Instructed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to move money away from London and reassign it to the regions as part of the Levelling Up strategy, Arts Council England has ended up making some very risky decisions. It has thrown funds at small untested groupuscules without a firm audience base and penalising major reputable institutions such as the Royal Opera House for their success and expertise. Given that the sector is struggling from the effects of the pandemic and the energy crisis – not to mention historic under-funding – the result could well be a catastrophic reduction in the quality and quantity of our cultural life, and a further blow to our international prestige. Opera is being particularly hard hit.

Undeniably, opera is an art form of interest to a relative minority and one that gobbles up the dosh in its need for full chorus and orchestra and months of rehearsal. But we do opera very well in Britain, and it is surely the job of any Arts Council to nurture excellence and support work that may be perceived as ‘difficult’ or arcane. Instead a scythe has been taken to it, cutting the grant to Glyndebourne’s touring wing down by half and chopping Welsh National Opera’s capacity to serve the Midlands and west of England. This isn’t levelling up, it’s dumbing down.

Most contentious of all will be the proposal to withdraw National Portfolio status from English National Opera – in other words, denying it a three-year funding agreement, currently set at £12 million per annum. In its place, it is being offered a one-off grant of £17 million to re-establish a base outside London, with Manchester being the front running location.

This is suicidal insanity. Nobody could doubt that ENO needs to change its business model from scratch and that its current home at the London Coliseum is totally unfit for purpose. But Manchester is not the answer, quite apart from the logistics of relocating (or reinventing) a chorus and orchestra.

The city is over-excited about investing in the arts at present, rather as Glasgow was, so disastrously, in the 1990s – money is being flung at new venues, but there simply isn’t enough audience to sustain them. There is simply no call for more opera in Manchester. Opera North, based in Leeds, spends two weeks every year at The Lowry in Salford and despite having been presenting it with strongly marketed and ‘accessible’ work of very high quality for decades, the company has never managed consistently to fill the house. Nevertheless, it would be loath to surrender its rights over the territory and a turf war benefiting nobody would become inevitable.

Far better would be to ask ENO to merge with the small-scale English Touring Opera (which, to be fair, to ACE, is being given a substantial uplift) and create two medium-sized companies that could provide singers and musicians with opportunities, move around nimbly and serve university or cathedral cities such as Cambridge, York, and Bath where there is already an audience for opera that could be developed.

A major part of the problem with Levelling Up when it comes to culture is that it is governed by wishful thinking and a belief that working class and ethnically diverse communities will be converted to high art if you dump it in front of them: alas, our educational system is not providing the necessary groundwork for this miracle to occur. Spreading opera around the country is a noble aim, but the demand for it is limited. And being enslaved to the DCMS’s Levelling Up juggernaut, ACE is now in danger of short-changing existing audiences in London and the south.

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