In Let’s Create, we made clear that to deliver our new strategy and become a more effective national development agency for creativity and culture, the Arts Council will need to change. We have already demonstrated, in the way that we responded at pace to the pandemic with our own Emergency Relief Funds and in our management of the government’s Culture Recovery Funds, that we can be agile and adaptable.

We will continue to build on the lessons we have learnt from the pandemic. We will accelerate the changes that need to take place so that we can embody fully the four Investment Principles that underpin Let’s Create in our own organisation. We will be clearer in our commitment to supporting ambition and quality, and we will continue our work on reducing our environmental impact. We will also become more inclusive and relevant, and more dynamic.

We will ensure that we approach everything we do from the perspective of our ‘customers’: the individuals and organisations seeking investment and development support from us; the local and national partners and co-investors looking to work with us, including other arm’s-length bodies and National Lottery distributors; the government, which will hold us to account for the money we invest on its behalf; and the public, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of everything we do.

We aim to be relevant and accessible to all those customers and will ensure that external voices continue to shape our work through our Area and National Councils, through new race and disability advisory groups, and via the use of external advisory groups for all major projects. We will continue to pilot our work with our Youth Advisory Board to ensure that there are opportunities for young people to provide advice and input into our policy development work, including the Cultural Education Plan and consulting on our Investment Principles Resource Hub.

We will commit more of our staff development time to supporting communities, cultural organisations and creative and cultural practice with which the Arts Council has been historically less engaged.

All our processes and decisions will be based on fairness and equity, and we will strive to make them simpler and more transparent for those who want to access our funding or our expertise, and in order to improve our efficiency. We will focus on making high-quality decisions and learning all the time from what we do. Our ambition is to improve continuously and to set higher and higher standards for efficiency, effectiveness and excellence in the way we serve the needs of our customers. We will adopt new ways of working to achieve greater organisational efficiency and better use of our office locations. We will continue our progress in becoming an agile, innovative and responsive organisation, where staff work flexibly, and in which appropriate technology is deployed. We will equip our workforce with the skills to adapt to changing circumstances and demands.

We will set clear targets that enable us to lead the way as an environmentally responsible arm’s-length body, both in our working practices and in the decisions we make. We will also audit our access provision and set targets to ensure we are an inclusive employer whose workforce, in terms of their profile, experiences and location, is reflective of contemporary England.

Underpinning these changes will be the implementation of a new data strategy. We will become an ethical, open data organisation, in which evidence is core to what we do – enabling us to make better, more informed policy, and to show evidence of the impact and benefit of our work. We will continue to invest in improving our data infrastructure and literacy to enhance our policy making and insight, helping our staff to have access to the right information at the right time in order to do the best work that they can, and to better support our stakeholders and our customers – the cultural sector, and ultimately the public, and our stakeholders. Increasing the effective use of technology and data will increase the accessibility of the work we do.

Finally, we will ensure that our values – ‘we care, we learn, and we are ambitious’ – are embedded in all of our work.