The Arts Funding Detective

Free theatre ticket initiative runs out of publicity funds

You might think that a scheme like this, 'giving away' theatre tickets, would be a natural for online promotion, honing social media techniques to ferret out an enthusiastic network of people keen to spread the word and find out what shows tickets were available for. But the Arts Council has never shown any interest or skill in the social media space. I've always found it amazing that their Facebook group simply regurgitates the first line of any given press release, failing to even link to the release itself, let alone provide any useful information (and repeated comments to this effect have never produced a single official response, so I guess nobody actually reads it.
Anyhow, this is a fail on a fairly major scale, not that they'd ever admit it.

The Stage / News / Free theatre ticket initiative runs out of publicity funds

A Night Less Ordinary, the government-launched free theatre initiative, has come under fire yet again after it emerged that the entire communications budget for the scheme has already been exhausted, despite the fact that the project has nearly a year to run and is still well short of its stated target of giving away in excess of 500,000 free tickets to under 26 year olds.

Arts Council England, which is administering the scheme, has spent all of the £100,000 that was assigned to communications out of the £2.5 million pot that it was handed down by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to support the initiative, which was launched in February last year. Over the first year of the scheme, 174,717 tickets were given away.

Free theatre tickets scheme for the young has failed

Free theatre tickets scheme for the young has failed, admits minister - Telegraph

The Government's attempt to attract more young people to the theatre with free tickets has failed, the culture minister has admitted.

Margaret Hodge said that the Government had not planned adequately or consulted the theatre industry before launching the A Night Less Ordinary scheme, which has cost £2.5 million.

The initiative was announced at the Labour party conference in 2008 by Andy Burnham, the then culture secretary, where he pledged to make a million free theatre tickets available to people under 26 by 2011.

But figures published by Arts Council England (ACE), the government's funding body which rolled out the project in February 2009, show that only 121,742 tickets have been taken up by young theatregoers so far – less than 20 per cent of its revised target of 618,000 tickets.

Coal Fired Computers

Art and Energy Talks: Graham Harwood, Yokokoji Yoha

AV Festival

Harwood will discuss his new work Coal Fired Computers, which is showing at the Discovery Museum, and the crisis of power in a modern globalised economy. Closely associated with the formation of social software and software art, he received the Tate’s first online commission and won the 2009 Transmediale Festival award for his social telephony work Tantalum Memorial, a memorial to the Coltan Wars in the Congo.

Talk at Tyneside Cinema

10 Pilgrim Street
Newcastle
NE1 6QG

+44 (0)845 217 9909
View Website

(NewcastleGateshead)

Sun 14th March from 10:30am until 11:30am

Some have a good life

Wish I could do this when I miss the last train ...

Arts Council England chair claims £431 expenses for late-night car ride home | Culture | The Guardian

In other expenses news, Dame Liz Forgan, chair of Arts Council England (and also chair of the Scott Trust, which owns this newspaper) claimed £431 to be driven home late to London after a performance given by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, ­reports the Sunday Times. Her ­predecessor, Sir Christopher Frayling, claimed £460.72 to be driven between London and Glyndebourne. Is it any wonder that the Tories complain about the quango's use of public funds for ­administrative costs? We expect better.

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.