COMMENT / Who's watching the consultants?: Accountancy alone can't solve the problems of the Arts Council, argues David Lister

FOUR incidents in the last 10 days have struck me as peculiarly bizarre, and then, on reflection, as peculiarly significant for the arts in this country.

The first is the Price Waterhouse report on the Arts Council. The eight weeks this firm spent at the Arts Council cost the taxpayer pounds 60,000; the report has some important mistakes and also one silly one: proclaiming in large type on the front page that it is a report about efficiency, it manages to spell efficiency wrong.

But it is in its recommendation that the Arts Council's staff and spending be cut in one of three ways, each a little more severe than the last, that it was particularly bizarre. All three options are dated 31 March, though the Price Waterhouse visit to the Arts Council didn't begin until April. Leading figures at the council believe that the PW team had thought out their strategy for cuts before they even arrived. I suspect it was a typing error, though that is hardly a sign of efficiency.

The next episode was the resignation letter of Lord Rix from his post as chairman of the Arts Council drama panel. Lord Rix, who seems to retain a touching affection for the scatological humour of the Whitehall farces in which he appeared, deploys it to describe the current Whitehall farce, the pounds 5m cut in government grant to the Arts Council, which he believes has been submissively accepted. 'The Government has defecated on us from a great height,' he says, adding that the Arts Council and artists 'generally end up being dumped on the floor, with the contents of the chamber pot being poured on our heads'.

Bizarre episode number three is the Arts Council chairman Lord Palumbo's statement of regret that Lord Rix had resigned, pointing out that Lord Rix had been in 'ill health'. Indeed he had, but he resigned on a point of principle which the Arts Council has not yet answered.

The fourth instance of odd behaviour - the statement of Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State for National Heritage - brings me back to the Price Waterhouse report. After some encouraging words for the arts - that he is fully committed to the arm's length principle and more economic efficiency, so that more money can be channelled to artists - Mr Brooke seeks to reassure Price Waterhouse: 'I do not want to make snap judgements. I was a consultant myself for 18 years and would have thought ill of a client who reacted immediately to a report of mine.'

So, the Cabinet Minister responsible for the arts is an ex-management consultant. If you have belts, prepare to tighten them now. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the logic of the management consultant cannot be the sole measure to improve funding of the arts. Price Waterhouse is right to be concerned that 10p in every pound of government funding that goes to artists is spent on administration. But it spoils the intricacies of its argument with titillating and widely reported examples of alleged waste, such as the visit this month of two Arts Council officers to Venice at a cost of pounds 800.

In fact this was a trip by two visual arts officers to the Venice Biennale to study the most prestigious event in the modern art calendar. At less than one sixtieth of the cost of the Price Waterhouse report, this seems perfectly proper for a department that puts large sums of money into the visual arts and liaises with galleries all over Britain. Price Waterhouse also bemoans a visit by four staff to a conference in Finland at a cost of pounds 2,300. Wrong. The officers were invited and every penny was paid by the Council of Europe.

I don't think for a minute that all the Price Waterhouse report should be dismissed. Though Lord Rix despises the criticisms of the Arts Council's social engineering, pointing out quite rightly that it has done much for disability and the arts, I do share Price Waterhouse's bewilderment at a special unit for women and the arts. Why women? Surely there's a stronger case for the elderly having a unit, or ethnic minorities, or the poor?

But at the end of the day, Price Waterhouse brings an accountant's logic to the arts; and it is only one corner of the argument. Mr Brooke should realize that chipping away at a few Arts Council posts here or selling off a bit of property there is neglecting the real problem - the Government's failure to give the arts sufficient funds to enable them to plan with stability, and indeed to show leadership in devising, with or without the Arts Council, a proper policy and strategy for the arts: one that would include areas as diverse as global funding, the lack of grants for drama students, and the stop-go developments of key arts sites such as Covent Garden and the South Bank Centre, which the Government seems content to leave to the vagaries of the property market.

All of which brings me to Lord Rix again, who is nearer to addressing the real problems. His words are worth quoting: 'For as long as I have served on the Arts Council, we have been led by the nose. First, by the Office of Arts and Libraries and now the Department of National Heritage. We have had to creep and crawl every year for our funds. When magnanimity has been displayed, we have gobbled up crumbs with unseemly haste, raising fawning voices in praise of the minister concerned. When parsimony is the order of the day (as now, with the threatened cut of pounds 5m), we rush like lemmings to the water's edge, devising fatuous so-called policies and strategies and visions and corporate plans which are merely feeble attempts to cover up the fact that we have been defecated on from a great height. Furthermore, we who do have a record of some success over the years, in spite of ourselves, accept with servile subjection the examination of our competence by an outside agency, hardly renowned for its artistic prowess, reporting to a newly created department of state, with a record of precisely nil.'

What a pity the arts are to lose such a passionate advocate. But his message should not be lost. Brooke and Palumbo should start to get the point across publicly that arts funding is not even a blip on the Treasury graph, that a pounds 5m cutback is a meaningless figure for the Government but will cause enormous problems for the arts, with some theatre companies almost certainly going to the wall.

There should be a proper national strategy for the arts - not the platitudinous document produced by the Arts Council - giving a policy framework, analysing the needs of companies and identifying a figure to come out of public funds that will meet those needs alongside box office and business sponsorship funding.

The Arts Council must, as Lord Rix suggested, stand farther apart from government, and make its case more cogently and passionately, if it is to convince the doubters that there is greater benefit in the arm's length principle and a quango like the Arts Council than in the arts coming directly under a powerful department of state.

And lastly, may I ask a question? Am I alone in thinking that pounds 60,000 for eight weeks' work is something that could never be countenanced by any arts company in this country?