Some outrage may be evoked by the fact that Arts Council England (ACE) spends 35p in the pound on administering individual grants (p1). The whole business of grant-giving can clearly be an expensive one, though the document that discloses this statistic also finds that some Big Lottery Fund grants cost a mere tuppence to process. The question on almost everyone’s lips will be: why isn’t ACE cheaper? But the question that a very few will be asking is: why should ACE be cheaper? The statistics clearly demonstrate that the most expensive investments in terms of staff costs and overheads are grants made to individual artists. What makes them so dear? It’s the customer care, stupid. Building a new relationship with an artist, making all the right checks and assessments and giving that artist the support that we all know all artists need to write a passable application are what go into creating the luxury buy of the grant-giving sector. Would we want any of these to be skimped? Unlikely.
In an era where self-assessment and peer review are the new watchwords (p3), artist involvement in funding decisions is the Next Big Thing, and cost-cutting is all the rage at the DCMS, we need to ask ourselves whether decent back-up, good systems and close relationships between ACE officers and their clients are dispensable. Ask almost any arts practitioner who has had the fortune (and I will not presume to say whether good or bad) to be funded by ACE, and they will tell you that the best experiences are those which have an engaged and supportive Lead Officer attached. One of the ongoing results of the cuts in ACE staff is that the workload of ACE officers has increased so that only their bosses’ pet projects get the attention they deserve. Extraordinary, really, that in spite of the lack of staff time available, the arts sector still feels more interfered with than it has for years. Equity members (p3) have reasserted their belief in the arm’s length principle, while Geraint Talfan Davies (AP170 and this issue p12) has written whole book about it – or the lack of it. Yet there is clearly a balance to be struck – something between a free-for-all and a dictatorship – which will give true worth to the arts and the people who create and support them.
Catherine Rose
Editor