The case for abolishing Arts Council England

Arts Council England (ACE) has many ardent supporters who defend it at every turn. Whilst it’s defence is well rehearsed, well funded and well prepared, it is rarely challenged by informed insiders.

What follows is the damning case for the prosecution.

The Letters

On 22 October 2025, the Rt Hon Ian Murray MP, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts, wrote to me on Department for Culture, Media and Sport letterhead in response to a letter I had sent his department on 28 July 2025 regarding a litany of safeguarding failures. His reply was three months overdue. It expressed horror at the cases I had raised (Chris Goode, Wayne Glover-Stuart, Michael Croft, Kevin Spacey) and committed the Government to… nothing, except to passing my suggestion that ACE-funded organisations should be required to publish their safeguarding policies to ACE itself, “for consideration.”

To restate: the Department’s response to a complaint that ACE has failed in its safeguarding obligations was to refer that complaint back to ACE, and to a review of ACE being conducted by Baroness Hodge’s review team, whose own staff had informally acknowledged that they were not equipped to handle the safeguarding dimension because it was and is, in their words, “politically charged.”

On 21 November 2025 a second letter, this time from Dempster Marples of the Ministerial Support Team (ref TO2025/10341), arrived. It expanded the position. ACE, the Department confirmed, “is not a regulatory body and cannot make legal assessments of policies put in place by the organisations and individuals it funds. Assessing each policy individually would require significant additional resources and expertise.”

That is the institution stating, in writing, that it cannot do what it is paid to do.

The same letter then defends a particular and consequential loophole. Arts organisations that run youth programmes and training outside formal educational settings sit outside the remit of Ofsted. The Department’s defence of this is that child-performance licensing fills the gap. It does not. Licensing applies to specific performances by specific children; it does not regulate the safeguarding practice of an organisation that runs workshops, mentorships, residencies, and labs for the very same children. The letter conflates the two. Without that conflation, the defence collapses.

The Department’s third deflection is CIISA, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority. The Culture Secretary, the letter says, has been “clear and unequivocal in her support for CIISA’s work.” CIISA is voluntary, undercapitalised, and as Amanda Parker reported in The Stage in 2025, the wheels are coming off it before it has started. The body the Department is pointing to as the answer to industry safeguarding has produced no published standards and possesses no enforcement powers.

These are the three substantive moves the Department made in eight months of letters: refer the question to the body the question is about; deny that body has the powers to answer it; and point to a third body that does not function.

The Pattern

The cases that prompted the correspondence are matters of public record.

Christopher Goode was the artistic director of Chris Goode & Company, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. He was arrested in 2021 for possession of indecent images of children and took his own life before the case could come to court. Multiple survivors subsequently published accounts of years of sexual abuse, coercive control, and the use of theatrical methods as the architecture of that abuse: the closed devising room, the cult of the rehearsal process, the residential intensive. Lyn Gardner reported on the case at length in The Stage in 2022 and again in 2024; survivor accounts appeared at States of Deliquescence and in The Face. The Wikipedia article on Arts Council England documents the basics in a dedicated section. ACE has produced no public statement of accountability and no published reform in the five years since Goode’s death.

Wayne Glover-Stuart was a theatre producer who had worked with ACE-funded organisations including the Southwark Playhouse. He was convicted in April 2025 of sexually assaulting two early-career artists during underwear modelling photoshoots he had arranged. His initial two-year suspended sentence was found unduly lenient by the Court of Appeal in July 2025 and increased to three years’ imprisonment. The conviction is on the public record via the Solicitor General’s Office. He had been operating in theatres until his arrest in January 2024, three years after the Goode revelations. The same structural conditions that enabled Goode enabled Glover-Stuart. Nothing in those conditions had been altered.

Michael Croft was the founder and longtime director of the National Youth Theatre. Croft died in 1986. The National Youth Theatre acknowledged historic abuse allegations against Croft in a public statement in 2017, and has continued to receive Arts Council funding throughout the period since. In August 2025 the Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant disclosed via The Sunday Times that Croft had sexually abused him as a 16-year-old in 1978; NYT was compelled by the renewed attention to issue a further safeguarding statement. It has not been compelled to publish an account of what its safeguarding regime was during Croft’s tenure or after, and what changed.

