Review of Arts Council England – Further Information – Extended Deadline

You cannot make this stuff up. It has just been announced that the DCMS review into the Arts Council has just extended their deadline. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought this review was being run by the Arts Council. What a way to run a railway.

Details of the extended deadline and the survey can be found here The new deadline is now midday on the 30th June 2025. I have made a freedom of information inquiry as to why this has happened as I know many of you will have put a lot of effort into getting your submission in on time.

Here is my submission on behalf of the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group. I shall probably add to it as there is now  more time and I am awaiting a couple FOI inquiries. Now we have more time and you are submitting a form – and everybody should – please feel free to use whatever you like from my submission,

The submission is ACE Review a response from the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group

With the extended deadline this gives  people an opportunity to complete a simple questionnaire on Grantium and lottery funding. The questionnaire has been reopened and available here

The Advisory Panel and potential conflicts of interest

There has been no change in the advisory panel. Whilst the advisory panel are eminent managers in the arts, 7 panel members, 6 of them are in receipt of Arts Council funds albeit indirectly through their organisations. Regrettably this poses a potential conflict of interests.

There are no musicians, dancers, composers, singers, promoters, large and small scale, visual arts, 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? And for that matter how many members of the Arts Council England National Council have filled in a form. I bet you a pinch of snuff to a pound of horse manure – not one.

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	£1321387
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 TrustSee 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	£634200
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	£427728

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 Swanage Jazz Festival for this and for providing the template that will save you from losing your submission.

The template can be found here

There was an article in the Guardian on the 22nd April 2025 by Darren Henley, where he claims that  Arts Council England is a victim of London-centric media.

Darren Henley and Arts Council England(ACE) deserve the opprobrium of the press. What next, cries of fake news?

Some facts:

A FOI to the Welsh Government revealed they were made aware of the funding reduction to Welsh National Opera when ACE made its announcement about the new National Portfolio Organisations on 4 November 2022. ACE received a letter from the Secretary of State for the DCMS, Nadine Dorries, on the 18th February 2022 saying more be spent in the regions. ACE had 8 months to arrive at a solution that wouldn’t wreck ENO and WNO.

ACE Council Members register of interests on July 2018 indicates the potential for conflict of interests.  Of 15 Council members 10 had registered interests relating to ACE funding.  The register of  December 2024 had 15 members, 13 had registered interests relating to ACE.

There has been a 49% increase in the numbers of NPOs since 2015. The subvention from the DCMS has been supplemented by lottery funds. On 31 March 2023, ACE announced funding for 2023/2026. There were 985 NPOs with 275  new applicants, they will receive in total £444.5m, made up of £370.6m of core funding and £73.9m of lottery funding.

The use of Lottery funding to shore up National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) started in  2012-2015, where £54m was used to prop up NPOs. This continued in  2015/2018, where £180m of Lottery funds were used. In the round – 2019/2023 – this figure rose to £326m.

ACE has raided lottery funds to buttress NPOs. This reduces funds available to applicants who do not have NPO status. NPOs are also eligible to apply for ACE National Lottery Project Grants – they can seek additional funding elsewhere. This is discriminatory. Many applicants  will  be turned down due to insufficient funds. The  concept of “additionality”  has been negated.

There are plenty more – one woman Chair of the Arts Council members council since 1946.

The extended deadline? – every cloud has a silver lining and it gives me more time to dig and ferret away.

© Chris Hodgkins
24th April 2025