New structure for ACE

Job cuts equivalent to 111 full-time posts, a central Grants for the Arts team and the regrouping of the regions under four Regional Executive Directors are among the changes proposed by Arts Council England (ACE) in its bid to achieve the 15% budget cuts required by the DCMS. The projected saving of £6.5m annually from 2010/11 would be redirected into artistic activity. The head office team would be reduced from 168 to 112, with five main departments: Arts (including education, engagement and audience development, and retaining the artform heads); Arts Planning and Investment (including diversity); Advocacy and Communications (including marketing); Resources; and the Chief Executive’s Unit. An ACE spokesperson told AP that its salary grading and job evaluation system would be redeveloped “to more accurately define existing and new roles within the organisation and for them to be graded and salaried at a level appropriate to the responsibilities and scope of the role”.

Each of the four regional offices (East and South East, London, Midlands and South West and North) would be led by an Executive Director. ACE intends the regional office structure to remain, with “a director and assistant, a small finance and business support team, a communications specialist, and the remainder of the staff to be customer-facing specialists for the various artforms, arranged in teams to suit that region”. Among the benefits of the area groupings cited by ACE are the possibility of “delivering more coherent strategies nationally”, moving funds across regional boundaries and “generating efficiency savings through a smaller number of executive directors [nine] and through streamlining our business”.
A centre to deal with enquiries, finance transactions, human resources operations, IT infrastructure and the service desk would be in Manchester together with a Grants for the Arts centre with 40 staff “to carry out assessment and monitoring processes, with close links to regional offices and head office, and decisions made at area level”.
Lorna Brown, Chair of the local government arts officers’ association, nalgao, welcomed the changes, anticipating that they would strengthen “working relationships and on-the-ground arts delivery and development”, but she expressed some concern as to whether “ACE can retain its historic extensive knowledge-base and expertise to ensure all future funding decisions are authoritative”. Charlotte Jones, Director of the Independent Theatre Council, told AP that she is “generally in favour of anything that cuts down the size of the extraordinary bureaucracy that the Arts Council has become”. She hoped that the restructure was not “just a response to Government pressure to cut costs… it should be done for reasons of effectiveness, usefulness and identity”. She also has concerns that the plans have not been considered in sufficient detail. Tim Joss, whose ‘New Flow’ model for a radically altered Arts Council structure (AP181 and AP183) won support at a major conference at Cumberland Lodge on 2 March, said that the review “is just more tweaking. Instead, we must all work to find a better way to support artists and connect citizens with the best of the arts.”
Three months of formal consultation has begun. Final proposals will be presented to National Council in July, and implementation will begin over the summer.