The Stage

ITC chief lambasts ACE’s Sustain scheme for favouring the ‘big boys’

Published Tuesday 15 September 2009 at 16:35 by Lalayn Baluch

Arts Council England’s Sustain funding scheme - the £40 million cash pot set up to help the industry through the recession - has been criticised for favouring “big building-based players” and encouraging “mismanagement and unresourcefulness” by a leading arts chief.

Independent Theatre Council chief executive Charlotte Jones has hit out at ACE after receiving “dozens” of complaints from ITC members about the criteria for Sustain and the types of organisations that have so far benefitted from it.

Since July, ACE has awarded almost £13 million through the funding programme, with opera and music companies emerging as the big winners. This includes a £900,000 grant for Welsh National Opera and £700,000 for the Royal Opera House.

Speaking to The Stage, Jones said the scheme was damaging the morale of small-scale theatre organisations, who were fighting to survive the recession.

She said: “Our members are working very hard to stay positive, energetic and resourceful in the face of the recession, and suddenly see such a flagrant dealing with the big boys and dealing with one art form.

“I think it is bringing up a message of mismanagement and unresourcefulness. The big building-based players are being propped up and small organisations that were working really hard to be resourceful are being ignored and stepped over. It makes things doubly worse when settlements are made of this nature - I can’t see why the opera house needs £700,000 when it has such huge public subsidy.”

Jones questioned why most of the cash was being given to opera, which she described as a “notoriously elite art form”. She also criticised ACE for naming organisations that had been unsuccessful in bidding for cash, believing it could have a negative effect on their chances with other funders.

Meanwhile, both she and National Campaign for the Arts director Louise de Winter have raised concerns over the lack of funding opportunities available to small organisations through the Sustain programme. The minimum grant that can be applied for is £75,000.

De Winter said: “I can imagine that there are hundreds of organisations crying out for a little bit of funding because of cash flow issues.

“I thought the Sustain award was meant to be about helping organisations with a cash flow crisis and that doesn’t have to necessarily mean a big sum of money. If they had made the bar around £30,000 that would have allowed a lot of organisations to get over this hump.”

An ACE spokeswoman said the minimum award level had been set to ensure the scheme was efficient and made an impact, and that additional lottery funds had been made available to help smaller organisation.

She said: “We have already made awards across all art forms and to all different sizes of organisations.”

The spokeswoman said all successful and unsuccessful applications were named as ACE had a duty to be “open and accountable”.

“Being turned down for a Sustain award is absolutely no reflection on the quality of an organisation or its work,” she added.