Birmingham is bankrupt. That sounds stark to anyone outside Britain’s so-called second city. Imagine what that’s like for someone like me, who lives there. The crisis will hit residents in all sorts of ways. The current plan for dealing with the budget shortfall involves cutting £149m from vital statutory services, including children’s services, youth services, adult social care and homelessness prevention. But for me, what really stings are the brutal funding cuts to the social and cultural scene of a thriving city that gave the world JRR Tolkien and Black Sabbath. In any budget cut, the question is always why should we choose galleries over childcare support or more maintenance workers? But why is it that we never ask what needs to be done so that we can keep both? They are just as important.
Part of the plan agreed with Michael Gove, when he was levelling up secretary, was to cut funds from 25 of my city’s 35 community libraries. Ikon Gallery, Midlands Arts Centre and Birmingham Rep theatre are among the places that have lost funding for 2024-2025.
The libraries in Handsworth and Birmingham city centre were my favourite places in the world when I was growing up. Bookshops were great too, but nothing could beat launching myself into a bean bag on a Saturday morning and reading a Jacqueline Wilson book for hours. My mum had an “only take what you can carry” rule when it came to books, as she was not holding the five books I wanted and my arms were too little to take them all – so two a visit was often the limit. I would breeze through them after school, or with a torch under the covers of my bed at night, and return the week after for more.
Christmas holidays were marked with trips to the Rep theatre and to Symphony Hall to watch the orchestra. It was in the heritage spaces at Birmingham Museums Trust – sites such as Aston Hall and Sarehole Mill – that I got my first ever paid job as a museum enabler, informing visitors on the history and lore of these sites. This forced me to confront my fear of Tolkien’s incredibly long descriptions of the Shire (or Moseley to us here in Birmingham).
In short, I lived much of my young life in arts spaces that had been funded by Birmingham city council. So I know viscerally how slashing their funding in half this financial year, and then completely in 2025-2026 in order to balance the books will make the city poorer in many ways.
The most frustrating thing is that sacrificing the rich culture and heritage spaces of Birmingham will not help in the long term. It will merely exacerbate the problems of inequality and poverty in the city. For example, we all know that children who grow up without books in their lives have worse outcomes. In 2023, the National Literacy Trust found that one in eight children between the ages of eight and 18 who were receiving free school meals did not have a book of their own. Reading books for study and pleasure has been linked to academic and economic success, as well as wellbeing.
The Mental Health Foundation and the charity Mind have both argued that access to the arts and artistic expression can allow people to express those feelings that you can’t find words to explain, improving mental health. And a 2022 Local Government Association scheme that blended arts, culture and health projects in the most deprived wards of Birmingham found that the artistic and cultural experiences they provided gave those who accessed them more confidence to discuss health at home – particularly in communities and genders that do not usually have health conversations. Access to the arts improved the interaction of community groups with each other, and made people feel that their voices had been heard.
This stuff matters: surely health, wellness and unity are fundamental for a functioning and healthy society.
This is not just about money, but OK, let’s talk money. We know the arts and heritage scene brings in a lot of it to the West Midlands: £1.2bn and 46,000 local jobs, according to the West Midlands combined authority. If anything, these cuts mean cutting a vital part of the economy – hardly the best strategy for a new government that’s obsessed with “growth”.
A youth worker and artist I know, who runs workshops for 12- to 18-year-olds in Birmingham during the summer, says things look bleak. She is not only worried in terms of employment for herself, but says: “It’s sad because we want to offer young people another path. It is harder to do that when we don’t even have the spaces and opportunities for them to explore at a pivotal time in life.”
Birmingham has been a cultural powerhouse. Think Benjamin Zephaniah, Joe Lycett, Joan Armatrading and more. We should not let it become a cultural wasteland in search of a short-term fix.
On her appointment as culture secretary in July, Lisa Nandy vowed that she would celebrate British culture. I commend that, but while her government continues to allow the decimation of the arts where I live, those promises don’t mean a lot.
An independent report by the Audit Reform Lab, commissioned by the Unite, Unison and GMB trade unions, has suggested ways that tens of millions of pounds of budget cuts could be avoided, and called for cuts and sell-offs to at least be paused. Implementing those recommendations seems like the least the new government should do.
We read more and more about councils running out of money. It’s just headlines, words. The reality for people who rely on them is different. These cuts aren’t paper cuts; they affect lives like mine, and those who live around me. What’s really being cut are the arts, cohesion, everything that makes a community a community. That must be worth protecting.