ACE monitoring arts centre after performers go unpaid

Art Council England has said it will continue to monitor an arts centre in Halifax after temporarily halting payments amid concerns that some performers who have played at the venue have gone unpaid.

ACE said that it had paused funding to Halifax's Square Chapel after the art centre’s directors “failed to provide adequate information” to satisfy the conditions of its National Portfolio funding agreement for the £159,000 it receives each year.

Following the receipt of evidence, ACE said that instalments have since been restarted but added that any further payments will only be approved “on a case-by-case basis on receipt of satisfactory monitoring information”.

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A spokesperson for Square Chapel told the Halifax Courier that the release of two out of four payments from ACE meant that “a significant number of priority and artist debts which had accrued whilst the funding was paused have now been cleared”.

"Unfortunately, there are still a number of artists who we still owe money to,” said the spokesperson.

"This is incredibly frustrating as at the time of booking the programme, there were no concerns that we’d be able to meet the payments and if we’d have known that our funding was at risk of being frozen for such a long time, there’s no way we’d have made commitments to artists.

"We believed that the process with the Arts Council review would be quickly resolved, which is why we continued to trade.

"We pride ourselves on looking after artists, and not being able to pay them on time has been a massive blow to everyone.”

Arts at the Mill

Square Chapel was named an NPO in 2022, just two years after falling into administration. In September 2020, the venue was saved from closure when it was taken over by Arts at the Mill, an umbrella company for Wigan organisations The Old Courts, Wigan Pier, and The Royal Court Theatre, a move supported by ACE and Calderdale Council.

Square Chapel is the second Arts at the Mill organisation to have its NPO funding paused in the last 12 months. In October 2023, The Old Courts had its payments temporarily frozen after it lost around £1.2m in revenue when structural damage in its concrete floor left it closed for months.

According to Square Chapel's spokesperson, subsequent redundancies at The Old Courts "had a knock-on effect on the capacity and expertise available, for free, to Square Chapel CIC as employees who had been supporting the organisation were no longer there.”

They said this was one of several contributing factors to Square Chapel's cash flow problems.

Those issues include Calderdale Council not renewing Square Chapel’s funding through its Cultural Grants programme, which provided the organisation with £70,000 per year from 2019 until 2022.

As a result, Square Chapel said it needed to access £500,000 from Arts at the Mill CIC’s reserves. The spokesperson also said the company had been forced to cancel a “huge” number of shows as part of its summer concert series due to “noise ingress”.

"We’ve had many promoters cancel events due to the interference with noise, which has left us substantially out of pocket,” they added.

Despite this, they said they had “found there to be an opportunity for Square Chapel to trade out of its position and remain solvent.”

"We have had a huge restructure ourselves and feel confident once this is all resolved that we’ll be back on track financially.”