St James needs long- term plan

How has the concert and assembly hall reached this position of facing closure if it doesn’t get £150,000 from the States in this Budget round?

We could go back to 1990 and ask how and why it was decided that the States should be picking up the tab for staff wages. But we could also ask why that funding stopped being linked to inflation for 20 years, and so its value today is about half of what it could, or should, be.

St James appears to have everything one could need for a thriving arts space, including space for a cafe, corporate meeting rooms, and the concert hall. But the all-important bottom line shows that it’s clearly not working.

Its plans to diversify its offering and to become a centre for all, not just those keen on classical music, have been ambitious, possibly too ambitious. But we don’t know if it’s these events that are not selling. Are running costs simply too high? Is the venue trying to offer too much?

For long term sustainability, St James needs to find a way to trade out of the position it has found itself in. A bail out, in isolation of the Arts Commission’s ‘Plan for the Arts’, surely makes little coherent sense.