Arts Council England Ends Let’s Create as Reform Enters Its First Test
Arts Council England’s replacement of Let’s Create moves the Hodge review from diagnosis into implementation, testing whether a new Strategic Framework can reduce procedural control rather than restate it in simpler language.
Arts Council England has replaced Let’s Create, its 2020–2030 strategy, with a new interim Strategic Framework published after the Hodge review recommended a less prescriptive approach to funding.
The first visible stage of implementation has arrived. The question is whether reform will alter the structure of Arts Council England’s funding system, or only acknowledge the need for change.
In March, ART Walkway argued that the review had moved ACE from diagnosis toward implementation, with the central test no longer what reform recommended, but whether procedural control would be reduced at the point of application. The new framework is the first measure of that shift.
ACE describes the Strategic Framework as a practical interim guide for how it will prioritise work, design services, and make investment decisions while a fuller strategy is developed. It is not yet the replacement strategy itself, but a holding structure for the period in which reform begins to act.
The Hodge review did not only question the wording of Let’s Create. It identified a system experienced by many artists and organisations as bureaucratic, prescriptive, and difficult to separate from compliance. ART Walkway’s earlier analysis described the review as a diagnosis of accumulated strain: a funding system in which trust, simplicity, and arm’s-length judgement had been weakened by procedural control.
The cancellation of Let’s Create should be read against that diagnosis.
The strategy was not without quality. ACE’s own document placed “Ambition & Quality” among its four Investment Principles, alongside Inclusivity & Relevance, Dynamism, and Environmental Responsibility. It also stated that judgements about quality were complex, open to debate, and ultimately the responsibility of Arts Council England.
The problem was not absence, but position. Quality sat inside a wider structure of alignment. Organisations seeking investment were expected to show how they would apply the four principles, improve against them, and report on progress. What began as strategy was increasingly felt at the level of form, assessment, and reporting.
The new framework compresses that structure into three terms: support excellence, deliver for everybody, and reach everywhere.
The order matters. Excellence moves forward. Access and geography remain close behind.
Arts Professional reports that ACE now says funding decisions will be made on the basis of the quality of the creative or cultural work proposed, while the framework continues to emphasise access, opportunity, regional balance, political independence, local partnerships, freelancers, and simpler support.
This is not a reversal from equality to quality. It is a repositioning of judgement within public responsibility.
ACE cannot detach public funding from questions of access, place, and who benefits. Nor did the Hodge review ask it to. The issue is how those responsibilities are converted into process: whether they support artistic and cultural judgement, or become another set of conditions through which applicants must pass.
The framework’s interim status keeps the question open. It is enough to retire Let’s Create, but not enough to prove that the operating culture around funding has changed.
That proof will sit elsewhere: in application design, assessment language, reporting requirements, funding cycles, duplicated data, and the discretion given to artists and organisations to describe their work on its own terms.
Arts Council England has now removed the document most closely associated with prescription.
What remains to be tested is whether the burden around funding changes with it.
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