Up in the air

New policies seem to be flying around like swarming ants at the moment – the air is full of them, but we don’t know which ones are going to make it through. The Arts Council of Wales is having to take charge of its own destiny in the face of potential funding cuts, and has laid down Draconian limits on who will have the chance of staying in the funding fold and who won’t (p3). No doubt Nick Capaldi and his staff will be fervently hoping to avoid the turmoil of Arts Council England’s (ACE) 2008 spending review. Meanwhile, the Tories’ culture team is continuing to woo the arts sector with a mixture of reassurance (‘we won’t ditch the popular stuff’) and potential innovation, with an implicit message that they would remove policy-making from ACE and give it to the DCMS, while returning ACE to the role of funder and adviser to the sector (p3). At the same time, ACE seems to feel that its Council’s decision to take over making the funding decisions for a further 59 regularly funded organisations (RFOs), in addition to the national companies, is a mere matter of getting “a national strategic overview of the arts” (p1). To outsiders, it looks like taking control of the funding of major regional and touring organisations across the country – whether they meant it to or not. This change, which was “effective immediately” following the May Council meeting, has bewildered a number of affected RFOs that AP has spoken to. “It seems to disempower the new structure before it has even begun,” said one chief executive, who expressed himself “mystified”. It also seems to misinterpret Baroness McIntosh’s recommendation that ACE should be better informed about the national picture. ACE could easily have asked for more detailed information on the five highest-funded organisations in each region. Instead, this move makes it look heavy-handed and controlling.
All this has rather distracted us from the main theme of this issue of AP, which is climate change and what the arts sector is doing to address it. AP has just signed up the 10:10 campaign and made sure that we use paper from sustainable sources. For some, this will seem like a drop in the ozone layer, but we have to start somewhere. We hope you’ll join us.