Does UK arts funding reach the regions? Arts Council England and the levelling up agenda

What to take away

• Arts Council England levelling up is easiest to test with National Portfolio Organisation data by region, not with ministerial speeches.
• Greater London still holds the largest share of NPO money, but the 2023 to 2026 portfolio moved more cash and more organisations to the North West, West Midlands and Yorkshire.
• ONS regional accounts and GVA figures let you compare arts funding with the size of a regional economy, which is the only fair way to judge whether a shift is real.
• Place-based schemes such as UK Town of Culture and the permanent mobile museum are small money next to the portfolio, so treat them as signals rather than as evidence of levelling up.
• The limits are serious: no region-by-region breakdown of all Arts Council spending, no audience data in the NPO file, and no inflation adjustment.

What levelling up means for arts funding in England

Levelling up is a slogan before it is a budget line. In arts funding it means moving public money, and the organisations that receive it, away from Greater London towards other English regions.

Arts Council England is the body that hands out most of that money. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and it distributes both grant in aid and National Lottery money.

Its remit, published by the government, covers England only. That matters when you compare it with Creative Scotland, the Arts Council of Wales or the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Arts Council England - GOV.UK sets out that remit and status.

The practical instrument is the National Portfolio. Every few years Arts Council England names a list of organisations that receive regular funding for a fixed period. The current portfolio runs from 2023 to 2026, and the next one has been announced for 2026 to 2029. Everything else, project grants, Capital Investment, National Lottery Project Grants, sits around that core.

So when a minister claims levelling up in the arts, the first question is simple. Did the portfolio move, and by how much, region by region? That is a question about National Portfolio Organisation data by region, and it has a checkable answer.

For readers who need the wider context of how institutions are financed and who they answer to, our arts criticism guide is a useful starting point.

How Arts Council England allocates National Portfolio Organisation money by region

Arts Council England publishes the portfolio as a spreadsheet and a set of regional summaries. Each entry gives the organisation name, its artform, its location and its annual funding for the portfolio period. That is the raw material for any serious regional story.

The allocation process has three layers. First, Arts Council England sets a national budget and a set of investment principles. Second, regional teams assess applications against those principles. Third, the national council approves the final list. In practice the regional teams shape the outcome, which is why the geography of the portfolio changes slowly.

There is no formula that ties money to population or to need. Arts Council England has never published a per-head target for each region. That absence is the single most important fact for anyone reporting on regional arts funding in England, because it means every shift is a political choice rather than a mechanical result.

A useful way to read the data is to split it into three questions:

1. How much money does each region receive in total?
2. How many organisations does that money support?
3. How does the money per organisation compare with the national average?

Those three numbers rarely move together. A region can gain organisations while losing cash, or gain cash while losing organisations. Both outcomes are worth reporting, and both are easy to miss if you only read the headline totals.

If you need to check what an organisation actually does with its grant, our arts reporting checklist covers the accounts and the audience claims that usually accompany them.

Regional accounts and GVA data for measuring arts spend outside London

A funding figure on its own tells you very little. Ten million pounds in Greater London and ten million pounds in the North East are not the same thing, because the economies around them are different sizes.

The Office for National Statistics publishes regional accounts that break down economic activity by region and by industry. These allow you to place arts funding next to the output of the region it lands in. Regional accounts - Office for National Statistics is the starting point for that comparison.

The key measure is gross value added, or GVA. It is the value an industry adds to the economy, and it is published at regional level. Gross Value Added (GVA) - Office for National Statistics explains the concept and provides the data.

Put the two together and you get a rough test of proportionality. If a region produces a certain share of national GVA, does it receive a similar share of NPO money? The answer is usually no, and the gap is the story.

Two cautions. GVA for the arts is bundled with other cultural and creative industries, so it is not a pure measure of the arts alone. And regional accounts lag by more than a year, which means the funding data will always be more current than the economic data you set beside it.

Here is a simplified example of how to set the two side by side. The figures below are illustrative, not official.

Region	Share of NPO money (illustrative)	Share of national GVA (illustrative)	Gap
Greater London	40%	24%	+16 points
North West England	11%	10%	+1 point
West Midlands	8%	7%	+1 point
Yorkshire and the Humber	7%	6%	+1 point
North East	3%	3%	0 points

Read the table as a method, not as a finding. The point is that a funding share is only meaningful when it sits next to an economic share, and that the London gap is the number most regional stories are really about.

Named shifts: where arts funding moved by region

The 2023 to 2026 portfolio is the one to study, because it is the first in which levelling up was an explicit criterion. Arts Council England said it would invest more outside London, and it did, but the scale of the change is easy to overstate.

Greater London remains the largest single recipient. It lost a small share of the portfolio and gained a slightly different mix of organisations, with more money going to outer boroughs and less to the large national institutions in the centre. The national institutions still dominate the top of the list by value.

North West England was the clearest winner. Manchester and Salford gained new portfolio organisations, and the region's total rose. Liverpool and the surrounding city region also held their ground. The shift is real, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for the levelling up claim in the arts.

West Midlands also gained, with Birmingham and Coventry adding organisations. Coventry's year as UK City of Culture in 2021 helped build the case for several of them, which is a reminder that place-based programmes can feed the portfolio later.

Yorkshire and the Humber saw a mixed picture. Leeds and Sheffield gained, while smaller organisations in rural parts of the region were more likely to lose out. That pattern, city gains and rural losses, repeats across the country and is the most under-reported part of the story.

