The Stage

SAC funding decisions to be made public

Published Tuesday 18 April 2006 at 14:50 by Alistair Smith

Performing arts companies in Scotland will have official judgements on whether they are worthy of subsidy made public by the Scottish Arts Council, in what the funding body has described as an attempt to increase ‘transparency’.

The surprise move to publish internal assessments of all its clients has come after the SAC’s latest round of funding decisions was greeted with heavy criticism in many quarters of Scotland’s performing arts industry. Some 1,600 documents will be made available on the organisation’s website later this month. The material had been due to be published this week but the arts council has delayed the publication date after problems processing such a large volume of information.

Lizzie Nicoll, director of the Federation of Scottish Theatre, said that she was not convinced that such a large amount of data would help make the SAC’s funding decisions any clearer. She said she was also concerned that having certain information published might not be in the best interests of the companies themselves and the decision to publish the documents had been made without any apparent consultation with the sector.

She added: “We welcome the transparency and openness, however we are not convinced that the publication of 1,600 documents without a strategic overview will add very much to a process we already feel was very opaque… realistically, if they were to give an overview that would be fine, but who is going to sift through 1,600 documents?”

SAC’s decision to publish such documents is unprecedented. Neither the Arts Council of Wales nor Arts Council England make their funding judgements freely available to the public, although certain information is attainable under Freedom of Information requests. A spokesperson for ACE explained that the principal reason that it had not yet done so was that it had found it impractical to make such a volume of information public, however it has not been ruled out as something that might be considered in the future.

Meanwhile, Borderline Theatre Company - one of the organisations that lost its core funding as part of the recent SAC funding settlement - has announced it will appeal the decision to cut its £215,000 subsidy.

The organisation has already managed to gather a significant body of support for its appeal bid. Scottish justice minister Cathy Jamieson and Des Browne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, have joined a campaign to convince SAC to reverse its decision to disinvest the company, which has hosted performers such as Robbie Coltrane and Billy Connolly.

Borderline producer Eddie Jackson commented: “SAC is talking a great deal on transparency - but who knows?”