How we will do it

We will resource this Delivery Plan primarily through a combination of our distributed staff team and our five main investment programmes, all focused on supporting the cultural sector to continue to recover from the pandemic, help manage the exceptionally strong economic headwinds it currently faces, and deliver our Outcomes and embed our Investment Principles.

1/. National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs), Investment Principles Support Organisations (IPSOs) and Creative People and Places (CPPs)

• NPO and IPSO budget 2023/24: £445.7 million

• CPP budget 2023/24: £9.46 million

2/. National Lottery Project Grants

• Budget 2023/24: £116.8 million

3/. Music Hubs

• Budget 2023/24: £76 million

4/. Capital Programme

• Museum Estate and Development Fund (MEND) – budget 2023/24: £22.6 million

• Libraries Improvement Fund (LIF) – budget 2023/24: £5 million

• Capital – budget 2023/24: up to £20 million

5/. Developing Your Creative Practice

• Budget 2023/24: £14.4 million

From 1 April 2023, we will provide three-year funding (until 31 March 2026) for a cohort of 985 arts organisations, museums and libraries, providing them with security to plan over the long term and contribute to the post-pandemic economic and social recovery of this country. They will, between them, receive the majority of our investment during these three years and will therefore be expected to take on the largest responsibility for the delivery of Let’s Create. This cohort will include:

• National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs): A group of 945 arts organisations, museums and libraries working across the country to deliver our Outcomes and embed our Investment Principles in the way they work

• Investment Principles Support Organisations (IPSOs): A group of 40  organisations that will provide support for the cultural sector to embed our Investment Principles

• Creative People and Places (CPPs): 39 partnerships covering 56 local authority areas where cultural engagement is currently low

Our National Lottery Project Grants (NLPG) programme is a high volume, flexible investment mechanism to help individuals and cultural organisations recover from the pandemic as well as help deliver Let’s Create. It supports a wide range of individuals and organisations, professional companies and non-professional groups to undertake projects ranging from small-scale research and development right through to large national tours.

NLPG funding will continue to be targeted primarily at individuals and organisations that are not part of the National Portfolio, and we will target our advice giving to those who might not have previously engaged with the Arts Council. This will ensure a more equitable spread of investment at both under £30,000 and over £30,000 levels. We currently have the following priorities:

• supporting museums, including non-Accredited museums, to unlock their collections and make them more relevant, inclusive and accessible

• supporting libraries to deliver fully against the four Universal Library Offers (Reading, Health and Wellbeing, Digital and Information, and Culture and Creativity)

 We also run the following ‘ringfenced’ strands within NLPG:

• Place Partnership Funds to support our place-making work

• Touring Funds to support national and international touring activity

• Nationally Significant Funds to support major projects seeking over £100,000 

• Supporting Grassroots Live Music venues and promoters to develop their programmes, their audiences and their business models

We keep our NLPG programme under regular review to ensure that it meets the needs of the wide range of organisations and individuals working in our sector and helps contribute to the delivery of Let’s Create. In September 2023, we will launch a refreshed version of NLPG guidance, designed to improve the user experience for applicants, create stronger alignment with Let’s Create and make clearer in advance what we will and won’t support. At that time, we will set out changes to our ‘ring-fenced’ strands to ensure that they are better able to support the delivery of Let’s Create. That will include improving our support for touring ecologies, helping them to re-establish and evolve at all scales so that they are better able to manage post-pandemic and with other ongoing economic challenges. We will at that time also publish a set of priorities  for the next year to address and support particular needs and gaps that we have identified. Applications submitted from November 2023 onwards will use the refreshed guidance and application form.

Our role as fund holder – on behalf of the Department for Education – for a national network of Music Hubs will continue in 2023/24. These partnerships deliver activity prescribed by the government’s refreshed National Plan for Music Education, and 117 Hubs will receive a total of £76,105,440 during 2023/24. We will support these partnerships via our National Portfolio, Investment Principles Support Organisations and other funded activity.  

We will deliver an investment process during 2023/24 to ensure a new portfolio of Hub Lead Organisations – that will support, deliver and enable access to music education activity for children and young people across every local authority in England – is in place for September 2024.

The focus for our capital investment during this period will be three-fold:

i) We will run a Capital Investment Programme to support projects that deliver our Investment Principles. We will invest in organisations and use our experience to help them develop plans to make physical adjustments to buildings and equipment so that they can operate safely post-pandemic, improve access, seize on technological opportunities and reduce environmental impact. Projects are funded up to a maximum of £750,000. We will launch our next Capital Investment Programme in early 2023/24.

ii) Our Place Partnership Funds includes support for the development of capital projects that align with our ambitions around place making. We combine our expertise as a national development agency with seed funding to work with local and national government and other partners to make the case for improved and sustainable cultural infrastructure in key places. Our role is focused on providing consultancy and early development funding rather than large-scale completion funding.

iii) We will continue to work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund to deliver the Cultural Investment Fund – a package of the three capital funds made up of the Cultural Development Fund (CDF), Museum Estate and Development Fund (MEND) and Libraries Improvement Fund (LIF). 

This investment programme supports a wide range of individual cultural and creative practitioners to focus on their creative development. It funds research, time to create new work, ideas development, networking, mentoring and international travel and training. We have published an evaluation of the programme and refreshed guidance for 2023/24.

We recognise that for many individuals, applying for funding can be onerous. We will try to make our application processes as simple as possible and will make it clear in advance the types of applications that are likely to be successful.

Our other investment and development programmes

These five investment programmes set out above will be supplemented by a limited number of new development initiatives. These are set out in the Actions listed in the five Theme sections of this Delivery Plan. In addition, we will continue to run a number of ongoing development programmes. These are set out in the ‘Other investment and development programmes’, which you can view here. We will keep these under regular review to make sure they remain fit for purpose and represent best value for money.

Reset & Innovation

In 2022/23 we ran a small-scale pilot of four projects to test different approaches and help inform the design of a full-scale programme which we had hoped to launch in 2023/24. During the National Portfolio and Investment Principles Support Organisation investment process, National Council decided to use the resources that had been earmarked for the Reset & Innovation programme for our new Transform programme. Transform has been informed by our thinking on Reset & Innovation. It will provide the opportunity for one-off support for organisations that were part of the 2018-22 portfolio and that have been offered reduced National Portfolio Organisation funding for 2023-26. It will help them re-engineer their business models so that they can operate sustainably on ongoing reduced levels of funding. Should additional resources become available, we will consider launching a full Reset & Innovation programme at a future date.

We will continue to conduct research, evidence gathering and analysis to provide and utilise intelligence on the post-pandemic challenges and opportunities currently facing the sector. As well as playing these findings back into government and the sector, we will also ensure that the Arts Council and our programmes are able to adapt and respond to the emerging situation.