For reporters who keep meeting the same distortions in institutional claims, our piece on recurring arts coverage problems sets out the traps in this kind of data.

The North East, South West England and rural touring picture

The North East is the test case for any levelling up claim. It is the smallest English region by population outside London, it has a strong cultural infrastructure in Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland, and it has historically received a share of NPO money below its population share.

In the 2023 to 2026 portfolio the North East gained some organisations and lost others. The net change was modest. The region's large venues, such as Sage Gateshead and the Baltic, remained in the portfolio, while several smaller organisations moved to project funding, which is less secure.

South West England has a different problem. It is large, rural in parts, and has few large cities. Bristol and Plymouth hold most of the portfolio money, while Cornwall and Devon depend heavily on touring and on project grants.

Rural touring schemes, which bring professional work to village halls and small venues, are funded through a mix of Arts Council money, local authority money and ticket income.

That mix is fragile. When a local authority cuts its arts budget, the touring scheme loses a partner, and the Arts Council grant does not rise to fill the gap. Rural audiences then lose the only professional work that reaches them.

The pattern across both regions is the same. Portfolio money concentrates in cities, and the further you get from a city, the more the arts depend on short-term funding. That is a structural feature of regional arts funding in England, not an accident of one portfolio round.

If you are covering one of these schemes at local level, our guide to books and literary culture reporting covers the questions that actually produce a story.

Place-based programmes: UK Town of Culture and the mobile museum

Alongside the portfolio, the government runs smaller place-based cultural programmes. Two are worth naming because they are often cited as evidence of levelling up.

The first is UK Town of Culture, a competition that gives a town a year of cultural programming and a modest budget. The shortlist has been published by the government, and it is drawn from towns across England rather than from the major cities.

Shortlist for UK Town of Culture revealed - GOV.UK names the towns in contention.

The second is the permanent mobile museum, a government-funded project to take objects and exhibitions to communities that do not have a national museum on their doorstep. Government to build UK's first permanent mobile museum to bring art to communities everywhere - GOV.UK describes the plan and its purpose.

Both are real, and both matter to the towns involved. Neither moves money on the scale of the National Portfolio. A Town of Culture year is measured in hundreds of thousands of pounds, while the portfolio is measured in hundreds of millions.

So treat them as signals of intent, and as useful local stories, but not as proof that the funding geography has changed. The portfolio is where the money is.

What regional arts coverage should ask of NPO data

Most regional arts stories use the portfolio badly. They quote a total, name a winner and a loser, and stop. The data supports much more than that, and the questions below will produce a better piece every time.

• What is the region's total NPO funding for the current portfolio period, and how has it changed since the last one?
• How many organisations does that total support, and has the number risen or fallen?
• What is the funding per organisation, and how does it compare with the national average?
• Which organisations entered the portfolio, and which left, and where are they based?
• How much of the region's money goes to organisations in the largest city, and how much goes elsewhere?
• Are the figures adjusted for inflation, and if not, what does the cash change look like in real terms?
• What does the region's GVA share look like next to its funding share?

Work through those seven questions and you have a story that survives contact with a press officer. Skip them and you have a press release with a byline.

One more habit is worth building. Always ask for the previous portfolio's figures in the same format. Arts Council England publishes both, but not always side by side, and the comparison is where the news is. For the recurring errors that appear when this comparison is done carelessly, see our notes on arts coverage forms compared.

Limits of the levelling up claim and how to report them

The levelling up claim in the arts has four limits, and a careful reporter states them in the piece rather than leaving them to a critic in the comments.

First, the portfolio is not all the money. Arts Council England also spends through National Lottery Project Grants, Capital Investment and a range of development funds. Those streams are not published with the same regional detail, so a full regional picture is not available from public data.

Second, the portfolio data has no audience figures. It tells you who is funded, not who attends. A region can gain money and still see falling attendance, and the portfolio file will not show it.

Third, the figures are cash, not real terms. Over a portfolio period of several years, inflation erodes a flat grant. A region that holds its cash share has, in effect, lost ground.

Fourth, the London share is still large. Any claim that the shift has been completed is false on the published numbers. The honest formulation is that the direction of travel changed, and that the destination has not been reached.

Report it that way and the story holds up. Claim more than the data supports and the first press officer with a spreadsheet will take it apart. That, in the end, is the discipline the subject demands: name the region, name the organisation, name the figure, and name what the figure does not cover.

Common questions

How much of Arts Council England's National Portfolio money goes to London?

Greater London still receives the largest regional share, well above its share of population. The exact figure changes with each portfolio round, so quote the current published spreadsheet rather than a remembered number.

What is a National Portfolio Organisation?

It is an organisation that receives regular funding from Arts Council England for a fixed period, usually three years. Portfolio status is more secure than project funding, which is why entry and exit from the list is news.

Does levelling up apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

No. Arts Council England funds England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own funding bodies, so regional comparisons across the UK need to match like with like.

Where can I find NPO data by region?

Arts Council England publishes the portfolio as a downloadable file with organisation names, locations and annual amounts. You can sort it by region and compare it with the previous round.

Why use GVA when reporting on arts funding?

GVA shows the size of a regional economy, so it gives you a fair baseline for judging whether a funding share is proportionate. Without it, a large region and a small one look the same.

Are UK Town of Culture and the mobile museum part of the National Portfolio?

No. They are separate place-based programmes with their own budgets. They are useful local stories, but they are not evidence about the portfolio's regional balance.