The organisation’s National Lottery Project Grant scheme has essentially been an 404 error page since mid-summer because ageing systems have not been updated.
Arts Council England’s [ACE] Grantium digital grant platform, which facilitates applications for payments to arts and culture from the National Lottery, has endured ‘technical issues’ since 23rd July.
The system has been on hold ever since, with news this week that the Supporting Grassroots Music and Incentivising Touring Repayable Grants tranches will come back online by 28th August and 1st September respectively.
Given this impacts already beleaguered sectors, the ripple effects could be significant. Some payments remain half completed, others are apparently safely stored in a frozen system. This means timelines for projects will be adversely affected, and invoices.
Even more troubling, rules governing eligibility for National Lottery grants stipulate that these cannot be paid for work which has already taken place – leaving many would-be-recipients in the dark as to how this will effect cash they were expecting.
Changes to the Grassroots Music process have also been necessary, and although minor could cause confusion, and potentially more work, for those responsible for completing the required documents. The pandemic Culture Recovery Fund is a terrible example of the disconnect between grant application bureaucracy and the arts and culture workforce — when experts were selling services as ‘form fillers’, targeting DIY and grass roots organisations in particular — this issue cannot be understated.
Last week, ACE’s chief, Darren Henley, found himself responding to calls for his resignation from the arts union Equity as a result of the Grantium collapse. Writing on behalf of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain on 14th August, leader Ellie Peers described ‘difficulties’ for playwrights and others represented by her organisation as a result of the outage. And she’s not the only one.
Equity General Secretary Paul W Fleming has also suggested Henley should quit and a forthcoming government review of ACE should be ‘bold in its ambitions, proposing widespread reforms that will build an organisation focused on supporting artists to thrive across England, through a long term vision for regional arts growth… After the mess of the last few years, any reform package must include personnel changes at the top.’
It’s an understandable perspective, considering the reason for the mini-crisis. As ACE has explained, ‘we commissioned specialist analysts who found no evidence of cybercrime and we’ve identified the nature of the problem: it relates to the inability of Grantium infrastructure to operate with high traffic, when we have needed to apply important system updates.’
Simply put, this could have easily been avoided — jobs and incomes saved — had the platform been fit for purpose in the first place. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, with the system that remains in place described invariably as ‘outmoded’, ‘unsuitable’ and ‘archaic’ — not to mention incapable of staying upright at a time when the cultural sector has never had less money or been more reliant on government or corporate cash. And with piecemeal repairs now in the pipeline, rather than confident and comprehensive replacements, all bets are off as to when a real resolution will materialise.
Image: Dylan nolte / Unsplash
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