Arts Council Funding Transparency

ACE restructuring and losing a pile of staff to save  money

ACE Restructuring Proposal Feb 2009

ACE staff list

ACE information

Quiz: what can you find on the ACE website?

Here's a listing of what you should be able to find with ease, by law: ACE Web Site content 

Grants

Between 2006 and 2008 over £23,000,000 given in grants. 1463 grants. From over £800,000 to a few hundred pounds. Average value over £15,000.

So where can we read about how these grants went, who did what and what the outcome was?

Can we learn from the responses of the Arts Council officers to successful applications?

Visual Arts funding Searchable list 

ACE budget

longtail of arts funding

These grants are the lifeblood of many artists and artists organisations. At the same time, there is a severe lack of information in the public domain about what these grants are, how they come about and what the outcome of each grant is. While you can get listings of grants made, there is no public listing of links to these projects. There are many reasons for making more of this information public, from giving the artists concerned a bit of clue as to what sort of applications succeed through to allowing us the taxpayers and interested parties to track individual projects and their outcomes. Many of these projects involve substantial amounts of money, but there is often no way short of extensive Google searches to find out any backstory.

My view is that the Arts Council should automatically publish all successful applications along with all internal and client reports within a fixed timeframe. At the moment, the Arts Council publishes next to nothing apart from a few self-selected overviews of featured projects. We need to see the good, the bad and the ugly without fear or favour.

It is theoretically possible to get copies of funding applications and reports through the Freedom of Information Act (FoI). I got the funding listing below through the FoI. But it's a huge job and well above my capacity to make substantial inroads.

So, this wiki and associated databases are a public project to extract information from the Arts Council and make it public for public use. The database I'm using is in the public domain. The aim of this project is to annotate the database and keep it up to date. To do this I will be encouraging:

• anyone who has had an Arts Council England visual arts grant to add a link to their website
• anyone who has had a visual arts grant to add documentation around the project to this wiki
• anyone who has an interest in a particular project or area of funding to start making FoI applications and adding the results to this wiki
• adding any other relevant information that sheds light on the funding process in the UK

I'll be making some FoI applications of my own in the near future. I'll update the database to show which projects have had FoI applications made and also to show where there is further information about projects. I'll also add information here about how to make FoI applications.

I have a listing supplied by the Arts Council England of almost 1,500 visual arts grants during the years 2006 to 2008. The list is sorted by value of grant. I will be making other versions of the list - I'm interested in how you'd like this sorted or what you're interested in - drop me a line  and I'll see what I can do. 

Visual Arts funding full list

(You can find all Arts Council funding 2006 to 2008  data here.)