing, but the policy encompasses all of culture and sport, and there are many strands within these areas that are equally important.

Disquiet

The government has laid out a grand vision, and yet I have a niggling disquiet about it, and that is because of the possible meanings of its link to health. Specifically, it is consulting on its ‘new, ambitious strategy for culture and sport in Wales, in order to design a system at the heart of government where they play a key role in preventing and treating illness, driving economic growth, and contributing to a prosperous future for every community’. While I enthusiastically agree with ‘the power of culture and sport to transform lives’, I am uneasy about the implications behind the stated belief about the power of culture ‘to contribute to the vision of moving towards a preventative health agenda to place our Health Service on a more sustainable footing’.

I want to believe that this means we need the arts, including literature, in order to be healthy in a holistic sense: to foster better mutual understanding; to expand our knowledge; to be surprised and stimulated and moved; to see our experiences reflected, and to engage with the experiences of those who differ from us.

That all helps to support social cohesion, too, lessening tension, misunderstanding and cultural conflict. It also supports mental and physical wellbeing (and, as a consequence, that elusive goal of governments, increased economic productivity). But the intention of ‘a progressive increase in arts, culture and sport funding, tied to a wider shift to preventative health and wellbeing activity across government’ has set off an alarm bell for me.

If what this means is that writers and artists and arts organisations have to produce in the service of a social need like health, rather than on our own terms, we are heading for a great deal of instrumentalist bother.

Make a living

I was recently interviewed by Hao Nguyen for his ‘How I Make Money Writing’ Substack publication, and looking through his archive of interviews with writers in the UK, the US and elsewhere, it’s clear that most do not primarily make a living directly from writing. Some of it is from writing-related work, and much of it from work that has nothing to do with writing at all.

As I indicate in my own interview (published next month), this is true of me too, and I don’t see this as a problem in itself, so long as work to support writing doesn’t end up entirely taking the place of writing.

But too often it does, and that’s why for me, and for many writers I know, the most precious resource is funding that supports paid time to write. Whether it is to release you for a period from the hustle of finding work, or from your job or jobs, or from caring responsibilities, support in the form of paid time to write is something that almost every writer needs at some point in their writing life.

In Wales we lost that as a resource years ago when Literature Wales cut its bursary scheme, and I believe that if the new policy on culture is to be worth anything for writers, something better than that scheme needs to be developed. I don’t mean one bursary scheme that has to be all things for all writers and address all social inequalities. I mean three bursary schemes, which would support and enhance a thriving literary culture, and at the same time address under-representation within it. That means a bursary scheme for new writers, a bursary scheme for emerging writers, and a bursary scheme for established writers.

Benefits

Sometimes the benefits of this kind of support aren’t evident until years after the fact. But none of it is wasted, whether or not it results in a tangible publication or performance. That’s because writing in most genres entails imaginative engagement with others’ experiences, worldviews and positions, and that in itself is one of the reasons that literature produced on its own terms is essential to a healthy society.

The very act of writing, of imagining through the written word, is an act of stepping beyond the limits of your own view. To support and enhance the capacity to imagine how the world looks to someone else: what a gift that would be for our angrily polarised, hurt and suffering society.

If you’re interested in exploring ways that we might foster some public exchange about these questions among writers – new, emerging or established – please get in touch with me.

If you want to contribute to the consultation, here’s the link.

The article was first published on Jasmine’s substack

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