Kevin Spacey was Artistic Director of the Old Vic from 2003 to 2015. After serious allegations emerged in 2017, the Old Vic commissioned its own investigation which concluded that approximately twenty people had brought complaints against him during his tenure. He has since been the subject of civil judgments in the United States and was acquitted of criminal charges in the United Kingdom in 2023. The Old Vic does not hold NPO status but operates within the same ecology of public subsidy, training pipelines, and freelance precarity that the other cases describe.

Any one of these cases would be damning. Together they describe a single structural condition: the absence of any enforced safeguarding standard across publicly funded theatre, particularly in the spaces where artists between the ages of 18 and 25 develop their early careers, and the absence of any meaningful response from the body supposedly in charge: Arts Council England. The pattern is not historical. Glover-Stuart’s conviction was finalised in July 2025. Bryant’s disclosure on Croft was published in August 2025. ACE’s own safeguarding page, current as of 2025, confirms the institution is not a regulator. The CIISA hotline still does not exist. The Theatre Helpline has not been replaced. The structural conditions that produced these cases remain unaltered in 2026.

The Loopholes

There are three.

The Ofsted gap. Arts organisations that advertise educational value (workshops, mentorship, training labs, outreach, residencies) do not fall under Ofsted unless they register as formal educational settings. They have no incentive to do so and many active reasons not to. The Department’s defence, that child-performance licensing covers this, does not survive contact with how these programmes actually run. A sixteen-year-old attending a youth theatre’s six-month ensemble programme is not licensed under the child-performance regulations because there is no public performance being licensed. The programme itself is unregulated and uninspected.

The 18-to-25 gap. Safeguarding frameworks in English law cover children (those under 18) and adults at risk (those whose capacity for self-protection is impaired by disability, illness, or comparable condition). Most early career artists fall into neither category. They are legally adults; they are not legally vulnerable. They are, in practice, financially precarious, professionally dependent on the very people who in some cases abuse them, and isolated in rehearsal rooms, residencies, and one-on-one workshops with no oversight and no reporting structure. This is the gap Goode and Glover-Stuart both worked in. It is the gap closed in publicly funded sport years ago through the Code for Sports Governance, which requires every UK Sport– and Sport England–funded body to maintain safeguarding policies for all participants, regardless of age, as a condition of receiving public money. Theatre has no equivalent code, no equivalent condition, no equivalent compliance.

The CIISA void. The Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority was announced as the sector’s answer to industry-wide bullying, harassment, and abuse following the post-Weinstein reckoning. It is funded voluntarily by industry contributions, which have largely not materialised. As Amanda Parker reported in The Stage in 2025, the body has yet to publish enforceable standards, possesses no investigatory powers, and operates at a tiny fraction of the scale its brief requires. Its complaints hotline, the basic mechanism the body is supposed to provide, is not now expected to launch until 2026, four years after CIISA was first announced. The Government’s repeated invocation of it as the answer to the sector’s safeguarding crisis is contempt dressed as policy.

In addition to those structural gaps, the Theatre Helpline, which had served as one of the few whistleblower routes available to sector workers in the years after the Goode revelations, was shut down in March 2023 by SOLT and UK Theatre, who announced they would instead “focus on the development of CIISA.” ACE, the funding partner, allowed it to die. The mechanism that worked was traded for the mechanism that does not.

The Scale

The cases at the heart of this argument are not statistical outliers. They are visible instances of a documented sector-wide condition.

In May 2024 the creative industries union Bectu published the findings of a survey of workers across film, television, theatre, live events, broadcasting and cinema. Eighty-five per cent had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment at work. 92% had witnessed or experienced bullying or harassment on grounds of sex or gender. 6/10 had been subjected to unwanted touching, hugging or kissing. 1/5 had experienced a serious sexual assault at work. Only 13% were confident the industry was taking effective action. The survey’s authors described reporting systems across the sector as not fit for purpose. The Film and TV Charity’s Looking Glass 2024 deep dive on workplace bullying, harassment, and discrimination reached comparable conclusions across film, television, music and theatre. The survey covers the broader creative workforce, not the ACE-funded portfolio in isolation, but ACE-funded theatre operates inside the same labour ecology that Bectu surveyed. The same producers, performers, technicians, and freelancers move between NPO productions and the wider film, television and live-events sector.

