I sympathise with Harrow Council’s need to reduce its spending and note that difficult decisions will need to be made in many areas.

However, I believe that the arts centre has been targeted because it offers a provision that is difficult to quantify.

How can improving someone’s mental health and wellbeing be easily put into numbers? The Arts Council England (ACE) is slowly beginning to recognise the problems the arts face in a world where numbers and targets are omnipotent. It recently published a report that examined the way the arts might be valued beyond simply reducing it to a series of numbers. Hopefully, it will gradually adapt its own funding allocation methods to take into account the discoveries noted in this report.

The knock-on positive benefits of engagement with arts, culture and heritage are now widely accepted, surely?

At the root of all arts engagement is an opportunity to be creative. Boosting creativity is the key to progress: using your imagination to improve your situation in some way will lead you to better jobs, better businesses, better lifestyles and better health. We use our imagination every day, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to think about the day ahead, to solving a difficult problem at work or college.

So offering opportunities where creativity can be honed, improved and shared is surely absolutely necessary to all of this.

The arts centre provides a buzzing, exciting environment for those who attend the many shows, talks, workshops, classes and more that take place there.

For many, attending a class might be someone’s only reason to leave the house that week.

It offers a space for people from different backgrounds to mix, create, share and learn from each other. Taking this away would be detrimental to the borough’s aims to assist the many diverse cultures to collaborate. The arts centre offers entertainment, self improvement, a distraction from the pains of life, a chance to play and let off steam, an opportunity to follow the arts in a time where they are being reduced from the schools curriculum.

It is vital the arts centre remains as a central site where these activities can take place concurrently.

I hope Harrow Council can see beyond the need to quantify all of this and urge it to talk to those who benefit from the centre, as well as their doctors, carers, teachers, families who also, in turn, benefit from their engagement with the centre.

Rebecca Adamson

Salisbury Road, Harrow