Culture and heritage charities still waiting for hundreds of millions of pounds in funding

Culture, heritage and arts charities and organisations are still waiting for hundreds of millions of pounds of government funding, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found.

The NAO has been investigating the allocation and distribution of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund.

This fund was set up to help the UK’s cultural, arts and heritage institutions survive the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many have been forced to close their doors due to successive lockdowns amid the health crisis. Social distancing guidelines, when they have been allowed to open venues and places of interest, have seen visitor numbers slashed.

But the NAO found that of the £830m in grants and loan funding awarded so far, just £495m has been paid out.

The funding is being distributed by four arm’s length bodies (ALBs): Arts Council England, Historic England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the British Film Institute. They have also been running their own separate funding award schemes.

The ALBs have responsibility for awarding £1bn of the £1.57bn fund. By February this year they had handed out £830m of the £1bn funding.

They have until the end of this month to award all funding, “although these can mostly be distributed and used by recipients” after March, said the NAO.

It added: “Applications for both revenue and capital grants were oversubscribed in the first funding phase. Loans funding was undersubscribed.”

The arts are the main beneficiary of revenue grants, with 85% of these grants handed to this sector and 15% allocated to heritage organisations.

London has received almost a third (31%) of revenue grants, followed by the North West and the South East, which each received 12%.

Among charities to be awarded funding is the Black Country Living Museum, which was allocated £3.74m to explore the history of the region in the 1940s and 1960s.

Others to receive awards include Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, the Museum of Oxford’s Hidden Histories and Grade II listed Georgian lido Cleveland Pools.