Further details on the review of Arts Council England

Further details on the review of Arts Council England

An independent review of the Arts Council England (ACE) covering strategic objectives, working relationships and partnerships, and the relationship between ACE and government.

This call for evidence closes at midday on 24 April 2025

Full details are available here 

The result from my freedom of Information enquiry is that If you wish to submit evidence in another format, such as a Word Document or PDF, please forward it to the DCMS at enquiries@dcms.gov.uk and it will be passed to the review team for inclusion in their evidence base.

However for those of you who complete the survey on line you need to be aware of the following:

“You cannot save and come back to the survey. You either need hours with an open window (and the risk of it crashing and losing all your responses), or you need a template in which you can plan the response and then cut and paste that into the survey form”.

My grateful thanks to Paul Kelly, chair of Swannage Jazz Festival for this and for providing the template that will save you losing your submission.

The template can be found here: ACE Review 2025 – Questions and Response Template

Here is my paper on the ACE review:

Observations on the open call for evidence for the Arts Council England review

1 Introduction

The announcement of the review of Arts Council England implied a thorough going review that would welcome submissions based on the terms of reference. However, it appears that evidence is being collected by an online survey with as yet no way an individual can address the terms of reference in a word document that would include, charts, tables, references and so forth. The announcement states:

“To enable us to process large numbers of responses in this form we will utilise AI to help us analyse the data gathered”.

This raises a number of questions of which the primary one is what has the AI machine been trained on? How will this evidence be reviewed?

2 The Advisory Panel and potential conflicts of interest

The advisory panel are eminent managers in the arts however of the 7 panel members 6 of them are in receipt of Arts Council funds albeit indirectly through their organisations. Regrettably this could  pose a potential conflict of interests.

There are no musicians, dancers, composers, singers, educationalists etc on the advisory panel – people who are at the sharp end of the arts. A case in point is how many of the Advisory Panel have filled in a 73 page  Lottery Project Grants application?

Advisory Panel Member	Organisation	Arts Council Funded	Amount
Helen Bowdur	Buxton Opera House	Yes – NPO – 2023/26	£300,000
Dave Moutrey – retired as Director of HOME in November 2023	HOME	Yes – NPO – 2023/26	£1,321,387
Stella Kanu	Shakespeare’s Globe	Yes – Culture Recovery Fund from Arts Council England in 2020. Stella Kanu is also Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan’s representative to Arts Council England.	£3 million
Paul Callaghan CBE, DL, FRSA	Sunderland Music, Arts and Culture Trust   See Charity Commissioners	Indirectly – Fire Station Auditorium. Sunderland Culture delivered the programming and venue operations in the Fire Station until 30 September 2023 when the Service Level Agreement ended with Sunderland Culture then focusing on the development and delivery of the Culture Start programme. From 1 October 2023, the Trust agreed a similar SLA with Pub Culture Ltd, the existing hospitality partner in the Fire Station since 2017, to operate and manage both the Fire Station and the Auditorium. This process involved Fire Station staff being TUPE transferred from Sunderland Culture to Pub Culture on that date and this was successfully completed with all senior management and programming staff staying in place and the operation of the venue continuing as normal. NPO – 2023/2026	£634,200
Samir Savant	St Georges Bristol	Yes – Culture Recovery Fund 2020	£564,916
Laura Pye	Director of National Museums Liverpool (NML)	Receives no Arts Council funding	–
Pawlet Brookes MBE	Founder, CEO and artistic director of Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage.	Yes – NPO – 2023/26 Pawlet Brookes has been the Arts Council assessor for a number of Black arts capital projects	£427,728

3 The questions

Have these questions been put to a focus group of any sort?

Question 1: In what way(s) does ACE fulfil its current mandate? – [free text box]
Is the word mandate referring to  the first term of reference under ACE’s Purpose and Structure
“Whether the Royal Charter still provides a clear and appropriate mandate and how ACE delivers it”
 or all the terms of reference under particular heading Purpose and Structure. It is not particularly clear.

Question 3: How would you rate ACE’s performance against its mandate?
Very poor
Poor
Average
Good
Very good

But where is the text box to say why a person thinks the performance is good or poor and how does any one no what the “average is”.

The same applies to Question 5 on the Arts Councils strategy “Let’s Create”.

Question 6: What is important to you in the Let’s Create strategy? – [free text box]
When it says free text how many words can a respondent write? Can they add  tables. Charts, graphs, references to Freedom of Information Inquiries

Question 7: In what ways would you wish to enhance the strategy?- [free text box]
These two questions are – as they say in legal terms “leading the witness”.
A person may well have evidenced views that Let’s Create is flawed so why would they want to enhance a flawed strategy.

One could go through all the questions in a similar vein with a similar result.
I fervently hope that this “review” is a review and not a survey. the good news is that evidence with appropriate references is welcomed and can be submitted.

Finally, the panel needs to have people who deliver the arts – musicians, composers, dancers, educationalists.

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Chris Hodgkins
23rd March 2025