Potential Threats to the Future of the Edinburgh Festival

The original version of this piece was penned back in 2007. Events have to some degree overtaken it and so I rewrote significant parts of it in December 2011. It is hopefully a more coherent version than the original, slightly rushed, offering.

Journalists rely to a degree on storylines that can be revisited every year, as they help to bulk out the content of a newspaper or magazine. You know the sort of thing … will Christmas trading be bad for the retail sector this year … in August (in the UK) will this year’s A level and GCSE examination results be even better than last year, and if so are the exams getting easier? … and so on.

Around July time it is often Edinburgh ’s turn to get the treatment. “Are we witnessing the decline of the Edinburgh Festival?” is a common media cry. Themes of the general hacks, as opposed to the usually more measured words of the critics, include:

• It does not hold the same appeal anymore. Ticket sales do not bear this out nor does my own experience.

• The Fringe is simply too big, leading to a dilution of the artistic content of the overall festival ... possibly

• Rival festivals, e.g. Manchester in the UK , are seriously challenging Edinburgh ’s pre-eminence.

These themes are usually supplemented by highlighting any perceived infighting between the individual festivals, usually between the International Festival and the Fringe, or occasionally between Edinburgh City Council and everybody else.

Here is my own "twopenneth” on some of the dangers that Edinburgh faces although I have tried to keep it brief. Finance is a common thread, like it or not.

Complacency

When viewed over the 60+ years that the Edinburgh festival has been in existence it is reasonable to say that the authorities, particularly Edinburgh City Council, have on the whole been complacent. In the early years when tourism was not recognised as an important part of the economy there was a certain ambivalence as to whether the city wanted visitors or not. This was followed in the 1980s and 1990s by an assumption that we would simply keep coming. The only time that I can remember Edinburgh City Council sitting up and taking notice during that period was when Glasgow was awarded European City of Culture in 1990 after Edinburgh had made a very half-hearted attempt to compete.

Fortunately, the importance of tourism to the economy has been fully recognised since the turn of the century. This has led to a significant reduction in the level of complacency. Thundering Hooves, a study that was commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council, politely, arguably too politely, tried to get across the dangers of complacency in its report of May 2006, relying largely on the perceived threats posed by increased competition from other festivals around the world to back their case.

The response to the findings of that study has seen a number of increased cash injections from Edinburgh City Council, the Scottish Arts Council and the Scottish Executive, the latter two unsurprisingly concentrating on providing support for Scottish artists and companies. However, there are no concrete signs of any long term strategy that I can see. In fairness, the state of the economy since 2008 has made it difficult to attempt long term planning anywhere in the arts world.

Complacency has not been limited to direct financial support of the festival. It has included, and continues to include, poor infrastructure, particularly with respect to temporary accommodation and travel facilities for the punters. Finally, complacency has manifested itself in a general lack of effective communication among the various festival players. The authorities, the individual festivals, the venues and the performing groups have all been guilty of an inability to see the bigger picture and of the pressing need to talk constructively to each other. Fortunately, there are some encouraging signs of a slow improvement here.

Some of the Competition

As the Thundering Hooves report frequently made comparisons with other festivals, a short summary of some of Edinburgh's competition is germane at this point.

Salzburg and Avignon are long-established European summer festivals which compete in the same space as the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). Salzburg dates back to 1920 while Avignon started up just one year before the EIF.

A number of UK festivals have started up in recent years, as cities have come to see them as an ideal way of boosting local tourism. In the UK Manchester, a competitor to the EIF, held its first international festival in 2007, describing itself as an "artist-led, commissioning festival presenting new works". Dancer Carlos Acosta was one of the star attractions at the recent 2009 festival which seemed to go down well with the critics. The festival is currently held biennially in July, lasting 18 days.

The Dublin Fringe Festival (Absolut Fringe) has been going since 1995. This critically acclaimed 16 day curated event predominantly concentrates on new work by Irish companies. Also in the Fringe space Greg Tallent, the man behind the 2009 London Bridge Festival, organised a London Festival Fringe in 2010 with dates that corresponded with those of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It is interesting to note that the dates for 2011 were brought forward to July, presumably so as not to clash with Edinburgh.

Birmingham currently has a number of festivals: a short 3 day Artsfest in September, a 10 day Jazz Festival in July, a book festival and a comedy festival in October. It is currently considering a larger autumn festival. It should pose a threat but its current offerings lack the coherence that Manchester has quickly achieved.

The Latitude Festival is a short 4 day event which is held in Southwold in mid-July which started in 2006. It is a niche festival - not really a competitor to Edinburgh.

Looking further afield The US, Middle East, Asia and Australia are all rapidly expanding festival areas, particularly for fringe festivals.

Looking at Edinburgh's festivals, Hogmanay and the Military Tattoo are niche events, and as such they seem relatively immune from competition. A similar argument could be made for both the Jazz & Blues Festival and the Art Festival although they are likely to be affected by any downturn in the fortunes of the other summer festivals.

