Arts Council England is to insulate vulnerable arts organisations and artists from the recession with a £44.5m fast track scheme mostly devoted to a new fund, Sustain.
The short, sharp initiative is for two years and the money will be generated by radically reducing lottery spending over the period.
Sustain will be an open application fund of £40m available to artists and organisations suffering directly because of the recession. There will also be a £4m increase in the lottery-fuelled Grants for the Arts budget, which partly targets individuals, and £500,000 to enable empty retail spaces to be used for artistic activities as part of the government’s Town Centres Initiative, reported on in AI 230.
Grants from £75,000 to £3 million will be awarded over, initially, 2009/10 and 2010/11. Any arts organisation can apply but priority will be given to those who are seen as vital to ACE’s mission of “great art for everyone”. The 2009/10 budget for Grants for the Arts will be increased from £52 to £54 million and will rise again in 2010/11 to £56 million.
Announcing the scheme, ACE chair Dame Liz Forgan said the package was devised to help the arts sector fulfil its wider social role as well as its cultural mikssion.
“The real challenge for the arts sector is not to ask ‘what is the government going to do to help us?’ but ‘what can we do to help the country weather and recover from this downturn?’” she said.
“Showing that we can make a real contribution in even the most difficult of times will be the best case we can make for continued public investment in the arts through – and just as importantly – beyond the recession.”
The increase is in contrast to the £4m cut in the arts grant for next year resulting from the Budget’s £20m reduction to the DCMS subvention for 2010-11. ACE has said it will absorb the cut without passing it on to clients.
“Of course we understand that the national debt has to be tackled, but a few million off the arts budget is going to make no appreciable difference to that task. On the other hand, it could undermine years of creative and financial investment” Forgan said. “The Arts Council will do all it can to keep that investment in place. We cannot protect artists from the realities of recession, but we can be as imaginative, open and useful as possible in our efforts to get us all through this with minimal damage to the creative life of this country.”
