News

Arts funding hit hard

Finance | Celina Ribeiro | 28 Oct 2010

Arts organisations are facing an across-the-board 6.9 per cent cut in funding next financial year as Arts Council England plans how to absorb the “severe” 29.6 per cent cut to its budget over the next four years.

Arts & Business and the Creativity Culture and Education (CCE) programme will be worst hit, both facing halved budgets in the next financial year.

Arts & Business will lose its entire funding in 2012/13. The Council’s budget for strategic opportunities will be cut by two thirds next year, losing £24m for touring and other such activities.

Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, criticised the cuts as “extraordinary” and “not fitting comfortably within the Government’s vision of the Big Society”.

CCE chief executive Paul Collard, meanwhile, warned of the irrevocable damage the cuts could cause: “Once these [programmes] are gone there is no turning back the clock and the impact of this on the next generation is not something that can be fixed once public finances are restored.”

Liz Forgan, chair of the Arts Council, said: "These are severe cuts, made worse by the fact that around 80 per cent of them have to come in the first two years of the settlement.”

“For several months we have been in conversation with the DCMS (Department for Culture Media and Sports), our funding partners, arts organisations and artists about how we can best support the arts in dealing with significant cuts. We have had to prioritise, to achieve a 6.9 per cent cut to our portfolio within a 14 per cent cash cut to our overall 2011/12 budget.”

Between 2008 and 2011, the Arts Council is due to have invested £1.3bn of regular funding to arts organisations. These regularly funded organisations, which will be absorbing 2011/12's 6.9 per cent cut (9 per cent in real terms), had been preparing for cuts in the region of 10 per cent. Things will get tougher as of 2012, however, when all funded organisations will have to prove their worth in reapplying for funding and in 2014/15 when the value of funding will fall by 14.9 per cent on current levels.

While severe, the cuts are no shock to the Arts Council, which had been in discussion with the DCMS and other organisations over the last few months in preparation.

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