The Stage

ACE rejects London bias claims

Published Tuesday 17 February 2004 at 12:35 by Jeremy Austin

Arts Council England has hit back at criticism from a parliamentary committee that it has concentrated too much of its funding of capital projects in London, ignoring the rest of the country.

The claim has been made by the public accounts committee in the most recent stage of a process of government scrutiny of how ACE spends lottery money, which started in 1999 with a report by the National Audit Committee. It looked at 15 major capital projects, funded in the early days of the weekly draw.

While the public accounts committee, chaired by Edward Leigh MP, acknowledged that ACE had addressed most of the problems encountered by those early projects - of which six went over budget by 20% or more, nine were late and ten received additional funding - it did state that the arts council still “needs to achieve a more equitable distribution of lottery funding across the country”.

It continued: “It should reach beyond the large, well established arts organisations concentrated in London and encourage applications from smaller bodies and from communities that have tended not to benefit from lottery funding. ACE does not seem to be routinely collecting information on the diversity of audiences but the information provided to the committee indicates that audiences remain disproportionately drawn from particularly sections of society.”

The 15 projects included the Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Court in London, as well as doomed projects the Dovecot Arts Centre, Stockton-on-Tees, and the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield.

ACE spokesman David McNeill said that the projects are representative of what was happening at the time and said that criticisms of ACE’s obsession with the capital were misplaced.

“We didn’t address it at the time because we weren’t allowed to by law. When the lottery first started we couldn’t be strategic, we had to compare them on their own individual merits,” he said, adding that this favoured the big, well-supported city developments that could afford to put together the various business plans that were needed.

This changed when there was a review of the law governing such things in 1997, allowing ACE and the other lottery distributors to be more strategic, ensuring a fairer distribution of cash.