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Responding to the Covid19 emergency

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Darren Henley

Our Chief Executive Darren Henley blogs about our emergency support for artists and organisations.
31 March 2020

Posted by:

Darren Henley

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An image of a beach with person standing in a circle of light.

Today we launched two new funds to support individuals and independent cultural organisations. In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching a third, to support National Portfolio Organisations. Under normal circumstances, the launch of a fund is an exciting moment: the unveiling of a new opportunity for artists and organisations to realise long-held ambitions. This time is different. The money from these funds will support individual creatives, arts organisations, museums and libraries as they face the most serious challenge to their existence since the Arts Council came into being at the end of the Second World War. For now, we are solely in the business of helping artists and cultural organisations to get through this unprecedented crisis. By providing basic financial support, we want to afford practitioners and organisations time to stabilise, to think, and to plan for the future.

We believe these emergency response funds are essential, but they don’t come without cost. In order to release the money for them, we took the difficult decision last week to suspend several of our funding streams, including National Lottery Project Grants. This decision was based in part on the evidence that, with cultural venues closed, tours cancelled, suppliers shut down and match-funding falling away, the vast majority of projects currently submitted are simply no longer feasible. For most artforms, there’s no practical means of producing work at present, so continuing to fund projects that depend on systems that are no longer functioning was not the right way for us to steward taxpayers’ and National Lottery players’ money. 

But to those who worked for months, or years, on a project, and who last week saw the chance to realise it snatched away: I’m truly sorry. Many of you have written over the last few days to tell us of your shock and frustration, and I wholly understand your dismay. Such a blow would be hard at the best of times. For it to fall now is doubly distressing: it has meant having to manage bitter disappointment on top of worries about money, and the health of family and friends. But because of this crisis, because of its enormity and its calamitous impact on the people and organisations in which we invest, we’ve had to move fast, and respond decisively.

I want to reassure you that we are still looking ahead. Over the coming weeks, we’ve committed to spending £160m to help England’s cultural ecology survive - but we’ve nevertheless held back around £57m, more than half of our National Lottery Project Grants budget for 2020-21, in the hope that we can reinstate the programme at the earliest opportunity. None of us can say when this period will end, and I know you’ll understand that we can’t make any promises. But a timely restoration of National Lottery Project Grants to help move from rescue to recovery is what we’re hoping and planning for. At that point, we will welcome resubmission of revised applications that have fallen by the wayside as a result of this crisis.

For now, though, we need to ensure we protect as much of our cultural ecology as we can – and as things stand, every part of it is in peril.  While our National Portfolio Organisations may appear to be relatively well-funded, they generally depend on very high levels of earned income, which have disappeared overnight. That, combined with relatively small levels of reserves, has meant that many National Portfolio Organisations have already been placed in real jeopardy by this crisis. Some may not survive. And while individually the failure of these organisations would be painful, collectively their loss would decimate our cultural infrastructure. Together, they employ thousands of people, commission thousands more, and support many small companies through their supply chains.  The £90m of funding that we’ve set aside for them during this crisis is to help increase the likelihood that they can reopen their doors as soon as possible once we return to normality.

At the same time, there are many hundreds of organisations across the country outside of our National Portfolio, who also play a critical role in our cultural ecology: commissioning artists, producing outstanding work, and sitting at the heart of their communities. The £50m we’ve committed to them is intended both to help them with savage cashflow challenges, and to allow them to commission work now – work that will be available to people during the Covid-19 crisis, and that will channel money to artists who are desperately in need of it. 

For individual artists, we made a simple calculation: in the place of a single £10k grant from our Developing Your Creative Practice fund, we could invest £2.5k in four different artists, to help them through the weeks to come. We believe that, for now, this is the fairest and most compassionate way to move forward, and we have set aside £20m for this element of our emergency response.

We know that disabled artists have been particularly impacted by this crisis; you can read more here about the steps we’re taking to support them. We also know cultural workers such as performers and technicians are struggling, and we’re also announcing a set of grants to a range of benevolent funds today in order to help them (more on that here). Between these initiatives, the support that will reach them through our emergency funds for National Portfolio Organisations and organisations outside our Portfolio, and the help promised by the Chancellor, we hope our most vulnerable artists and cultural workers will be able to continue to work after this crisis is over.

The changes of the last two weeks have been sudden and seismic, and our response can only do so much.  We simply won’t be able to help everyone.  Some organisations will topple, and we will only be able to support a small proportion of the individuals we would like to help.  What’s more, we’re aware that the whole package we’ve produced, to which we’ve committed all of our reserves, will only see us through the immediate future.  So now we’ve launched these two funds, with details of the National Portfolio Organisation fund to follow shortly, we will start thinking about what comes next.  This will include ongoing analysis of the creative and economic impact of this crisis.  We’re working closely with the Government to ensure that the interventions they are making are relevant to the cultural sector, and we will continue to make sure that they are kept fully abreast of what’s happening to you, on the ground. We want to thank our Secretary of State, Oliver Dowden, Minister for Culture Caroline Dinenage, and officials at DCMS, DfE and HM Treasury, for the speed of their response, which has enabled us to do what’s needed without delay, and we look forward to continuing to work with them as we begin to consider the next stage. We are also continuing to work closely with DfE to support Music Educations Hubs and DfE funded cultural education programmes.

Of course, at times like these, every decision is complex, and every choice involves loss. I was deeply heartened, therefore, to read a blog by Francois Matarasso, in which he gave his verdict on the path we’ve taken. As well as being a clear-eyed critic of the Arts Council, Francois is a great champion of artists. “What has been announced – like every decision made by ACE – is open to question. It will not please everyone,” he says. But: “ACE has given us a breathing space.  There will be disagreement about how to use it – the arts world is disputatious and all the better for it – but we must keep the bigger picture always in mind.  We must see the cultural ecosystem in which every person, every organisation, every cultural expression, has a legitimate place.” 

That’s how I see it, and I hope that’s how you see it too. At this moment, it’s the whole of the ecosystem that we need to fight for, and that’s what I intend to do.

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