Let’s Create Is Gone. London’s Small Arts Groups Still Don’t Know What Wins Funding Now

Ask someone running a fifty-seat theatre in Walthamstow or a community gallery in Deptford what “excellence” means, and you will get a different answer than you would from the National Theatre. That gap is now the live question inside London’s arts sector, after Arts Council England confirmed in May that it has scrapped Let’s Create, the ten-year strategy that shaped who got public money and on what terms since 2020, replacing it with a shorter, three-word interim framework: excellence, for everybody, everywhere.

The change followed a government-commissioned review led by the Labour peer Margaret Hodge, published last December, which found that Let’s Create’s own implementation had worked against the creativity it was meant to champion.

Hodge wrote that “though the strategy was named Let’s Create, many felt that its implementation stifled creativity and innovation.”

ACE’s own response conceded the point directly, admitting that its former approach had, at times, worked against the interests of the people it funded.

For London’s national flagships, this story has mostly played out as a governance question: who chairs Arts Council England once Nicholas Serota steps down on 31 July, and whether a Department for Culture, Media and Sport appointment to that role sits comfortably with the arm’s length principle that is supposed to keep politics out of funding decisions. That is a real question, and one the sector is watching closely. But it is not the question that matters most to the organisations that make up the bulk of London’s cultural life, the ones running on a handful of staff, a rolling grant application, and a building that costs more to heat each winter than it did the year before.

For those organisations, the practical question is narrower and more urgent: what does “excellence” actually mean when the next funding round opens, and who gets to decide?

One commentary on the new framework put the sector’s unease plainly, asking “who defines excellence?” and “who is included in ‘everybody’?” , alongside the question of which places actually benefit when ACE says it wants to reach “everywhere.” Those are not abstract concerns. Under Let’s Create, an organisation had to demonstrate its work against four investment principles, including inclusivity, relevance and environmental responsibility, in language that funders themselves have since admitted became a bureaucratic exercise disconnected from the work itself. The new framework replaces that with three headline commitments, but a shorter list of requirements is not automatically a less prescriptive one, and practitioners inside London’s small-to-mid scale sector are waiting to see which version of “excellence” actually shows up in guidance documents rather than press releases.

The history here matters, because London’s smaller organisations have watched funding decisions reshape their prospects before, often in ways that had little to do with the quality of the work they were making. Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham paused public programming and new bookings this year, describing the move as necessary for its own survival, after facing what its leadership called serious financial challenges compounded by tenants themselves struggling to pay rent. Applecart Arts in East Ham, the only professional small-scale performing arts venue in its borough, had to raise emergency funds within weeks simply to keep its doors open, despite running a full slate of community and schools programming, because it receives no regular public funding at all. Neither story is a direct consequence of Let’s Create’s scrapping. Both are evidence of the financial floor these organisations already operate on, which is exactly the context in which any new definition of “excellence” will actually be applied.

That financial floor has been falling in real terms for years. CVAN, the Contemporary Visual Arts Network, has pointed out that Arts Council England funding stood at £460 million in 2025, when it would need to be around £920 million to have kept pace with inflation since it was last set at a comparable level. London’s small and mid-scale organisations have been here before, most recently when nearly £130 million in government funding was distributed across cultural venues, museums and libraries, and the lesson many took from that round was that headline totals rarely tell you what happens to the organisation with a fifty-seat theatre and three staff. A framework built around excellence, delivered against a funding pool that has not kept pace with the cost of actually running a building, creates a specific tension: excellence, defined loosely enough to cover the work smaller organisations actually make, or excellence measured against the scale and polish that only better-resourced institutions can consistently produce.

ACE’s own published framework does gesture at this concern directly, stating that it “recognises that excellence can look different in different places and contexts.”

Whether that recognition survives contact with an actual funding panel making real decisions with a finite budget is precisely the test the sector cannot yet answer, because the current National Portfolio funding relationships remain unchanged for now, with ACE stating it will contact organisations directly about any future changes to how it works with them. One concrete commitment has already started, though: ACE says it has begun working immediately on a new Service for Individuals, built around direct consultation with freelancers, which matters in a city where a large share of the creative workforce works project to project rather than inside a funded organisation at all.

The next National Portfolio funding round, expected to open under the new framework’s simplified guidance, will be the first real test of what “excellence” means in practice rather than in policy language. For a theatre in Hackney or a music project in Croydon, the answer to that question will determine whether the last five years of learning to speak Let’s Create’s language of inclusivity and dynamism gets replaced by a genuinely open assessment of the work, or by a new vocabulary that is just as capable of favouring the organisations that already have the resources to write a persuasive application.

The next funding round will answer this properly. EyeOnLondon will be watching which London organisations actually get called excellent, and why.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com

[Image Credit | Paul Marc-Mitchell]

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