No new funding to resolve arts council technical issues, says Nandy

The culture secretary Lisa Nandy has made clear that there is no extra financial support available to resolve the technical issues faced by Arts Council England’s funding portal, Grantium.

The grant management system stopped working on 23 July, halting applications to many of the arm’s length body’s funding streams and leaving organisations and artists facing significant uncertainty. Some funds have since reopened via other routes.

ACE has said the outage was caused by the inability of Grantium to operate with high traffic at a time when the system was being updated.

In a hearing before the culture select committee last week, Nandy was asked if the government would provide extra support to arts council to overhaul the grant application system.

Nandy said the team at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was “trying to assist [ACE] with resolving it as quickly as possible” and was providing technical support.

“It is a matter for them,” she added. “We didn't get additional money in the spending review to give them a new system.

“Obviously, through the Arts Council England review that is happening, we're looking at the whole set of questions around ACE, but right now we're just trying to help them resolve so that people can apply for grants and get the money when they've been successful.”

She said she would follow up with arts council chief executive Darren Henley on concerns that the application system was not working smoothly even before the current issues arose.

Nandy also confirmed to the committee that DCMS would shrink its 1,000-strong workforce as it strives to make 5% efficiency savings by the end of the current spending review.

“We've committed to about 5% efficiencies,” she said. “So we have to work out through our business planning process, that we're in the middle of at the moment, exactly how we do it…. all departments are going to end up smaller by the end of the [spending review] period, and the art for us is to do that well, so that it doesn't actually impact on the programmes of work.”

It was confirmed this week that Labour peer Baroness Twycross would take on the ministerial portfolio for museums and heritage at DCMS following last week’s government reshuffle.

Ian Murray, who succeeded previous culture minister Chris Bryant, will have the title of minister for creative industries, media and arts.  

Twycross will lead on cultural property, the museum sector and the art market.  

In its latest update on the Grantium outage, the arts council confirmed that applications for National Lottery Project Grants would reopen in stages this month.

The Under £30k strand was made available to early users on 10 September as part of a phased reopening to test that the new route is working well. The strand will reopen to all applicants on 22 September, with decisions shared with applicants ten weeks after submission.  

The next part of the fund to open will be the £30,001-100,000 strand, which will be back online by Tuesday 30 September.