Five-year funding promises for Scotlands distinctive arts organisations.
The Scottish Arts Council (SAC) has announced a major shake-up of its support to regularly funded clients (RFOs), removing long-term support from 15 organisations in order to increase the availability of funding for the surprise of new talent and new approaches. The funding overhaul, which will take effect from April 2007, allocates 48 organisations a new long-term funding status, known as foundation funding. The changes take advantage of additional resources that have been pledged to the arts as part of the major shake-up of arts funding currently being implemented by the Scottish Executive, which will see Scotlands national arts companies coming under the direct control of the Executive.
The new funding regime is intended to provide sustainability for strategically important organisations whilst leaving increased resources to support new developments and to fund emerging artists. Explaining the changes, Richard Holloway, Chairman of SAC, said We have decided that this is the best way to confirm and support the great work that is going on, as well as building in enough space for those happy surprises. The organisations which will be offered foundation funding have been deemed to offer a distinctive and significantly unique role in relation to an artform, policy priority and/or place. The other 55 companies that currently have RFO status will be moved into one of two other categories; flexible funding status and project funding.
Foundation organisations, some of which are receiving dramatic uplifts in annual funding, will be guaranteed funding for a period of five years. In return they will be required to reach pre-determined targets in areas including education and outreach. Total funding for foundation organisations will increase by approximately £4m to £14m. Forty organisations, ranging in scale from Glasgows Citizens Theatre to Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, will receive flexible funding, and effectively have their current funding status and commitments maintained.
Fifteen organisations, including theatre companies 7:84, Borderline and Theatre Babel, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, which previously received regular funding, will now only be able to apply for project funding. Ruth Ogston, General Manager of 7:84 said, The companys work over 33 years has been wiped out under new criteria that ignore audiences. We will be appealing this decision but fear that the company and the Scottish touring circuit and vast audiences will not be respected enough for a decision to be revoked. Borderlines Chairman, Ian Welsh, said, Essentially the SACs decisions are the actions of a vain coterie intent on leaving their mark on the Scottish Arts infrastructure before their own demise. This demise was in part caused by their own failure to control the wasteful extravagance of the big guns of the arts and more crucially to make the arts accessible to a wider Scottish public& Their cull of companies who have access at their heart betray their narrow exclusive vision of the arts.