Nine NPOs rejected for additional funding by ACE

A total of 15 National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) have been granted extra funding by Arts Council England (ACE) to help them adjust to lower levels of income for the 2023-26 period, with nearly 40% of the available money going to Welsh National Opera, it has emerged.

ACE said it had a total of 33 applications from 24 individual organisations to the two stages of the £9m Transform programme designed to support NPOs that have received a cut in the amount they receive from the funder.

Welsh National Opera, which saw its annual income from ACE cut from £6.24m a year to £4m a year for 2023-26 and ceased touring in Liverpool as a result, has received £3.25m through the programme. Nine NPOs had their applications rejected.

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The next biggest beneficiary of the fund was Camden Arts Centre which received a total of £708,000 – £84,149 in stage one, and £623,851 in round two.

Meanwhile the Crafts Council received a total of £614,109, Curious Minds received £503,800, The Organisation for New Music and Sound got £489,656, and London Sinfonietta received £468,681.

In total, 52 NPOs saw a reduction in their funding from ACE compared with previous levels, although for eight of these the reduction came to less than £100.

However the seven NPOs that received the highest proportional cuts to their funding as part of the 2023-26 investment programme, including Glyndebourne, the Arts Marketing Association, University of Cambridge Museums and The Albany, did not receive any funding.

ACE has not provided details of which nine organisations were unsuccessful with their applications and has stressed that not all of the NPOs that saw a reduction in funding applied to the Transform programme.

For stage one, funding is intended to act as a "bridge" between 1 April and 31 July 2023 to help organisations transition to their lower funding base, while allowing breathing space to consider how they may remodel their business. ACE received a total of nine applications and made five awards.

For stage two, intended to provide support from August 2023 to March 2026 so that organisations can develop and implement innovative changes that restructure their business models and deliver long term financial sustainability on lower levels of ACE funding, a total of 24 applications were received, and 15 awards made.

Five organisations received funding from both stage one and stage two.

Although ACE set aside £1.5m for stage one, only a fifth of that (£303,874) was paid out. And while ACE initially set aside £7.5m for stage two – the amount that was eventually handed out came to £8.25m.

Of the overall £9m that was initially set aside for the programme, a total of £8.55m was distributed.

New sources of income

London Sinfonietta Chief Executive Andrew Burke said the additional £468,681 over three years his organisation will receive represents around 75% of the grant it lost.

"Some of this funding can be used to underwrite short and mid-term commitments, but most of it must be used to evolve new sources of income," he said.

"This Transform funding will help us a lot in the short-term and we are relieved and grateful. Yet our smaller staff team will now need to replace ACE’s lost funding; extra hard work in addition to producing our programme, let alone the potential lost future opportunities for the composers, freelance musicians and artists who work with us.

"Our long-term financial resilience, evolved over many years, is inevitably now more at risk."

"We will commission and curate projects that can tour more often and reach wider audiences online, and we are developing new income streams from partners, businesses, trusts and individuals."

Darren Henley, Chief Executive of ACE, said: "We received a record number of applications to our latest investment round, and many more good applications than we could support; as a result we had to make difficult decisions which meant some organisations had to leave the portfolio, and we had to ask others to manage with less.

"We really do understand how challenging some of our decisions have been for those organisations, and this package of support is designed to help manage this change as fairly as possible."