ACE Investigated, Denies Being Useless!
The Latest News || Friday, 14 March, 2008
The Stage newspaper is reporting that Arts Council England (ACE) is to be formally investigated over the perceived bungling of their recent funding review.
Baroness Genista McIntosh (stop laughing at the back), a member of the UK's House of Lords, has been asked to look into the matter by ACE's new Chief Executive Alan Davey.
The funding giant came under increasingly heavy, metaphorical, fire for some, if not all, of the decisions they made to remove 194 arts organisations from the regular, 3 year funding programme. One funding cut, that was later overturned, was a plan to stop funding The Exeter Northcott Theatre. This decision was made all the more puzzling following a £2.1Million refit partially funded by ACE themselves.
Sadly, there will be no formal, televised questioning of the protagonists under oath like we see from the US House of Representatives. Everything will take place behind closed doors so the most incompetent people can protect their anonymity, their jobs and we can all pretend ACE is still competent "so those consulted are able to speak in confidence", according to The Stage.
We should point out that this investigation has actually been called in by ACE and ACE will report the final results sometime in the summer. The House of Lords are not elected by anybody to do anything are are pretty much accountable to nobody. It's all about transparency, openness and responsibility readers!
For their part ACE denied that they were completely useless, or words to that effect.
The report will be published, in part, sometime in the summer.
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