More information on the review of Arts Council England and a survey questionnaire on the ACE grants application form + comment and Darren Henley’s article in the Stage
More information on the review of Arts Council England and a survey questionnaire on the ACE grants application form + comment and Darren Henley’s article in the Stage
I would be grateful if you could participate in this survey. Your feedback will help The All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group submission to the Arts Council England Review. This survey should take about 5-10 minutes to complete.
The data harvested will be handled in accordance with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), 2018, and will not be given or sold to any third parties; its sole purpose is to provide insight for the purposes of a Review of Arts Council England.
Many thanks in advance of your support and participation. It is greatly appreciated.
The Questionnaire is Here
An independent review of the Arts Council England (ACE) covering strategic objectives, working relationships and partnerships, and the relationship between ACE and government.
The 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
Darren Henleys article in the Stage is more reason to complete the review survey of Arts Council England
On the 13th March the Stage published an article by Darren Henley, “Making our case to Government must be about more than facts and figures”. The article was a plug for the reissue of his book The Arts Dividend: How Investment in Culture Creates Happier Lives. In Fairness to Darren Henley all author royalties are going to Manchester Metropolitan University’s First Generation scholarship scheme.
However this is clearly an attempt to raise the profile of the Arts Council in the face of the DCNS review of Arts Council England. Darren Henley says he sent a copy to every MP and Peer in the House of Commons and the Lords – they are busy people – will they have time or the will to read it?. Some may even ask in these straitened times how much this exercise cost? Well, here it is: 784 eligible peers + 650 MPs = 1434 parliamentarians x retail price of book £11:04 + postage at £2.99 = £20,133. I have no idea what it would cost a few people to pack the books ready to send.
I know bands and musicians who could do a 20 date tour on that sum of money and still have change.
The “Arts Dividend” is inspired by J.B.Priestly’s the “English Journey”. Priestley’s observations focused on the social problems he witnessed, something that Darren Henley has completely ignored in his travels; the austerity years, arts cuts, cuts to local authorities, the English National Opera debacle, all of which have had a devasting impact on the arts. J.B. Priestly’s “Postscripts” a series of popular BBC radio broadcasts during World War II, in his broadcast of the 4th Augst 1940 said:
“Let’s have the great symphony orchestras peeling out the noblest music, night after night, not for a fortunate and privileged few, but for all the people who long for such music. Let’s have comedians in the canteens, but at the same time let’s have productions of great plays in our theatres, so that the people who work may also laugh, and weep, and wonder”.
It is a pity that Darren Henley didn’t start with the “Postscripts”, first when he arrived at the Arts Council in 2015.
The book talks up investment and such things as a happiness and enterprise dividends but fails to provide qualitative or quantitative information on the return on investment. One would have thought that a visit to the New Economics Foundation would have enabled the use of various impact measurement methods, including Local Multiplier 3 (LM3) for local economic impact, and Social Return on Investment (SROI) for broader social, environmental, and economic outcomes. The sort of information which is crucial to informing the government on their growth agenda.
The ”Arts Dividend” is littered with disingenuity and contradictions. A few examples will suffice. In the introduction(page 2) he talks of Lisa Mandy and her book, “All In: How We Build A Country” published in 2022 and how she highlights the arts and he quotes “that people no longer saw themselves or their communities reflected in the national story”.(page 118) He then goes onto say “and issuing a challenge to funding bodies such as the Arts Council to do more to ensure that decision making happens closer to where people live”. The bit that was missed out from Lisa Nandy’s book on the next page 119 was: “When funding was provided, decisions were made by funding bodies in London with limited understanding about what worked or what mattered to the local area”.
Darren Henley talks of welcoming 273 newly supported organisations to the National Portfolio of organisations for the first time and that the total investment rose to £446 million compared to £408 million in the previous round. He omitted to say that NPOs have grown like topsy from 703 in 2012/15 to 985 in 2023/26.
There has been a 49% increase in the numbers of National Portfolio Organisations funded by Arts Council England since 2015. The subvention from the Department for Culture Media and sport has been supplemented by lottery funds.
Funding for 2023/2026 of the 985 organisations will receive in total £444.5m. This is made up of £370.6m of core funding and £73.9m of lottery funding.
The use of lottery funding for core funding is questionable. Lottery funds are not supposed to be used as an alternative to Government funding known as “additionality” – that is Lottery funding should not “become a substitute for funding that would normally fall into mainstream Government spending”. This reduces the funds available to individuals and organisations who do not have NPO status.
Darren Henley also reminds us that his first speech as CEO of the Arts Council in 2015 “nobody should be prevented from achieving their creative potential because of barriers of ethnicity, belief, disability, age, gender, sexuality or social class. And he was determined to do something about it. In “Culture is Bad for you” by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor drew attention to the fact that Disabled people (39%), Black people (41%) and Asian people (36%), as well as those in routine and semi-routine working-class occupations (38%), were all more likely to say they had not attended any of the arts activities listed in the Participation Survey.
It is also worth noting that the index “The Arts Dividend” contains no mention of jazz or jazz National Portfolio Organisations or grass roots venues – all the usual suspects are there, which says it all.
Perhaps instead of wasting money on sending his book to Parliamentarians he focussed on the crucial issues at hand and develops art form policies with an action programme.
© Chris Hodgkins
19th Aprill 2025