Philanthropy Cannot Replace Public Arts Funding

Public funding for the arts in the UK has shrunk dramatically. Between 2009/10 and 2022/23, per-person spending on culture by Arts Council England and local authorities fell in real terms by 18% and 48% respectively. Since 2010, the UK government has cut its total culture budget by 6%. Over the same period, government spending on culture has increased by 22% in Germany, 25% in France and 70% in Finland.

The hidden collateral damage can be the vital education work of cultural organisations. Museum and gallery learning teams are often cut, unfunded programmes lost and free school visits decline.

There are some reasons for optimism: an increased commitment to museum funding, a new museums plan in development, a curriculum review placing greater emphasis on arts subjects and a change in rhetoric under Andy Burnham. But the autumn budget last year left DCMS spending plans unchanged. The government is therefore still on track to spend less per citizen on culture, media and sport by 2029 than it did in 2010.

Culture is expensive, but the question shouldn’t be whether we can afford it. It should be whether we can afford not to. Culture is not an optional extra, something to add once society’s problems are solved; it is part of how we address them. It is part of the infrastructure of healthy communities: it shapes how people understand themselves and one another, creates opportunities and brings people together. Ensuring that everyone can access and participate in culture is a public responsibility.

Arts organisations, however, rarely rely on public funding alone. Their funding models are as diverse as the work they undertake, drawing on sponsorship, earned income, patronage, philanthropy and public money. No single source can sustain a resilient cultural sector.

Artist Lab walk & talk with Steve Benn. Courtesy of Signal.

Philanthropy can give organisations room to experiment or support work that falls outside public funding criteria. But private funding cannot make up for sustained reductions in public investment. Nor should anyone expect it to. Public funding provides much of the infrastructure on which everything else depends.

Relatively modest, flexible investment can nevertheless have an outsized effect when it responds to local circumstances.

Freelands Foundation's is an independent charitable foundation, and our mission is to champion art education. This year we launched the Freelands Awards, committing £1.5 million over the next five years to recognise and celebrate outstanding practice in art organisations across the United Kingdom.

Each year we will award three organisations £100,000 each. The 2026 winners -- SIGNAL in Barrow-in-Furness, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and The Burton at Bideford -- are superb examples of the incredible art education work going on across the country.

In Barrow-in-Furness, SIGNAL is running an artist development programme that provides local people with an accessible route into working as artists while building a community from its base in a previously vacant high-street building. Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s young people’s programmes are creating routes into the cultural sector outside school and university, giving participants agency in developing their own projects.

In Devon, The Burton at Bideford responded to local teachers who explained that organising school trips to the museum had become increasingly difficult. Poor transport infrastructure and reduced school budgets meant that hiring a coach could be prohibitively expensive. Its response was the Burton Art Box: a converted horse box that takes art directly into schools.

The Burton at Bideford. Photo: Jim Wileman, courtesy of Freelands Awards

These organisations are working in places where opportunities to engage with art, develop creative skills or enter the cultural sector can be severely limited. What is striking is how closely their work responds to the particular barriers facing the communities around them.

All three are recipients of the inaugural Freelands Awards, through which the Freelands Foundation is providing unrestricted grants of £100,000. The awards reflect a principle we have come to believe strongly in: giving organisations freedom to decide how money is best used can be as important as the amount awarded.

Too much funding is tied to predetermined outcomes, rigid criteria and layers of bureaucracy that require organisations to prove they have delivered what someone else has decided matters. The result can be perverse: organisations design work around funders’ requirements rather than the needs of the people they serve.

Giving organisations more flexibility creates space to respond to circumstances as they change and puts greater trust in the people closest to the work.

That does not remove the need for accountability. Funders should expect organisations to demonstrate that money is being used responsibly and that their work has purpose. But accountability need not mean prescribing every outcome in advance.

This is particularly important in art education, which has spent much of the past 15 years defending its place within schools, cultural institutions and public policy. The organisations continuing to deliver this work demonstrate both its resilience and its vulnerability. Their ingenuity should not become an excuse for expecting them continually to do more with less.

MORE ART INC. Photo: Simon Suphandagli, courtesy of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

Philanthropy cannot become a substitute for public responsibility either. Charitable foundations can support approaches that the government sometimes cannot, and can often move differently and more flexibly. But they operate at a different scale and with different responsibilities.

A resilient cultural sector needs both stable public investment and other sources of support: philanthropy, earned income, sponsorship and patronage. None removes the need for the others.

Andy Burnham’s emphasis on communities, devolution and the role culture can play within local life is significant. But rhetoric alone is not enough. If we believe that culture is part of the infrastructure of healthy communities, that belief needs to be reflected in how we fund it.

Public and private investment together can create the conditions for organisations to innovate, communities to participate and people to see possibilities for themselves that might otherwise remain out of reach. But private support works best when it strengthens a properly funded cultural infrastructure rather than being asked to replace one.