Wednesday’s Budget announcement by the chancellor George Osborne will mean more cuts at Arts Council England, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has confirmed.
The department is to receive an extra 1% reduction to its budget for 2013/14 and 2014/15 and this will be passed on to ACE as 1.09% in 2013/14 and 1.06% in 2014/15.
A DCMS spokesperson, quoted on The Stage website, said: “It is inevitable, given that almost all DCMS funding is passed directly to our arm’s length bodies, that we need to pass much of this cut on. Apart from … protected areas, our bodies will be receiving reductions of 1.09% in 2013/14 and 1.06% in 2014/15. We will be discussing with our bodies what this means in practice.”
In a statement responding to the Budget announcement, Arts Council England Chief Executive Alan Davey said: “We understand that the reduction to DCMS budgets announced in the Budget will be passed on to the Arts Council as a cut to our Grant in aid of 1.09 per cent in 2013/14 and 1.06 per cent in 2014/15.
“Added to the cuts already announced in the autumn statement, this will mean our allocation of Government money for these years will be cut by 2.09% and 3.06% since the Spending Review in 2010.
“We will have no choice but to pass these cuts in our Grant in aid budget onto the organisations we fund. Once the figures are confirmed we will look closely at them and decide how we will do this.”
