Tony Hall, chief executive of London’s Royal Opera House, says increasing funding for the arts is a “no-brainer” for government. “If you put the arts in the bigger picture, and talk about them as part of the framework of the creative and cultural industries, the argument that asks ‘can the arts really make a splash, do they really matter?’ becomes very clea. “They are part of something fundamental and big, which is the creative economy, which is now what we live off. And when you look at it like that then arts funding becomes a no-brainer … our future depends on creativity.”