‘Critical’: sector needs £300m over next decade to survive – report

In the long-term, it calls for £300 million over the next 10 years. This, the submission states, would help around 220 venues that have urgent need. With funding, they would be able to receive an "enabling contribution towards their capital investment project". 

"We would like the Treasury to commit to working with the theatre sector and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to devise long-term funding options and mechanisms to meet the larger capital investment need ahead of the comprehensive spending review in 2025," it adds.

Backing the calls for the funding, Britannia Morton, executive director and co-chief executive of Sadler’s Wells, said investment in "arts infrastructure" was "much needed in theatres and concert halls across the country".

Theatre Royal Plymouth chief executive James Mackenzie-Blackman agreed and told The Stage: "There’s a specific need for urgent capital investment at TRP. We estimate that we need to spend tens of millions of pounds on our two buildings over the next decade. This expenditure is critically important for the long-term health of our charity."

He added: "Given the significantly challenging conditions in which we are operating, we do not have the financial resources to carry out the detailed feasibility work that is required to fully understand our full capital spending requirements. Support from DCMS to help large organisations like ours fully cost their projects would be hugely useful."

Meanwhile, the Lowry chief executive Julia Fawcett said she would like to see "concrete plans to address the need for investment in theatre infrastructure across the country".

"In our case our building is now 25 years old. It is an architectural icon of which we, and the people of Salford, are proud of but much of the main plant has now reached the end of expected life cycles. For us, a £10 million capital investment would be transformative. We are not talking about grand projects here, we are talking about our need to have a building that can operate sustainably, can be fully utilised by its artistic communities and can service the changing needs of audiences," she said.

Fawcett also said she hoped the government would "speak to the idea of multi-year settlements and tangible, intelligent policies that provide sustainable and long-term support for the sector". 

"I really hope that they avoid the trap of the zero-sum game and look at ways to grow the funding pot, not simply redistribute the existing – or even smaller – pot," she said.
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Caroline Routh, executive director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, said funding for capital projects was a "key issue for us".

"We are in a 90-year-old building (converted in 1996) which is also listed and, despite us investing every year in maintenance, our theatre is reaching the end of life in a whole range of aspects which were all installed at the same time. We are about to deliver £1.1 million worth of work to address our most business critical element – thanks to some amazing funders – but that was really hard work to pull together and we had to put all our available reserves into it. We probably need about £5 million to address all the issues we are aware of that could close our building or significantly reduce our programme, and at the moment there is no obvious place where that money could come from," she said. 

In their submission, SOLT and UK Theatre also reiterated their ambition to see every child provided with at least one theatre trip before they leave school.

Initial costings suggested that for approximately 800,000 children a year to visit the theatre, covering transport, theatre tickets and teacher supervision, it would cost a maximum of £42.33 per child, or a total cost of £34 million per year.

However, SOLT and UK Theatre have now watered this down "given the current challenging fiscal environment", and have now suggested "a more affordable interim measure in the form of pilot projects to test the viability of our proposals and develop a programme that could be rolled-out nationally when economic conditions allow". 

The bodies have proposed identifying three towns with "cultural deprivation" within three regional mayoral areas to act as pilot areas over the period of one year at a cost of £1.5 million.   

Mackenzie-Blackman said committing funds to support the work that needs to take place to "reintroduce creativity in our schools" was "urgently required". 

"I genuinely think it’s one of the biggest crises facing the sector," he said.

SOLT and UK Theatre also said they were currently working with members to develop a "proposed set of principles for what good public investment in performing arts looks like". 

"We would like to work with HM Treasury and DCMS to refine and agree these principles so that together we can maximise the power of theatre to be a positive impact on British society," the submission states, adding: "Our priority for government is to strategically review public investment in performing arts in the run up to the comprehensive spending review and collaborate with SOLT and UK Theatre and other stakeholders to co-create principles to guide good investment in the performing arts."