Theatre News

ACE Slashes Quarter of Workforce by April 2010

| London's West End |

25 February 2009

Arts Council England has announced it will reduce its staff numbers by 24 percent in order to meet the government’s requirement that it saves 15 percent on its grant in aid administration costs by 2010.

A representative of ACE confirmed to Whatsonstage.com that the restructuring means the organisation’s number of full-time staff will reduce from 622 to 473 by April 2010. There will be a formal period of consultation between now and June, with the final proposal being ratified by the National Council in July.

Redundancies will mainly affect administration roles as opposed to “customer-focused” ones, and will take place across the organisation. The Arts Council hopes that the major restructuring will help it to “share resources and knowledge in a more flexible way across the organisation”.

ACE has long been engaged in a battle to cut its running costs, having already made savings of £9.6 million a year since 2002.

Alongside the staff reductions, the new proposal includes plans for “nine streamlined regional offices”, a smaller executive board (nine instead of 14), a centralised grants team based in Manchester and a smaller head office, which will co-locate with the London regional office.

ACE chief executive Alan Davey said in a statement: “This proposal outlines a new Arts Council where responsibilities are clear and creative input at all levels is encouraged. Making the most of our talented and motivated workforce can only be of the greatest benefit to the organisations we fund and the rich arts landscape this country has to offer.”

Many of the new proposals are influenced by the 2008 McIntosh report, which criticised ACE’s “inward-looking culture” in the wake of its 2008-2011 spending review, which saw over 150 organisations lose their subsidy (See News, 30 Jul 2008).

At the time of the report’s publication, Alan Davey said: “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 … that we expect from those arts organisations and artists we fund.”

– by Theo Bosanquet