Challenges for income and programmes

Artquest, like many arts organisations with long-standing grant funding from Arts Council England (ACE), is experiencing a significant drop in core funding.

Since 2010, arts funding in England has been static for most organisations. In our case:

• in 2010 we received £120,500 each year from ACE to cover our staff salaries and project costs.
• each year since we have again received £120,500. But because of inflation, the value of this money – although still significant – has lost around 58% of its value due to inflation.
• this means that if our grant had been increased each year in line with inflation, we would now be receiving £190,390 each year.

ACE have twice extended the National Portfolio due first to changed priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then due to a new government bringing forward new spending priorities and the Hodge review of ACE in 2025. Originally planned to run from 2023-2026, this round of Natonal Portfolio funding will instead run to 2028. By then, our funding will have lost 68% of its value since 2010 – almost £82,000 each year.

We receive £15,000 each year from our host, University of the Arts London (UAL), which is the same amount we have received each year since before 2010.

Over and above cash, however, UAL covers core service functions, such as legal, HR, governance and management, IT support, estates, insurance, an extensive staff development programme, and all other back-office support.

In total, UAL’s support amounts to around 65% of our total budget in cash terms.

The higher education landscape also has an impact on our context and capacity to ask for more money from UAL. Funding for teaching in the arts and humanities was eliminated many years ago, and the freeze on UK student fees continues to impact income to the sector. International student fees, many times higher than for home students, although high, are limited by a visa regime that serves to put off many from coming to the UK.

While our income has dropped significantly in real terms, essentially all of our costs have increased.

Web hosting and maintenance, fees paid to freelance artists, venue hire, equipment, and staff salaries, National Insurance and pension contributions have all increased. All costs for the Artquest programme at UAL come from our real-terms reducing income.

Like all National Portfolio organisations (NPOs), Artquest cannot apply for increased core funding until the next application round.

The government’s recent spending review proposes a 1.2% cut to DCMS, including a 2.8% cut in capital expenditure and 15% cut to administration. £400m of extra funding to DCMS announced in the spending review is ringfenced for the UEFA Euro 2028 football tournament. In this context, increases or even restoration of funding for culture is not a political priority. No-one in the sector is seriously expecting increases to budgets in future funding rounds.

Our recent NPO Leaders research report explains the arts funding landscape in more detail, and calls for restoration of the £100m cut from the National Portfolio by value since 2010.

Artquest is a special type of NPO, designated an Investment Principal Support Organisation (IPSO). Instead of delivering public programming to arts audiences, IPSOs are tasked with supporting the arts and culture infrastructure: workforce development, encouraging diversity and inclusion, or other functions deemed strategically important. Arts Council England’s own research suggests that IPSOs “were created to bridge a substantial gap between what funding bodies believed the sector needed to thrive and what the ‘market’ – artists and arts organisations – were willing and able to pay for [and] will remain heavily dependent on public subsidy”.

In short, IPSOs will find it almost impossible to make money outside of public funding.

In addition, Artquest is a public programme of UAL, a higher education corporation. There are restrictions on the type of income all legal entities can make, including universities. For example, charities cannot trade at a significant level, with most having to make a separate company in order to run their shops or income-generating activities.

We have explored the following ways to earn money:

Memberships

Memberships are useful for ongoing revenue / core funding, but in our case are not possible.

Universities cannot have members. We would have to set up a separate legal entity to manage a membership, creating more administration around management, governance and reporting, and therefore costing more money and taking more time to administer.

Members require extra value or services just for them in order to encourage people to pay. Extra activity would need to be budgeted and fundraised, adding costs and requiring more staff. Salaries for fundraisers are highly competitive, and outside of our budget possibilities. And forthcoming changes in the law with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA) threaten to make memberships less financially viable.

Many arts membership organisations exist already, all of whom offer competitive benefits for artists like insurance, highly specialised networks or legal information (which we offer artists anywhere in England for free). Adding another paid membership for artists turns our collaborators into competitors, and would risk increasing duplication simply to continue to exist.

Art auction

Some high profile and well-connected arts organisations have had success with art auctions, typically by securing one or two very high value works. Auctions usually need a skilled auctioneer, making them reliant on an auction house to make sales legal, handle promotion, and deal with art shipping and storage, tax payment on sales, and processing sales. In return, auction houses usually demand a cut of auction proceeds, often around 20%, eating into profits.

Art auctions require artists to donate work, once again placing the burden of arts fundraising on artists instead of the wealthy individuals and foundations who collect their work, who could simply donate money directly. If work fails to sell, it can damage the artists sales record and their relationship with their gallery.

