Arts organizations still in ‘funding dilemma’ after Arts Council England portal collapses Arts Council England

Arts organizations and artists have said they remain in a “funding limbo” with mounting bills and uncertain futures after the collapse of Arts Council England’s grant processing platform this summer.

ACE’s online portal, Grantium, was used by artists to submit and manage funding applications. But when it collapsed in July, it left thousands of applications for vital funding in doubt – a situation that persisted for months until applications were reopened in late September.

Individual artists and arts organization leaders said that, following the collapse, they received less money than initially provided by ACE, which has also been accused of canceling extensions of funding requests for organizations affected by the Gateway collapse.

ACE claimed that the outage was caused by Grantium being unable to operate with high traffic while the system was being updated. The liberal arts funder currently distributes around £500 million of public funds and more than £250 million of National Lottery money annually, while employing 650 people.

Grantium was launched in 2016 and was advertised as a system that would “help drive success.” [ACE] In the 21st century.’ It was meant to do away with the bureaucracy of the old paper-based system, be ‘fit for purpose’ and deliver annual savings of £1 million for ACE.

But many people the Guardian spoke to described chaos and confusion in the wake of Grantium’s closure.

Pui-Ka Cheng is the writer, director and fundraiser for Drift, an ACE-funded project which had screenings at Lowry’s Aldridge Studio in Salford earlier this month.

Drift received approval from Grantium on July 17, according to Cheng. But she faced difficulties in providing her bank account details soon after.

When Grantium’s problems began, Cheng sent numerous emails, made phone calls, and made inquiries through the ACE website “without receiving proper assistance. Unfortunately, we only received incorrect links in response.”

She added: “We did not receive any funding from the Arts Council, therefore none of our team members received artist fees and I had to cover all expenses from my personal savings.”

Grantium has been criticized for years by those who have to use it. In May 2024, an open letter was sent to Dame Mary Archer, who was at the time chairing a review at ACE, now led by Margaret Hodge.

Figures including Stella Cano, chief executive of Shakespeare’s Globe, Matthew Shea, chairman of the Touring Actors Company, and Living Theatre’s artistic director, Jack McNamara, have called for Grantium to be “transformed” to make the grants process more “streamlined, fair and transparent”.

Pippa Duarte, an actress and theater director in London, said the outage had caused problems for a £28,000 grant she received from ACE for her touring exhibition Sharing Ingredients. Duarte said ACE ended up paying less than £1,500, which would have covered her rent.

Grantium collapsed when Duarte was due to submit her final report, which includes income and expenses, which is necessary before receiving the final payment from ACE.

After weeks of being unable to submit her report, Duarte was asked to do it all by hand in a Word document. “I had to arrange my expenses line by line,” she said. “You can imagine, with the amount of money these grants indicate, trying to do it that way. I didn’t have the math to back it all up.”

Duarte said ACE previously would help her if a mistake was made or a final report was missed, but after the Grantium crash, she struggled to get responses from ACE, which ultimately claimed it had not spent much and so her final payment was reduced.

She said: “The difference in money that they do not pay me may be very small for them, but for me it is two or three months’ rent.” “Artists should not have to pay the price for the mess they find themselves in.”

Other arts professionals described a “brutal” bureaucratic process in which they appeared to be penalized by the additional workload caused by Grantium’s collapse.

Jo Hunter, co-founder and chief executive of 64 Million Artists, a Gloucestershire-based arts delivery company, told The Guardian that her organization had been given an extension to apply for grant funding this summer.

But after Grantium’s program collapsed, the organization was told that the extension had been cancelled, meaning the company – which is closing its public arm – had to rethink the final few months of its program and look elsewhere for funding.

“It was a ‘computer says no’ moment where no one could interrupt the system,” she said. Musician Brian Eno eventually stepped in and donated £10,000, but many organizations were not so lucky.

Since the Grantium outage, arts unions have been working to highlight the impact of the collapse on artists. In August, Equity said, “The collapse of the system is just the latest in a series of governance failures. Struggling artists pay the price every time.”

Reaction to the new ACE system and whether it offers an improvement over Grantium has been mixed. The system “seems more complicated,” said Daniel Bernstein, CEO of Emergency Exit Arts.

Last month, Culture Minister Lisa Nandy said there would be no additional financial support available to reform ACE’s grant application system. “It’s a matter of their own,” Nandy said. “We did not get additional money in the spending review to give them a new system.”

An Arts Council England spokesperson said: “Following the technical issues we experienced over the summer, we have created new application processes to ensure artists and organizations can access our funding as directly as possible. We regret the disruption caused by the original outage and are grateful for the patience shown by applicants as we work to put alternatives in place. These alternatives are now up and running and working well.”

“Since that moment, we have made more than 3,900 grant payments totaling more than £203 million to individuals and organizations across the country. When you offer any grant funding on this kind of scale, it’s always a small number of applicants who will have some issues. When this happens, we work as quickly as we can to rectify this, so that applications are processed and payments are made as quickly as possible.”