Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey has reaffirmed the Conservative party’s view “that the Arts Council has a vital role to play in supporting the arts”, following a report by Marc Sidwell, published by the right-wing think-tank the New Culture Forum (NCF), calling for the abolition of Arts Council England (ACE). Vaizey told AP that the Tories “want to strengthen the arm’s length principle” as well as allowing ACE to become “a centre of expertise for the arts in a digital age”. The NCF has hosted Tory events in the past, including a speech given by Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt (AP173). Other leading figures have criticised Sidwell’s report, ‘The Arts Council – Managed to Death?’, which recommends that the DCMS should take over many of ACE’s responsibilities, that the regional arts councils should be slimmed down, and that regularly funded organisations (RFOs) should raise more money from private sources. It also proposes the creation of a national regulatory watchdog, ‘OfArt’, to “…assess efficiency and related value-for-money questions, and… develop publicly available, standard statistical data.”
Baroness Genista McIntosh, whose 2008 Review of ACE is extensively referenced by Sidwell, told AP that that the report “quotes my report rather selectively (to say the least) and that whereas I did make some fairly trenchant observations about the Arts Council’s handling of the last Spending Review, they were made in the context of my stated belief that another round of radical reorganisation will do nothing either for the Council itself or for the people and organisations its serves. That is still my view.” ACE, responding to the document, has criticised the NCF for missing important opportunities and making “a critique that is years out of date”. ACE also slammed the author for “some basic errors and highly misleading factual inaccuracies”, including issues of staff levels, administration costs and funding decisions.
Further criticism came from Tim Joss, whose recent work, ‘New Flow – A better future for artists, citizens and the state’, published by Mission Models Money, called for ACE to be replaced by two new agencies (AP181 and AP182). Joss told AP that the ACE model “has passed its use-by date”. However, he called for “robust data, intelligent analysis and imaginative, workable ideas” and said that Sidwell’s recommendations “would backfire, reducing freedom of artistic expression and doing little to increase public choice and involvement”.