The Arts Council late last month, issued its response to the increasingly controversial McIntosh Review, an independent review commissioned by Chief Executive Alan Davey which examines the process used to reach funding decisions.
The recommendations within the review concerned Arts Council leadership; the organisation’s relationship with the arts sector; the importance of maintaining a national overview of all the organisations they fund; and bringing more of an external perspective into their thinking and decision-making.
Arts Council England Chair Christopher Frayling said, “Our new Chief Executive Alan Davey commissioned Baroness Genista McIntosh to examine our investment strategy process and her report provides us with a detailed survey.
“It is an independent report which reflects the views and perceptions of the people Jenny spoke to. I completely accept the broad thrust of her recommendations and believe that Alan’s response sets out a clear and workable plan which will build on the valuable lessons we have learned.”
Among the key review points of the report, Genista McIntosh called for the reintroduction of peer reviews of ACE’s methods of assessment, the auditing of lead officers’ skills and experience, improved training for all staff, the ACE to review the council on a regional and national level, and stressed for a clearer, more consistent, criteria against which organisations are judged.
This is in stark contrast to the Arts Council peer review from 2005, in which the organization was applauded for its key role in ensuring that the arts were healthier, more optimistic and more central to UK national life than ever before.
That report was commissioned and headed by McIntosh as well, with a panel of industry experts and academics assisting her. The report was welcomed wholeheartedly by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, who said at the time, “The Peer Review report has many positive things to say about the work of the Arts Council and their management of the massive investment we have made in the arts since coming to power in 1997.
“It also sets out clearly the challenges ahead. The Arts Council now needs further to enhance its role, to strengthen connections with its artistic and wider constituency and to become – even more – the force in the cultural community we all need it to be.”
Alan Davey said in February of this year that an “external eye” was required to review the Arts Council’s recent funding process. McIntosh, who has previously run two of the UK’s flagship performing arts companies – the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, was chosen as the person most qualified to undertake the review.
It could be argued that after the latest report, the Arts Council has failed in carrying the baton and achieving what it stated its mission was three years ago.
The content of the report is detailed and meticulous, after McIntosh consulted 100 people in the research and preparation of the review. She writes, “Almost all witnesses I spoke to believed that the ACE, including some who did well from the 2007/8 funding decisions, said they had lost respect for ACE as a result of the way the process was handled.”
Whilst beginning the report with the statement that “from the assumption that everyone involved acted in good faith and to the best of their ability”, she later tells 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 later mentions that the review process “…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 report results into an at times scathing indictment of the behaviour of the Arts Council and its administrative failings brought about by the tensions between national and regional interests, and tells of an organization clearly too focused on its own priorities and not engaged with the needs and aspirations of the artists it serves.
Most of all, it criticizes the failures to create and support a staff framework that retains officers who are informed and acquainted with work happening within the sector, and a critical failing of communication coupled with a dangerous culture of secrecy within the organization that means many voices are not heard, or simply ignored. McIntosh says, “…the lead officers are not supported enough, too exposed, either too powerful or not powerful enough, underpaid and under trained.”
In early March this year, soon after his appointment and at the time of the commencement of this year’s report, Davey felt the baroness was “the ideal person to carry out the review” because of her extensive experience within the arts. He said, “This is the first time that the arts council, as a single body, has led a single, integrated investment strategy for our regularly funded organisations. As a learning organisation it is important we now review that process in detail, establish what worked well and what improvements can be made next time. An external perspective on this is vital.”
And in response to this report this week, Davey said, “I see the publication of this report as heralding a new beginning as we build stronger relationships with the arts world, and use the lessons of the report to move on.
“It is right that we are the kind of organisation that can submit itself to this kind of scrutiny and be open in sharing the lessons it takes from it. Because if we are truly to have excellent publicly funded art in this country, we need to do our job with the highest levels of knowledge, skill and judgment we can, applying the same degree of rigour in our own processes and communications that we expect from those arts organisations and artists we fund.
“We are an organisation that wants to learn and to improve: with the help of Baroness McIntosh’s report, we can and will do so.”
In final summing up, Davey acknowledged that “trust was lost and relationships were damaged”, but said it was crucial to “learn the lesson and move on”.
To read the report in full view McIntosh Report