Arts Council England does not collect, audit, or publish equivalent data for its own funded portfolio. There is no published count of safeguarding complaints received about ACE-funded organisations, no inspection regime, no audit programme, no published count of breaches or sanctions. ACE has a Safeguarding Policy Statement, first published in April 2024 and reviewed in April 2025. It requires funded organisations to have appropriate safeguarding policies and procedures in place. It also confirms, on the same page, that ACE “cannot offer advice or guidance about your safeguarding policies and procedures” and that organisations “will need to take expert and/or legal advice, as appropriate.” Requirement without guidance, without audit, without inspection, and without sanction is administrative form. It is not a safeguarding regime.

The defence that the cited cases are statistical outliers within a portfolio of well-functioning organisations cannot survive contact with the scale data. The defence that the perpetrators acted in defiance of ACE’s values cannot survive contact with the institutional architecture: a funder that does not audit cannot detect; a funder that does not inspect cannot deter; a funder that does not sanction cannot enforce. ACE, by its own published statements, is none of these things.

The Waste

Safeguarding is the strongest argument. But it is not the only one.

In 2009, as part of the build-up to the London 2012 Olympics, ACE administered the Artists Taking the Lead commissioning programme: twelve major works, one from each of the UK’s nations and English regions, each funded with public money to leave a permanent cultural legacy in its host area. The North West region’s commission was Anthony McCall’s Column, a planned solid-light installation that would rise from the surface of East Float in the Wirral as a permanent legacy work.

The original budget was £500,000. By the time the Olympic Games were over in autumn 2012, Column had not been built. ACE had been forced to find an additional £110,000 on top of the original commission to chase completion; £425,000 of public money had been released into a production that, by January 2013, still had no completion date. McCall personally received a fee of £40,000. Planning permission for the installation site was due to expire in July 2013. It expired with the work still not delivered. The legacy it was funded to leave does not exist.

The Cultural Olympiad’s broader record was no better. In February 2011, eighteen months before the Games and already two and a half years into the programme, the Cultural Olympiad’s own director Ruth Mackenzie told the London Assembly that public awareness of the programme stood at 9%, and that this was, in her own words, “its highest level to date.” She added: “We have not yet adequately told the story.” The total budget for the programme was £126.6 million. ACE administered £36.4 million of that directly.

Awareness eventually reached 29% at the height of the Olympic Games period, when global attention was on London regardless of what the Cultural Olympiad was doing. ACE’s commissioned post-programme evaluation, conducted by the Institute of Cultural Capital and funded by ACE itself alongside LOCOG, the Legacy Trust, and DCMS, describes that 29% as “remarkable.” and I would agreed it is remarkably… Bad. It is the awareness figure for a £126.6 million programme that struggled for most of its life to convince the public it existed, and that produced flagship commissions which were never built.

The trajectory since has not corrected. ACE’s annual investment has grown. Its 2023–26 National Portfolio programme alone distributes around £446 million a year, against total annual income above £800 million. Yet ACE itself, through its 2020 Let’s Create strategy, has been forced to designate 109 “Levelling Up for Culture Places” across England, areas it formally describes as having “historically low cultural engagement and spending.” DCMS’s most recent Participation Survey records weekly arts engagement falling by 14% between 2021 and 2023. More than a decade after a £126.6 million programme reached fewer than 3/10 people it was funded to engage, ACE spends more, reaches less consistently, and is on record acknowledging the failure.

The waste argument is structurally identical to the safeguarding argument. ACE administers large sums of public money. ACE is not equipped to assess what it funds. ACE has no meaningful accountability when its commissions fail to materialise, when its programmes fail to reach the public, or when its funded organisations fail in their duty of care. The same institutional architecture produces every category of failure.

