The Arts Funding Detective

I've never met the BBC Trust chairman - have you?

BBC Trust chairman claims £29,000 in expenses

BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons claimed more than the average UK salary in expenses over a six-month period, figures released by the BBC show.

As chairman, he is expected to travel the country to meet BBC licence fee payers and other stakeholders in the corporation.

I've never met the BBC Trust chairman - have you?

BBC Trust chairman claims £29,000 in expenses

BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons claimed more than the average UK salary in expenses over a six-month period, figures released by the BBC show.

As chairman, he is expected to travel the country to meet BBC licence fee payers and other stakeholders in the corporation.

Film quangos merge, fat cats get fatter

I don't suppose much if anything will get done about salary levels at a merged British Film Council thingy.

BFI and UK Film Council plan merger | Culture | The Guardian

Proposals for the merger of the BFI and the UK Film Council have been drawn up, at least in outline; still to come is the inevitable horse-trading between the two bodies. Is the new outfit to become a cultural organisation with a film-enterprise arm, or a film-enterprise organisation with a cultural arm? The merger will provide a good opportunity for the Film Council to take a look at its salary bill. In the financial year ending March 2009, eight senior staff were paid more than £100,000, four of those more than £150,000 – that even manages to make Arts Council England look modest. Such salaries do nothing for a quango's credibility.

Film quangos merge, fat cats get fatter

I don't suppose much if anything will get done about salary levels at a merged British Film Council thingy.

BFI and UK Film Council plan merger | Culture | The Guardian

Proposals for the merger of the BFI and the UK Film Council have been drawn up, at least in outline; still to come is the inevitable horse-trading between the two bodies. Is the new outfit to become a cultural organisation with a film-enterprise arm, or a film-enterprise organisation with a cultural arm? The merger will provide a good opportunity for the Film Council to take a look at its salary bill. In the financial year ending March 2009, eight senior staff were paid more than £100,000, four of those more than £150,000 – that even manages to make Arts Council England look modest. Such salaries do nothing for a quango's credibility.

Sustaining the ICA?

I thought the Sustain package was supposed to be for organisations that were financially solid but who had been hit by the recession. Looks like the ICA picked off its 1.2 million quid despite having problems that run 'deeper than the current financial climate'. So where does that leave Sustain and how much control does the Arts Council have over the situation?
Maybe the ACE should do what it did at the Hackney Empire and force a 'temproary' closure of the ICA while it sorts itself out. I imagine that Eshun's threat to close it down is just a negotiating tactic somewhere along the line. (More thoughts at my Absent Without Leave blog)

ICA warns staff it could close by May | Culture | The Guardian

The ICA has been granted a package of £1.2m over two years by Arts Council England's (ACE) Sustain fund, which is designed to help arts organisations hit by the recession. The total turnover of the ICA is £4.5m, and it receives an annual ACE grant of £1.3m.

But Eshun said the problems at the ICA ran deeper than the current financial climate, and in May last year, even before the scale of the immediate financial problems had emerged, a consultancy firm was commissioned to report on structural problems within the organisation.

The future of the Arts Council

I've always found the Arts Council anything but open. I advocate that they voluntarily provide much more detailed information about who and what they fund and why into the public domain. At the moment you can find out about individual funded projects by doing an FoI request. They always provide the information, but why should it be so difficult - and no doubt expensive at their end. And you still have to find out about what has been funded in the first place. They don't make any of this easy. Things need to change, but I fear they will change in the wrong direction.

David Lister: Tough questions, but still no answers - David Lister, Columnists - The Independent

In the midst of world-shattering events and important political debates, a little-noticed but fascinating question was asked in the House of Commons the other day. The Labour MP Tom Watson asked the arts minister which private members' clubs used by Arts Council staff and board members are funded by the council.

In fact, there were 50 little-noticed but fascinating questions asked in the House of Commons. And they were all asked by Tom Watson, and were all about the Arts Council. Mr Watson clearly shares my concern that the much vaunted "arm's length principle" in the arts which avoids government interference by delegating power to a non-elected quango can lead to a lack of accountability. Mr Watson would also seem to have a disgruntled source in the Arts Council as his questions seemed detailed and knowing.

To prove his point and mine about worries over accountability, most questions were answered by the arts minister Margaret Hodge with the response, "The information requested relates to operational matters that are the responsibility of Arts Council England." Parliament, it seems, could not be less interested. Most of Mr Watson's questions concerned weighty matters such as redundancy payments, pension arrangements for Arts Council staff and general administrative costs, though there was more than a sprinkling of light relief with probing questions about the exact sums spent on flowers for the Arts Council headquarters.

But it was those private members' clubs that intrigued me. And, unlike Margaret Hodge, I was able to discover the answer. No Arts Council staff have their private clubs paid for from taxpayers' money, though my own Arts Council sources tell me that had Mr Watson asked his question a couple of years ago, he might have received a more entertaining answer.

But even if his more colourful questions have not elicited the desired response, the fact that a senior Labour MP asks 50 questions about how the Arts Council is run does not exactly bode well for it. Add to that some interesting comments from the shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt at a state of the arts conference last week. He bemoaned the fact that 11 per cent of the Arts Council's budget was spent on administration (the Council says it is nearer 6 per cent), and said it would have to be leaner under the Tories.

