After the emotionally charged and highly damaging (to the Arts Council)
three-year funding Investment Strategy review announced in December
2007 and the subsequent furore both in the arts world and in the media,
ACE's new chief executive Alan Davey commissioned Baroness Genista McIntosh
to review the way in which the organisation had acted and discover the
lessons which should be learned. That review has now been published
and can be read on the Arts Council website.
What follows is a summary of Baroness McIntosh's recommendations, as
well as the recommendations of Gill Kirk's separate report on ACE's
communication strategy. The third part details ACE's response.
McIntosh started, she says, "from the assumption that everyone
involved acted in good faith and to the best of their ability"
and she believes that her investigations largely bore this out. However
she believes that "the difficulties ACE later encountered arose
because its approach to the task it had set itself was too much focused
on its own priorities and had not engaged sufficiently with the needs
and aspirations of its client organisations. This determination to prove
itself and its new structures was not entirely matched by the confidence
to share its intentions clearly from the outset with the sector it funds
and with its other stakeholders."
She writes, "It is my view that ACE was unwise to embark on a
radical review of its RFO client base without first properly reviewing
what that client base looked like in its entirety from a national standpoint.
The failure to do so, which I believe derives from ACE's overly complex
structure based on 10 separate decision-making bodies, meant that the
process which followed, though robust and well-ordered in its own terms,
lacked a coherent intellectual framework and was therefore very likely
to run into difficulties as it unfolded. I believe that many of those
difficulties would have been significantly mitigated, if not avoided,
had a period been set aside early in the process for a comprehensive
assessment, led from National office, of the scale of the enterprise."
The Councils Themselves:
I recommend that ACE's national Council undertakes a review of its
role and composition, paying particular attention to the balance between
regional representation and the need for independent members, especially
those who are arts practitioners, to be more effective in shaping
ACE policy. In doing so, it should consider how its membership can
properly reflect the views and aspirations of the next generation
of leaders in the arts.
Executive Leadership:
The Executive Board, as ACE's strategic and decision-making executive
group, should be responsible for ensuring that a national overview
is preserved at all times in the way ACE policies are implemented.
I recommend that the Chief Executive review the structure and terms
of reference of the Executive Board, paying particular attention to
how it can more effectively fulfil this role whilst maintaining an
appropriate degree of flexibility in the delivery of policies regionally.
Relationships with Regularly Funded Organisations:
Taking account of everything I heard, and noting the recognition in
the McMaster report (Supporting Excellence in the Arts p 15) that
today's Lead Officers may become tomorrow's arts policy makers, I
recommend that an audit of skills and experience amongst LOs across
all regions is commissioned as soon as possible, and that training
and appraisal is reviewed and improved, bringing it into line with
current best practice and paying particular attention to the development
of confidence in managing face-to-face relationships with clients.
I also recommend that all ACE officers responsible for making judgements
about the quality and significance of their clients' work, including
regional Executive Directors, should ensure that they have sufficient
first-hand experience to make those judgements credible.
It is also in my view essential that an element of independent peer
review be introduced as soon as possible into ACE's methods of assessing
its clients, as recommended by the McMaster report, and I note that
the Chief Executive has already put plans in place to bring this about.
New RFOs:
I recommend that ACE develop clear criteria for entering the RFO portfolio,
which should be published and applied consistently across all regions.
I also recommend that ACE's funding agreements with RFOs be reviewed
to ensure that they accurately reflect the relationship of mutual
respect, trust and openness which ACE should expect to have with all
its clients.
Moderation:
I recommend that before another similar process is undertaken, ACE
ensures that the national Arts Strategy team has the necessary capacity
and that its authority in asserting national art form priorities is
agreed and understood across all regions.
Comprehensive Spending Review Settlement:
My own view is that ACE would have been in a better position to compensate
for the effects of the delayed announcement of the CSR settlement
if it had been working from a complete overview within a better defined
framework from the start and had not been obliged by its own constitution
to go through a lengthy process of individual regional council meetings
before decisions could be ratified. The relationship between regional
and national decision-making was unhelpfully cumbersome in these difficult
circumstances. I recommend that the role of national Council be formally
strengthened to avoid similar difficulties in future.
Relationships with Stakeholders:
ACE needs to ensure that the importance of maintaining open, respectful
relationships with all its partners, in order to sustain a healthy
ecology of funding and support for the arts, is fully understood at
all levels of the organisation and by its partners. I recommend that
it takes urgent steps to repair and renew those relationships which
have been damaged as a result of the IS process.
Contingency and Transition Funding:
Given that a response process was written into the original plan for
the IS, ACE should have foreseen that contingency funds would be needed
to adjust decisions at the final stage, and designed a transparent
method for allocating them. I recommend that any future investment
strategy takes this into account.
Conclusions:
The problems it experienced throughout the IS process arose, in my
view, partly from a preoccupation with implementing its own priorities
leading to an inward-looking culture which inhibited it from talking
openly to its clients, partners and friends. ACE needs to remember
that it is not a regulator of the arts sector, even though it has
responsibility for public funds. It should be advocate, enabler, supporter,
developer, critical friend - but not policeman. The way it relates
to the artists it supports should reflect this role at every level,
especially in the language it uses in its key communications with
the sector. A less impersonal, regulatory tone in some of the documents
drawn up for the IS process might have resulted in the messages being
heard more sympathetically.
ACE also needs to recognise that while it must have its own strategic
priorities, these should be based in a proper understanding of what
artists want to create. As one witness remarked: "nobody makes
art in response to Arts Council policy". Such understanding can
only be gained from placing the arts at the centre of everything ACE
does, which may seem blindingly obvious, but needs restating nonetheless.
This will require everyone involved, including senior officers and
council members, to maintain a more direct and visible connection
to the work they fund. Responsibility for reasserting this core purpose
lies primarily with the national leadership team, both executive and
non-executive.
