Catch 9.2

Who wouldn’t sympathise with Arts Council England (ACE) for falling foul of the National Audit Office (p1)? Conversations about what to do with its 2010/11 Grant-in-Aid underspend must have been pretty tense ones – just think of the hullabaloo if the money had been clawed back by the Treasury. Heads would have rolled – and rightly so. The alternative was to find something worthwhile to spend £9.2m on… fast. Not such an easy task. Local authorities and other public bodies across the country are only too familiar with the push to get invoices raised in March when there is money left in the kitty at the end of the financial year; and it is ironic that ACE does not incorporate DCMS-style time restrictions into its own funding agreements with clients. But the folly of a public funding system that penalises good financial husbandry by requiring organisations to return underspent grants is not the only issue here. The revelation of a £5m contingency fund to support organisations in “financial distress” is also of interest. How was it envisaged that this cash would be allocated, when the open-access Lottery-funded ‘Sustain’ fund was ostensibly the one to which arts organisations already suffering the effects of the recession were eligible to apply? Do we assume an open and transparent decision-making process for the £5m fund? Somehow, despite ACE asserting in its 2010/11 Annual Review that it has nothing to hide in how it spends public money, we are left with the feeling that opacity is still the name of the game.