The Case for Abolition

ACE has refused to act. It refused to act in 2021 when it was discovered that ACE had been funding a prolific paedophile, Chris Goode. It refused to act in 2022 when the survivor accounts were first published. It refused to act in 2024 when Glover-Stuart’s arrest demonstrated the absence of any institutional learning. It has refused to act, in writing, every month since July 2025. The response on departmental letterhead has been to refer the matter to itself.

After five years, enough is enough. The institution has had every opportunity to reform. It has had its commissioning department, the DCMS, intervene. It has had a major review under Baroness Hodge. It has had eight months of escalating correspondence regarding the exact issues raised here, with national press copied throughout, and the response has been deflection in three distinct forms.

The question at this point is not whether ACE can be reformed. It cannot, because the bodies around it are not willing or able to compel it to. And reform from within would not be reform. An institution that distributes 90% of a new £96 million capital fund to organisations already in its own portfolio is one whose incumbency culture would absorb new statutory powers rather than be reformed by them. The replacement is not ACE-with-more-teeth. It is a different institutional architecture, designed against capture from inception. The question is what replaces it.

What Replaces It

A short list. Each of these is achievable inside one Parliament. The replacement framework preserves the scale of public investment in the arts. This is a case for the restructuring of administration, not the reduction of funding.

1. Statutory safeguarding parity between arts and sport. Mandatory published safeguarding policies as a condition of any public funding. Sport-style oversight bodies with investigatory powers. Sport did this; theatre can copy it.
2. Extension of Ofsted, or an equivalent inspectorate, to any organisation offering training, youth programmes, or educational activity, regardless of how that activity is framed for funding purposes. Where formal registration is not feasible, independent safeguarding inspection as a condition of public support.
3. A statutory minimum standard of protection for freelance workers aged 18 to 25 in publicly funded arts contexts. Reporting structures, named safeguarding leads on every funded project, transparency on rehearsal and residency conditions.
4. Devolved funding administration, with statutory anti-capture safeguards. Arts Council England’s existing regional structure already operates through closed networks. In April 2026, the first round of its Creative Foundations Fund distributed approximately 90 per cent of £96 million to organisations already in the National Portfolio. Devolution to combined authorities alone would risk replicating that capture at regional scale; devolution to local councils without sector expertise risks the knowledge gap the old regional Arts Council offices were designed to fill. The replacement is therefore not simply geographical relocation. Devolve to local authorities, with a statutory requirement that each maintain a dedicated cultural and heritage lead or department staffed with sector expertise. Bind every administrative level, national, regional and local, to published criteria, open competitive entry, transparent scoring, and mandatory recusal where existing funding relationships are present. Closer to the ground is not automatically fairer. Open and accountable is.
5. A statutory funding regulator with real powers. Not CIISA, which is voluntary and unfunded, but a body with the same statutory teeth as Ofcom or the Charity Commission: compulsory submission of policies, real audit, real consequences for failure.

None of this requires legal novelty. Sport, charity, broadcasting and finance all operate under statutory frameworks of the kind proposed here. What is required is the political will to acknowledge that an arms-length body which cannot answer for what it funds is not an arms-length body. It is an alibi.

The Department wrote to me on 22 October 2025 that “safeguarding is everybody’s responsibility.” That sentence is technically true. In practice it has functioned as the opposite of accountability. When something is everybody’s responsibility and nobody is required to do anything about it, the responsibility is performed by the survivors who are forced to make the public case, by the journalists who carry it, and by the few inside the sector willing to write letters that go unanswered for months.

Eight months of letters. Two responses. No policy. No inquiry. No acknowledgement that the bodies responsible have themselves been the principal source of inaction.

Arts Council England has had its chance.

— Sam

Notes

Arts Council England’s own statements

• Arts Council England, Safeguarding and Child Protection page. Source for the standfirst quotes. artscouncil.org.uk
• Arts Council England, Safeguarding Policy Statement, first published April 2024, reviewed April 2025. artscouncil.org.uk (PDF)
• Arts Council England, Additional safeguarding considerations for projects working directly with children, young people and adults at risk of abuse. artscouncil.org.uk

Letters from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

• Rt Hon Ian Murray MP, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts. Letter dated 22 October 2025, ref MC2025/07728. Reproduced in full in companion post (forthcoming).
• Dempster Marples, Ministerial Support Team, DCMS. Letter dated 21 November 2025, ref TO2025/10341. Reproduced in full in companion post (forthcoming).
• Acknowledgement of correspondence by Wendy Watson, Head of ACE Review at DCMS, on behalf of Baroness Hodge’s review team.

