On 23 July 2025, Arts Council England (ACE) was forced to suspend its main open-access funding programme — National Lottery Project Grants (NLPG) — due to the sudden and complete collapse of its Grantium application portal.

At the time of writing, ACE state that applications for under £30k NLPG will restart "by mid-September" (but they have repeatedly missed timescales set out in earlier updates); ACE have not stated when other strands - which have longer decision-making timeframes and can require a two stage process with an EoI - will reopen. 

This breakdown has left artists, producers, companies, and cultural organisations across the country in limbo. Funding applications are frozen. Projects are being cancelled. Freelancers face uncertainty and financial risk. And yet, this was not an unforeseeable event — Grantium’s problems have been known for years.

Despite repeated complaints from applicants and warnings in publications like Arts Professional and The Stage, ACE failed to implement meaningful improvements or meet its own deadlines for resolving critical technical issues. Now, the consequences are being felt sector-wide.

The UK Government is currently conducting an Independent Review of Arts Council England, led by Baroness Margaret Hodge. But worryingly, the call for evidence closed in June — a month before the Grantium collapse. There is now a real risk that this catastrophic failure may not be addressed in the review at all.

We, the undersigned, call on:

▶️ The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and
▶️ Baroness Hodge, Chair of the Independent Review
to urgently ensure that the review includes:

• The long-documented history of Grantium’s failings
• ACE’s responses, including broken promises and shifting timelines
• The collapse’s impact on individual applicants and organisations
• ACE’s compliance with government guidance on business continuity planning for arms-length bodies
• Whether proper risk and resilience strategies were in place

This is not just a technical glitch — it’s a systemic failure in public funding administration, affecting livelihoods and creative work across the UK.

Help us send a clear message: this cannot be ignored.

Signing this petition is not an attack on Arts Council England’s wider functioning. ACE’s role as the national development agency for culture is valued and appreciated by many, and its arms-length status is vital to the difficult task of distributing, with intelligence, integrity and fairness, an amount of public funding that will never meet all the demand. But in this case, they have got it wrong. Signing this petition is both a call for accountability and a signal of how vital ACE, the funding it manages, and the cultural life of England truly are.

Add your name to call for transparency, accountability, and a functioning arts funding system. We've chosen this platform as it allows signatories to remain private if necessary, to avoid potential future ACE relationship management issues!