Arts & Business (A&B) has announced that the £2m it has lost in ACE funding is being withdrawn directly from its investment programmes for the arts, namely ‘Reach’, an open application scheme designed to encourage businesses to try something new with the arts, and ‘Invest’, a scheme to “initiate transformative business/arts partnerships”.
Both are being halted in England and no new applications are being invited for the Invest strand. All A&B regions will be required to spend their Reach and Invest budgets by March 2008. A&B’s Jonathan Tuchner confirmed to AP that these programmes are the only victims of its 33% cut in ACE funding, and conceded that the amount of commercial funding leveraged by arts organisations is likely to decrease as a result. A&B will be seeking a commercial partner in order to restore the programme.