Sector-wide harassment and bullying data

• Bectu, 2024 sexual harassment survey of UK creative industries workers, reported in Screen International, 3 June 2024. screendaily.com
• Bectu survey coverage, Televisual, 30 May 2024. televisual.com
• Film and TV Charity, Looking Glass 2024 Deep Dive: Workplace bullying, harassment, and discrimination. filmtvcharity.org.uk (PDF)

Christopher Goode

• Lyn Gardner, “Abuse in theatre: how did Chris Goode avoid scrutiny for so long?”, The Stage, 6 October 2022. thestage.co.uk
• Lyn Gardner, “Abuse in theatre: the Chris Goode case is a wake-up call for the industry,” The Stage, 10 October 2022. thestage.co.uk
• David Levesley, “Ponyboy Curtis: how a cult theatre director disguised abuse as art,” The Face, 13 October 2022. theface.com
• States of Deliquescence, survivor accounts, October 2022. statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com
• Wikipedia, Chris Goode (playwright). en.wikipedia.org

Wayne Glover-Stuart

• Solicitor General’s Office, “Photographer jailed after sexually assaulting two models,” UK Government press release, 2 July 2025. gov.uk
• “Theatre producer Wayne Glover-Stuart found guilty of sexual assault,” The Stage, April 2025. thestage.co.uk
• “Theatre producer Wayne Glover-Stuart in prison after initial sentence overturned,” The Stage, July 2025. thestage.co.uk

Michael Croft and Sir Chris Bryant MP

• “Chris Bryant: I was abused by head of the National Youth Theatre,” The Sunday Times, 2–3 August 2025. Coverage and excerpts: ITV News, 3 August 2025; BBC and Guardian, 4 August 2025.
• National Youth Theatre, public statement on historic abuse, 4 August 2025; earlier public statement, 2017.
• Wikipedia, Michael Croft. en.wikipedia.org

Kevin Spacey and The Old Vic

• The Old Vic, Findings of independent investigation by Lewis Silkin (external counsel), 16 November 2017.
• “Kevin Spacey: Old Vic reveals 20 staff allegations against him,” BBC News, 16 November 2017. bbc.co.uk
• “Old Vic Theater Logs 20 Complaints About Kevin Spacey, Pledges to Improve Accountability,” Variety, 16 November 2017. variety.com

The Cultural Olympiad and Anthony McCall’s Column

• BBC News, “‘Low awareness’ problem for 2012 Cultural Olympiad,” 9 February 2011. bbc.co.uk
• The Independent, “Lost in the mists of time: saga of Anthony McCall’s £0.5m Column drags on,” January 2013.
• Beatriz Garcia, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Evaluation: Executive Summary, Institute of Cultural Capital, April 2013. beatrizgarcia.net

ACE Spending and Engagement

• House of Lords Library, Arts Council England: Funding and Regional Distribution, briefing, 14 December 2022. lordslibrary.parliament.uk
• Arts Council England, Annual Report and Accounts 2023/24, gov.uk. publishing.service.gov.uk
• “Frequent engagement with the arts decreasing,” Arts Professional, 7 October 2024. artsprofessional.co.uk
• Arts Council England, Active Lives Survey data, February 2024 release. artscouncil.org.uk
• Matthew Hemley, “ACE’s Darren Henley defends distribution of new Creative Foundations Fund,” The Stage, 21 April 2026. thestage.co.uk
• “Henley defends first round of capital works fund,” Arts Professional, 21 April 2026. artsprofessional.co.uk

CIISA

• Amanda Parker, “Are the wheels coming off new standards authority CIISA before it’s got started?”, The Stage, 27 August 2025. thestage.co.uk

Theatre Helpline

• SOLT and UK Theatre, “Theatre Helpline Closure: Alternative Support Services Available,” joint announcement, January 2023 (closure end of March 2023). uktheatre.org