Public participation specialists Involve have just published an Arts Council England (ACE) commissioned report on  “Participatory budgeting and the arts” outlining this new form of public engagement with funding and its potential impact on the arts, locally and nationally. nalgao members are urged to read the report and consider how it might affect their services and funding. 
 

“Participatory budgeting,” explains the report, is “a process whereby citizens are given the power to decide how a public budget should be allocated [and] is a growing phenomenon in the UK. So far it has been used mainly to allocate small, community-focused budgets separate from mainstream funding but it is now also beginning to be used on larger service budgets, which could have implications for many public services.”  Central government explicitly backs participatory budgeting  and has announced that it wants to see all local authorities use it in some form by 2012

ACE commissioned this study in order to explore how participatory budgeting is currently applied to arts projects, and to create an idea of how they can use the process to enhance their work with local authorities and in involving the public in decision making.

Click here to download the ACE commissioned Participatory Budgeting report.

Arts Council England will not lose clients to the DCMS if the Conservatives win the next general election.  That was the clear message given by Shadow Culture Minister Ed Vaizey at the National Campaign for the Arts’ conference Future Britain: Arts Leading The Way which launched the NCA's new ‘Arts Manifesto’.  "We are not going to take the ‘big five’ [clients] away from the Arts Council", said Vaizey, although he added, “the idea that they have to come back every three years and check that you are still going to fund a National Theatre seems slightly absurd.”  

The threat to ACE’s funding responsibilities emerged in Sir John Tusa’s Conservative commissioned report ‘A New Landscape For The Arts’.  In this report Tusa proposed that management of the largest ACE clients be passed to the DCMS. 
 

In a  round of Cabinet musical chairs, Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter, Minster of Health and Minister for the South West has succeeded Andy Burnham as Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport.  Burnham has gone to be Secretary of State for Health, replacing Alan Johnson who moves to the Home Office.

Bradshaw, was born in London, raised in Norwich and worked as a journalist for regional newspapers in Exeter and Norwich before joining the BBC.  His reporting of the fall of the Berlin Wall for BBC Radio won a Sony award.  Bradshaw was elected MP for Exeter in 1997 in what is widely regarded as a vitriolic and bitter campaign.

Since his election, Bradshaw has held positions in the Ministry of Health,  the Foreign Office, The Department of the Environment and the Leader of the Commons’ office.

Bradshaw's cultural interests and involvement are as yet unknown.

The Government’s 2009-10 budget includes a number of measures to support the creative industries which clearly demonstrate the importance the government is attaching to this sector. The measures include:

June 2009, publication of national best-practice advice on business support for the creative industries for Business Links in each participating region.

July 2009, publication of a Local Government Association and Work Foundation toolkit of actions to help Local Authorities support creative industries in their areas.

October 2009, the first Creativity and Business International Network (C&binet) conference designed to  raise the international profile of the UK's creative industries and address a range of issues of importance
to creative sectors, including intellectual property.

In addition the government has announced that it will create “Sector Compacts” with the Sector Skills Councils that cover the creative industries to improve the skills base of the creative industries and it will tailor “Train to Gain” provision to meet the particular needs of employers.