Impacts of Brexit on the UK Arts Community

Introduction & Methodology

Like many of our peers within the UK arts and cultural communities, we foresaw that the outcome of the UK referendum on continued membership of the European Union could be tight, but we, like many others woke up on the morning of 24th June to be surprised that the majority of those who had voted had decided in favour of the UK exiting the EU (Brexit).

Over the ensuing week, many arts organisations with whom we have worked since our founding, contacted us to gauge our views on likely impacts on the UK arts and cultural communities. Our view was clear – wait and see – but as the volume of emails and calls continued to grow and anecdotal opinion began to mass, we determined that around a month from the date of the referendum, we might seek to invite the sector more widely to share its views and so we set about drafting an online survey to capture wider opinion.

Alongside seeking to gather narrative viewpoints, we also drew on key elements of what has proved to be the highly effective data capture model which we established for our first Revenue Generation in the Arts Survey. Including key questions from this earlier Survey has enabled us to gather hard data on the immediate impacts on private sector fundraising and earned revenues on the decision to Brexit, details of which are reported in full in this report, comparing like-for-like findings with those we collected at the end of last year for the same periods to demonstrate shifts in projections from across the sector.

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