With respect to the Edinburgh Book Festival, there are many book festivals, both in the UK and around the world. However, perhaps competition is the wrong term to use in this area. Book festivals tend to take place at different times during the year and the majority of their audiences tend to be local - in the case of Edinburgh 85% of the audience in 2010 were estimated to be Scots. Therefore, book festivals can and do co-exist, and they all appear to be prospering, at least for the moment.

The position of the EIF always appears to be somewhat precarious, perhaps because of the large cost involved in staging it and the quality of productions that the available money can bring. Manchester may eventually constitute a threat although it will need to become an annual event before this can be considered a possibility.

It is difficult to envisage the Edinburgh Fringe being challenged by another festival. It is so huge and it has such an established position. Any fall from grace is mostly likely to stem from internal problems within the city or the festival itself.

Finally, the Edinburgh Film Festival has experienced a dreadful 2011, appearing quite rudderless. This may be a temporary blip, but at the moment it looks to be by far the most threatened of Edinburgh's festivals. It moved from August to June in an attempt to escape competition from Edinburgh's other festivals. Now some people consider that it is too close to the date of the Cannes Festival, and there are many critics who question the quality of the programme.

Political Interference

The Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), far and away the chief beneficiary of public funding, has been the main sufferer over the years, often being used as a political football by the City Council in return for financial support, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

I did wonder if matters were likely to be exacerbated when the Scottish Executive of the previous administration (a Labour / Liberal Democrat coalition) wanted to restructure cultural policy across the country, as outlined in its Draft Culture Bill in 2006. My cynical mind considered that this was simply a political euphemism for more direct control of funding. The Executive planned to handle national performing arts companies directly while amalgamating the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen as part of their “Creative Scotland” initiative. The Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen subsequently issued their initial response to the draft proposals. The idea appeared to be shelved initially with the advent of the current administration which is led by the Scottish Nationalists. However, the merger has now recently taken place. The new organisation is called Creative Scotland. It will be a case of watch this space to see if my cynicism is justified, or not.

Notwithstanding my innate cynicism, the politicians can hardly be called the bad guys at the moment. However, putting politicians and good guys in the same sentence is a step too far!

Funding

The Thundering Hooves report recommended back in 2006 that Edinburgh City Council should increase its funding from 2.8% of the municipal budget to 4% to bring it in line with other festival cities across the world. A study in The Guardian indicates that the council's funding across all the festivals increased by 40% between 2006/7 and 2010/11, illustrating perhaps that the report's recommendations had been taken on board.

The vast majority of festival funding comes from public bodies, primarily Edinburgh City Council and Creative Scotland in the first instance. The EIF is the major recipient of public funds, receiving a total in the region of £4.8m in 2010. However, it still complains that the quality of programming suffers through the relative lack of funds. This is arguably a reason why it has recently courted prosperous countries such as China that are able to subsidise visits to Edinburgh by their performing companies. Other grants from Edinburgh City Council and Creative Scotland in 2010/11 according to The Guardian's research included: the Book Festival (£255k), Fringe (£98k), Film Festival (£85k) and the Jazz & Blues Festival (£81k).

The Scottish Government introduced its Expo funding scheme for the festivals in 2008. The scheme is aimed at providing grants to Scottish artists and performing groups. On the Fringe this is done via the Made in Scotland Showcase. £6m was allocated to the Festivals Expo funding over a three year period. This has recently been extended for a further three years, taking financial support up to 2014.

Sponsorship plays an important role in supplementing the grants from public bodies. Companies in the financial sector have tended to be the most prominent sponsors, followed by those in the brewing sector. However, there is a strong case for much more sponsorship from businesses, particularly from those in the leisure sector, because they are after all significant beneficiaries from the economic benefits that accrue from the festivals. The Edinburgh Festivals Economic Impact Study (2004) estimated that the summer and winter festivals generated £184m revenue of which £135m directly accrued to Edinburgh and the Lothians. The latest study - Edinburgh Festivals Impact Study (2010) - estimates that the festivals are worth £245m to the Edinburgh economy and £261m to the overall Scottish economy.

What are the threats to funding? In short, periods of economic downturn, such as we are in the midst of now, bring reductions in public expenditure. The arts are seen as an obvious target in this sort of environment. The City Council reduced the grants to each of the festivals by 1.5% in 2010-2011, which will grow to 3.5% in each of the following two years. Various ideas have been floated to raise revenue for festival funding. They include: a bed tax of £1 or £2 per night which would be levied on hotels and B&Bs; a "city growth" tax which would be levied on all businesses with a rateable value of more than £50K; and a festival tax on tickets. The bed tax seems the most likely of the three options to get off the ground, if indeed any of them do. It is estimated that it would generate £5-10m per year.

Creative Scotland will see a reduction in its grant from the Scottish Government although details on how this will affect individual arts organisations is not clear; there is talk of a 10% cut over three years but we shall have to wait and see.

Balance of the Arts

It is one of the strengths of what I call the August Feast that a comprehensive range of quality art forms is available across the individual festivals. It is arguably one of its major drawing cards.

