Let's begin resetting, recovering and building back stronger

It is now over a year since our country first entered lockdown, and for all of us, these last 12 months have been profoundly challenging. Loved ones have been lost, lives and livelihoods upended; we’ve missed our families and friends, our colleagues, and our old ways of moving through and participating in the world.  Engagement with the work of artists, creative practitioners, arts organisations, museums and libraries has been a constant presence over this time, as people rediscovered, or discovered anew, the power of creativity to console and delight. But the cultural sector itself has been deeply impacted by the crisis. Jobs have been lost, projects abandoned, and venues closed. 

And yet, as we enter our second year of living with Covid-19, my feeling now is one of hope. The success of the vaccine programme, and the roadmap out of lockdown, mean that as we look ahead to summer there is, finally, cause for optimism. If the last year was about surviving the crisis, the year ahead looks set to be one of recovery and renewal. It’s time, at last, to raise our eyes from the road in front of us to the horizon – and that is why, today, I’m proud to share with you the first phase of Arts Council England’s Delivery Plan, in which we lay out the ways we intend to work with the sector to implement our ten-year strategy, Let’s Create. 

The story so far

When the first lockdown was announced on 16 March last year, we moved at speed to support the cultural sector. We redirected all our available resources to our Emergency Response Funds, which distributed more than £100 million to creative practitioners and cultural organisations, and invested in a range of benevolent funds that targeted freelancers across every artform who weren’t eligible for support via other avenues. At the same time, we worked with the Government to support the development of its unprecedented £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund. As one of the arm’s-length bodies responsible for distributing the Fund, we began making grants in October; to date, we have invested £492 million in more than 2000 organisations across the country, and £165 million in loans to 11 of our largest cultural institutions. Finally, we redesigned our rolling funding programmes (National Lottery Project Grants and Developing your Creative Practice) to ensure they were fit-for-purpose in the context of Covid-19, making changes in order to simplify the process for individual practitioners. 

The year ahead and Arts Council England’s Delivery Plan

This work was critical: without it, many more cultural organisations would have been forced to close, and I’m grateful both for the hard work of the Arts Council team and the resilience and ingenuity of the sector that allowed us to invest so confidently. But as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, it’s time for the Arts Council to turn our focus to the future, and to consider how we can support the cultural sector to rebuild most effectively, and to best serve communities devastated by Covid.

The Culture Recovery Fund remains at the heart of this work, and we will soon be announcing awards from the Fund’s second round.  Where the first round was designed to help organisations weather the immediate crisis, the second focuses on supporting them to transition back to long-term sustainable business models. The Government has also announced an additional £300 million for a third round of the Culture Recovery Fund in this year’s Budget. We are extremely grateful to the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Oliver Dowden, for this vote of confidence in the work of cultural organisations and the role they have to play in our country’s recovery from the pandemic, and we will continue to work closely with the Government to ensure this round is tailored to the sector’s evolving needs.

As we begin to look forward to the year ahead, however, another critical element of our future-facing work involves us focusing once again on the aims and ambitions of Let’s Create, our ten year Strategy. The Strategy itself was published in January 2020, and we had originally intended to publish a Delivery Plan for it in April 2020. After Covid hit, publication was, of course, delayed. But I believe that the events of the last year, and the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic have revealed how absolutely essential culture and creativity are to our personal wellbeing and to the wellbeing of our communities, have only strengthened the case for the Strategy as we conceived it. The vision at its heart – of a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish, and where every one of us has access to a remarkable range of cultural experiences – feels more imperative than ever. So in order to begin to realise that vision, we’re today publishing a revised Delivery Plan, which describes how we intend to achieve the ambitions of Let’s Create in a changed landscape; how we will support organisations to carry forward the positive lessons of the last year; how we will nurture talented people from all backgrounds including freelancers and practitioners who have been disproportionately impacted by the crisis; and how we will work to deliver levelling up and building back better.

This Plan will be published in two parts: a context document describing the themes and ambitions for the next three years, followed in the summer by a detailed set of Actions that we will take to support the sector to reset after the pandemic, to help our communities recover, and to contribute to the rebuilding of our economy. At the same time, we will publish five accompanying Area Delivery Plans, that will describe in greater detail how we will implement our Strategy at a regional and local level. 

In the material published today, we are setting out the five thematic areas of work that we believe, in the wake of Covid-19, are most urgently needed, and further detail on the Investment Principles that we expect to guide our investment until 2030. In doing this, it’s not our intention to create additional pressure; we recognise that for the vast majority of people working in the cultural sector, the future is still highly uncertain, and the primary focus remains, rightly, on survival.  However, as the country begins to take its first steps out of the pandemic, I believe we have a responsibility to be as clear as possible, as soon as possible, about what we believe a roadmap for the future will look like, and what our future priorities will be. Above all, we hope that by publishing this material today we can begin to return some certainty to the cultural sector by familiarising organisations and individuals with the changes we hope to implement over the period of the Delivery Plan, and thus provide a framework in which conversations about resetting and recovery can happen. 

Looking to the future

I began by talking about my feeling of hopefulness, as we move towards the summer. Today’s publication of our Delivery Plan is an act of hope: of investment in a future that we are finally beginning to see more clearly, and of belief in our ability as a sector to make positive choices about what we want that future to look like, and the type of cultural sector we want to rebuild. At the Arts Council, we invest taxpayers’ and National Lottery players’ money in artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries because we know that investment creates happier lives in villages, towns and cities across England. For me, there is no greater argument for doing what we do. 

We know, now, that Covid-19 has changed our world profoundly; we cannot simply return to the way things were at the beginning of 2020 – and crucially, nor would we want to. Out of every crisis comes an opportunity, and in our case, it is this: the chance to rethink and shape a more open, inclusive and resilient sector, and for the cultural sector, in turn, to play its part in remaking a better, happier world. This Delivery Plan is the first step on that journey. I look forward to taking it with you.