Arts Council England has done what it promised. Let’s Create, the ten-year strategy introduced in 2020 and subsequently criticised in an independent review for being prescriptive, bureaucratic and counterproductive to the very creativity it claimed to champion, has been formally retired. In its place sits the new Strategic Framework, published this week and described by ACE as a practical, interim guide to how it will prioritise work, design services, and make investment decisions. Whether this amounts to genuine change or a rebranding exercise wrapped in more palatable language is a question the arts sector is already asking, and the answers so far are not entirely reassuring.
The context is important. Baroness Margaret Hodge’s review, published last December following a government commission, was damning about the way Let’s Create had operated in practice. The strategy had been built around four investment principles that organisations receiving public funding were expected to embody: inclusivity, environmental responsibility, dynamism and ambition. In theory, this was progressive. In practice, it meant that arts organisations spent significant time and money demonstrating compliance with criteria that had little to do with the quality of what they actually made. As Hodge put it with admirable clarity, many felt that the strategy’s implementation stifled the creativity and innovation it was ostensibly designed to support. ACE itself, to its credit, acknowledged the problem, admitting that the thrust of Let’s Create had at times constrained the freedom of funded organisations to develop the art that mattered to them.
The new Framework replaces the four principles with three. ACE now believes its investment must support excellence, deliver for everybody and reach everywhere. Those of a cynical disposition will note that this is still a prescriptive set of requirements, just a shorter one. The document insists that artistic excellence will be the primary consideration for funding decisions, which is something the arts sector has been asking for throughout the Let’s Create period. Whether that commitment survives contact with the actual funding round processes remains to be seen, but its prominence in the Framework is at least a signal of intent.
Hodge’s review had called for something ambitious and simple. This strategy allowed organisations and individuals to apply for funding based on their own strengths and contributions to a vibrant creative sector, rather than requiring them to squeeze their activities into predetermined categories. The Framework’s language gestures toward this. It speaks to simpler processes, stronger partnerships with local authorities and the private sector, and new services, including a Touring Service and a Service for Individuals, specifically designed to address the longstanding inadequacy of ACE’s support for freelancers and independent artists. The commitment to begin work immediately on the Service for Individuals, through direct consultation with freelancers, is one of the more concrete promises in the document and one of the easier ones to hold ACE to account on.
The regional question is also addressed, at least rhetorically. The persistent concentration of arts funding in London and a handful of larger cities has been a source of justified frustration for decades, and the Framework acknowledges that funding has been historically unevenly distributed. The language about balancing investment and building on the network of Priority Places, locations where arts engagement is chronically underfunded, suggests that this concern will be structural rather than aspirational in the new approach; whether the distribution of actual money changes as a result is the only meaningful test of that commitment.
There is a passage in the Framework that will have raised eyebrows among those who have been following the political climate around arts funding. ACE describes its decision-making as free of political interference and central to protecting artistic freedom, then adds, in the following sentence, that it is required to respond to the government of the day’s policy priorities through its services and development work. The tension between those two statements is neither acknowledged nor resolved. For an organisation that has been criticised in some quarters for over-politicisation and in others for insufficient political courage, the balancing act implicit in that formulation looks difficult to sustain in practice.
The announcement comes with further institutional context that the arts sector is watching closely. Nicholas Serota, who has chaired ACE since 2017, steps down on 31 July. His replacement will be appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. This direct government appointment carries its own implications for the arm’s-length principle that is supposed to govern the relationship between public funding bodies and political oversight. The new chair will arrive in an organisation still in transition, operating under an interim framework while a permanent strategy is being developed through consultation beginning later in 2026.
One museum professional stated that the revamp was welcome but hoped it would prove less prescriptive in practice. That cautious, qualified welcome is about as good as ACE is going to get from a sector that has spent years navigating the bureaucratic demands of Let’s Create while watching its funding decline in real terms. The Framework is shorter, cleaner and more focused on quality than its predecessor. The question that only time will answer is whether the culture of the organisation implementing it has genuinely changed, or whether the same habits of mind that turned a well-intentioned strategy into an administrative burden will reassert themselves in different forms.
ACE has replaced the rules. What it has not yet demonstrated is that it understands why the rules became the problem in the first place.