However, there is a degree of unnecessary duplication. Drama is the most obvious example, being covered by both the EIF and the Fringe. It has been very much of a curate’s egg over the years at the EIF, many routine productions being interspersed with the occasional tour de force. Given the ever-increasing financial pressures that the EIF faces, particularly with the costs of putting on music and opera, I often wonder if it should leave drama to the Fringe, ideally with the Traverse Theatre leading the way. The other area of duplication is in the visual arts. After a golden period in the late 1940s and early 1950s the EIF had largely deserted this area of the arts, resulting in the eventual formation of the Art Festival in 2004. The current EIF artistic director, Jonathan Mills, has included the visual arts several times during his current tenure. Once again, this seems unnecessary duplication in these straitened times.

The balance of the arts on the Fringe is in danger of becoming distorted. The festival continues to grow inexorably. From a marketing perspective the Fringe Society seems to consider, at least publicly, that big is good and bigger is even better. To state the obvious, increased size almost always results in reduced quality. It is comedy that is responsible for the vast majority of the current growth; it became the major art form on the Fringe in 2008. I fear that this trend is not good for the festival. Since I first penned this page in 2007 four of the super Fringe venues (Assembly, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon and Underbelly) have flexed their muscles by announcing an "Edinburgh Comedy Festival", a festival within the 2008 Fringe. While they protested that this was merely a marketing tool to attract sponsorship, some speculated that this presaged some form of breakaway from the Fringe Society. In 2009 they allowed other venues to join their "comedy festival". The continuing inability to find a sponsor for their comedy festival makes any discussion of the subject somewhat academic for the moment.

If it does eventually manage to take off I can envisage that drama and other art forms at these venues would gradually decrease. Perhaps that may be no bad thing in the long term. Perhaps it will offer opportunities to other organisations who can demonstrate to punters that they are determined to maintain the spirit of the festival. And, of course, it may make the "comedy gang of 4", as the headline in the Scotsman called the super-venues, more of an open target to some of those wannabe festivals elsewhere in the UK.

The Cost of Visiting the Festival

To my mind the biggest threat is that Edinburgh may ultimately price itself out of the market to visitors from outside Scotland, a danger that is readily more apparent in the current financial crisis, although it is fair to say that it has managed to get through 2009, 2010 and 2011 relatively unscathed. The festivals with the largest percentages of visitors from outside Scotland in 2010 were the Military Tattoo (71%), Hogmanay (58%), Fringe (45%) and the International Festival (32%).

Nothwithstanding the current financial crisis, a visit to the festival has never been cheap for non-locals … unless you are prepared to sleep on floors, exist on pizza and baked potatoes, and wherever possible limit yourself to free or cheap shows.  OK, I exaggerate but only marginally. Edinburgh is an expensive city to visit.

The creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 helped to make Edinburgh an even more expensive city to live in, and this has led to increased costs to visitors in terms of accommodation, restaurant bills (particularly noticeable from 2007 onwards), the price of drinks, particularly at the main venues, and finally the price of tickets for shows.

While punters may complain about the costs of their visit they are as nothing when compared to the costs that can be incurred by performers and production staff, particularly on the Fringe. Reading some of their experiences is quite sobering. I frequently wonder why so many of them are prepared to lose money on their Fringe ventures … but of course I know that appearing on the Fringe is a rite of passage, alluringly mixed with a dash of hope that recognition and perhaps a smidgen of fame may come their way.

If visitor numbers do fall the festivals will have to rely on an increase in the number of locals / Scots to make up the shortfall. This will be particularly so for the Fringe which relies on punters attending multiple shows. This may play into the hands of those super venues who want a comedy festival, as comedy is the one area which may be able to attract significant numbers of additional locals. The Tattoo and Hogmanay are much more niche and one-off events from the punters' perspective and therefore they are likely to be slower to suffer any noticeable effects from cost pressures.  

In Summary

The main points of note are that:

• complacency among the powers that be is fortunately much reduced although there is still a small degree of residual hubris that Edinburgh will continue to prosper as the home of festivals
• competition is an ever present threat and it is inevitable that it will make some inroads into Edinburgh's current dominance. However, the city has achieved a position of preeminence and it will be difficult for any other city to challenge it unless Edinburgh rests on its laurels
• political interference can always throw a spanner in the works, as politicians hold the purse strings. Fortunately, at the current time there seems to be a recognition that interference would be counter-productive
• funding levels have generally improved over the last ten years. However, the picture can change virtually overnight. The current economic climate is bringing reductions in grants to the arts in general and it remains to be seen how they will impact the festival as a whole, and in particular the EIF. It would help if the EIF avoided unnecessary duplication, and hence cost, by leaving drama to the Fringe and the visual arts to the Art Festival
• the excellent balance of the arts helps to foster the notion of the spirit of the festival, and this is what attracts many visitors to Edinburgh. Any significant disruption to what is a delicate balance is likely to turn visitors away. In particular, if comedy becomes the Fringe's main claim to fame then visitors to Scotand are more likely to stay away although this may be offset by an increase in the number of locals. Of course, any significant decrease in the number of visitors may in turn have an impact on the ability of Edinburgh to attract performers.
• the increasing costs of attending the festival or appearing on the festival are likely to be the initial drivers for any downturn in the fortunes of the Edinburgh festival.

Last updated - December 20th, 2011.