Issue 219 of AP contained a number of misleading and indeed unfounded assertions about Arts Council England.
The news story reporting the £19m cuts to this year’s Arts Council grant in aid funding (‘ACE scrambles to make savings’, p1) said that we “claim to have made an immediate £4m in efficiency savings... the total reduction therefore demanded of ACE this year is £23m.” This is incorrect. Arts Council England’s organisational review in fact saved £6.5m in our annual running costs, something that AP has reported on a number of occasions.
The £4m reduction the article referred to is the previous cut to our funding for 2010/11, as announced in the April 2009 budget. This means that Arts Council England has received a total cut of £23m this year and in addition, we have saved £6.5m in our annual running costs.
I was also disturbed by the claim in AP’s Last Word column (p16) that the Arts Council was acting in a “naïve” or “incompetently irresponsible” way by not putting plans in place for budget cuts. In fact, the Arts Council sent a statement in response to AP’s enquiries which clearly said that while we continued to make a strong case for sustained public funding of the arts, we were “of course considering and planning for a number of different funding scenarios”.
Your claims present an inaccurate and misleading picture of the work the Arts Council is undertaking to minimise the impact of cuts to this year’s funding, and to impress upon the government the unmistakable value of continued investment in the arts. We want to work with artists and arts organisations across the sector to make those arguments, as we head towards what will be a tough spending review in the autumn, and I hope AP will help us engage that support.
Editor’s note: AP has reported twice on ACE’s target of £6.5m cost savings from 2010/11 (AP189, AP199), but the accounts revealing whether this saving has actually been achieved will not be published until later this year. With regard to budgets, in its statement ACE told AP that it was not modelling for specific cuts (see Last Word p16). Prior to the 2009 budget it modelled funding cuts of 1.5%, 2.5% and 3% (AP192).