Ready for our next investment round
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In 2016, as we were planning our 2018-22 investment round we launched a major consultation with the sector to ask your views on how we were investing in arts and culture. Following that consultation, we announced some changes to our National Portfolio.
We brought arts organisations, museums and libraries into a single funding stream and we invested in a new set of organisations to support the sector rather than provide artistic work themselves. We also introduced a new banding system focused around the relative size of our investment in each funded organisation.
In June last year, alongside our Chair Sir Nicholas Serota, I announced our 2018-22 National Portfolio at The Curve in Leicester. More than 800 brilliant arts and culture organisations will receive investment totalling £1.64 billion over the next four years. We also confirmed that we would be spending an extra £170 million outside London, without a reduction to our investment in the capital.
It was exciting to see that our ambitions around museums and libraries had been met with enthusiasm and some fantastic applications, resulting in seven library services and 72 museums joining the portfolio. Since then, I’ve been travelling up and down the country meeting with some of the new intake and I’ve been particularly impressed by the ideas and creativity from these new joiners.
We’ve put more budget into Project Grants - £97.3 million will be available each year
Today, we’ve announced more details about budgets over the 2018-22 period, and some important changes we’ll be making to our funding. The first of these changes is how we’re approaching Grants for the Arts. This funding stream will now become Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants, because we want to proudly acknowledge the role that The National Lottery has in supporting good causes in arts and culture.
We’ve put more budget into Project Grants - £97.3 million will be available each year. We will continue to seek out the highest quality work and create fantastic cultural experiences across the country. This programme will be open to artists, performers, creators, libraries, museums and arts organisations.
We’re also making changes to our Strategic Funds, which will be renamed Arts Council Development Funds. We’ll use these to develop audience engagement in areas where it’s been traditionally low. We will invest to support diversity, leadership development, the use of new technology, innovation in business models and in creating new pathways for a wider range of people to enter the sector. The Development Funds budget will be £72.2 million per year in 2018-22.
We are confident that we are investing strategically to deliver against our goals
Our total investment in England’s arts and culture stands at an average of £13 million more per year during this funding cycle than it was between 2015 and 2018. This increase in funds comes despite the very tough funding environment we face. Our decision to grow the National Portfolio outside of London and to welcome more small and diverse organisations into it, has meant that we have faced some difficult choices when it comes to our other funds.
The decisions we have made have been based on the principles we heard in the 2016 consultation I mentioned earlier. We are confident that we are investing strategically to deliver against our goals, to support our sector and to grow the number of people across the nation benefiting from artistic and cultural activity.