I enjoyed the response of the Arts Council's redoubtable chair Dame Liz Forgan, who said: "I have been trying to be leaner all my life." But she will have been startled by Mr Hunt's subsequent comment that more policy should be made by the DCMS rather than the Arts Council. There, in a throwaway line that went largely unreported, was a severe dent to the arm's length principle. It does seem that the way the arts are run is going to change. A senior Labour MP has made it his business to see that happen, and, more importantly, a future Conservative government has served notice that it will too.

In the meantime, the Government and the Arts Council could pre-empt that by showing that they are properly accountable. Instead of an arts minister brushing off questions with the response that it is a matter for an unelected quango, she could find out the answer and tell it to the country's elected representatives. It might be against the spirit of the arm's length principle, but it would stop all those rumours about Arts Council employees watering their plants before they go off to their club.

Six week suspension to Grants for the arts applications

Arts Council Press Office

REMINDER – Temporary suspension to Grants for the arts applications
Date:

07 Jan 2010 Region:

National


As previously announced, Arts Council England will suspend applications to its Grants for the arts programme for a period of six weeks between Monday 18 January and Friday 26 February.

This means that applications need to be submitted by 5pm on Friday 15 January to ensure decisions are made before the end of March.

The temporary suspension will allow the effective introduction of the new, improved application process from 1 March 2010. For the first time artists and arts organisations will be able to apply to Grants for the arts online making the programme more widely accessible and the application process as easy as possible.

A new national Grants for the arts team, based in the Arts Council’s assessment centre in Manchester, will assess and monitor all applications. The new teams will be focused around individual artforms and will maintain close links to each region, with decisions continuing to be made within the region. This will allow the Arts Council to make funding decisions using a national framework and ensures consistent advice and assessment is given to applicants wherever they are based.

The changes will improve how the scheme works for applicants, and save almost £1.5m a year in administrative costs, which will be reinvested directly into the arts.

Boris and Veronica, a cautionary tale

(this is just beyond perfect soap opera)

Previous Arts Council London candidates spurn re-run as Veronica Wadley paper trail emerges | UK news | guardian.co.uk

Veronica Wadley: "Dear Boris..."


Yesterday, the job ad for a new chair of the London region of Arts Council England was placed for the second time - the start of Mayor Johnson's re-run of a process that ended with the non-approval of his friend and erstwhile media ally Veronica Wadley by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw. He'd been advised by ACE's national chair Liz Forgan, one of those who'd conducted the initial interview with Wadley (Forgan also chairs Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian), that Nolan rules against cronyism had been breached.

Boris's obvious determination that Wadley shall have the job, no matter how limited her arts credentials or how she performs in interviews, caused me to end my previous post on this saga wondering if anyone else would even bother applying this time round. Well, I've learned from Tim Marlow, one of the three candidates Johnson rejected in favour of Wadley, that he will not be applying again. It was already my understanding that Patrick McKenna, another contender turned down by Boris, would be unlikely to go to the trouble a second time. Maybe I'll apply, just to keep it interesting.

Yesterday's other development in what has clearly become a farce was publication on the GLA website of the material supplied to Labour group leader Len Duvall in response to his freedom of information request of 9 October (see top item here). There's around 550 pages' worth: find the whole lot appended to the agenda for Wednesday's meeting of the EDCST committee.

This is composed almost entirely of emails which give a fascinating insight into the efforts made by a number of GLA officials and Boris's culture adviser Munira Mirza to manage a growing political problem arising from Wadley's appointment by Boris in spite of two of the three people presiding at the initial interviews - Forgan and Sir David Durie - believing she had not been a good enough candidate even to progress to the second and final interview stage (which was conducted solely by Boris, with GLA deputy chief executive Jeff Jacobs in attendance). Only the third person presiding at the first stage interview, Mirza herself, argued that Wadley should progress.

Today I'll be higlighting some of the more instructive parts of Duvall's FoI harvest. To begin, an letter from Wadley to the Mayor dated 28 April 2009. See if page 559. (Page numbers are at the bottom of each "sheet" of the single online document.)

Dear Boris,

If I may, I would like to put my hat in the ring for the Arts Council, London role you mentioned. Since we had lunch, I have discovered that there is no conflict with another arts advisory position that I am being offered. Perhaps [name redacted] could put me in touch with whoever is handling the applications.

The letter is signed, "Very best wishes, Veronica."

Hard to read this as anything other than evidence that the Mayor encouraged his friend to apply for the job. The other "arts advisory position" is probably a reference to having been invited to become a trustee of the Northern Ballet Theatre in Leeds. I'm very struck by that deferential, almost coy, "If I may," at the start of the letter. The ACE London job is a public appointment. Wadley didn't need to ask the Mayor's permission to apply for it. How odd.

Bring the curtain down on the Ben and Boris show

theartsblogs  | Charlotte Higgins

For the sake of our cultural life, politicians like Bradshaw and Johnson should leave political drama to the arts

Art and politics have always been, and always will be, locked in a complicated and often uncomfortable dance, from Velázquez's double-edged depiction of Pope Innocent X to Mark Wallinger's Turner prize-winning State Britain – a meticulous recreation of Brian Haw's Parliament Square peace camp.

But politics and art have now become entangled in a manner at best unedifying, at worst damaging, to cultural life.

Thinking of applying for an Arts Council Grant? Some tips

Notes from the End of the World: Thinking of applying for an Arts Council Grant? Some tips.