Art auctions, like crowdfunding and other one-off events, only raise money at a single moment and not on an ongoing basis. Our budget reductions are baked in to our business, and require ongoing income.

As well as being outside of our staff capacity to organise, auctions carry a high risk of failure without an excellent network in highly sellable artists work, and are, in our opinion, not ethically sound.

Event programme

Artquest has in the past run live and online events for artists professional development. Historically we charged a small fee for artists to attend these, mostly to encourage people to turn up. At free events, only around 30% of those who book a place come along, blocking space for other artists on the waiting list. Fees are significantly lower than cost price, which can be several hundred pounds, and were subsidised by our grant from ACE.

We have more recently focussed on creating web content instead of events, since it allows people to access it when they need it, instead of the short timeframe when it happens to be produced.

Running events is expensive, to pay for staff time, freelancer fees, venue and equipment hire; running them at a profit is highly challenging.

Project funding

On occasion, we have been successful at raising money for individual projects, such as our AWP Internships programme working with UAL, and for some larger scale conferences. Project funding, as any artist who has applied for this before knows, requires significant investment in time with no guarantee of success. For us, this would take our 4 part-time staff away from service delivery while they make applications.

UAL’s central fundraising team does not get involved in the administration of our project funding or ACE income. Artquest is a funded temporary project at UAL, since ACE income covers only a so far rolling 3-year cycle. Like all projects, Artquest is expected to come to an end.

Project funding does not end when activity ends, with evaluation and feedback built into every funding cycle. Relying on project funding is possible – many arts organisations do this successfully, if exhaustingly, with many eventually aiming to become core funded as part of the ACE portfolio.

Given the gradual reduction in the value of our income since 2010, we do not need income for small, temporary projects that create additional work. We need income for core costs.

Philanthropy

Since we lack a programme aimed at the general public sponsorship or philanthropic giving options are very limited. Public and private funders that support the arts are receiving many more applications for diminishing funds. Many are still focussed toward plugging the gaps in social provision left by austerity.

Intellectual property

When Artquest began, we were the first online professional development organisation for artists in the UK, possibly the world. Our website has gone from 50 pages at launch to over 12,000 pages today, with a wealth of information and advice for professional visual artists.

With the rise of the internet, there are now hundreds of professional advice services for artists (of varying quality) and others, devaluing our intellectual property. Monetising web content has proven challenging for all content providers, and this is no exception for us. We estimate that a requiring artists to pay for access to our site would cut visitors from our current peak of 35,000 per month to a few hundred, raising some money at the cost of greatly reducing access to vital advice for artists at all stages in their careers. Plus the problem of artists not having much money to begin with, and the issue of membership needing fresh regular content to encourage payment – all of which drives up costs.

Consultancy

We are developing consultancy services for arts organisations, local councils, museums and galleries to help them work with artists better to help them understand the importance of equitable processes, fair pay, and artistic practice.

Many of these sectors, however, have also suffered due to the extended period of austerity in local council budgets and culture funding, and have little money to pay for services. We are finding that plenty of partners would like to work with us, but cannot afford to pay.

In line with our mission to help make the arts more equitable for artists, we continue to collaborate with a range of partners. In our new paradigm of required income generation, we are operating these services at a loss. We are trying to develop a consultancy offer that will enable ongoing income from organisations and businesses, while still servicing the professional information and advice needs of artists.

We continue to commit to not charging artists to access our services. We were set up to be a free service, available to artists at any stage in their career, and for any advice they might need. This need remains, while artists incomes remain stubbornly low, restricting their ability to pay.

We remain totally committed to offering services to artists for free in perpetuity. Since artists are so poorly paid, they have little disposable income for their own professional development, and paid events present a significant barrier to participation.

Demand for our programme is at record levels, with requests for advice and support at an all-time high. Costs increase as we commit to paying the artists we work with at least at industry standard levels.

In 2025 we were forced to cut almost all of our public programme offer to artists. We still offer free online advice and information to any artist, anywhere in England, including legal information, and our website. But we had to cut our popular one to one advice service, peer mentoring groups, and remaining events programme, on top of our recent career development grants, paid arts internships, early career mentoring programme, and artist research residencies. Simply put, we can no longer afford to pay the freelance artists who run many of our programmes. Instead, we are focussing our staff time on developing a consultancy / research offer in order to raise income to support the programme, with the aim to earn enough to restart some of these projects in future.

Staff salaries

Artquest is made up of 4 part-time members of staff, together making 2 full-time equivalent posts. We cannot cut staff numbers without reducing capacity to below a level where we can operate.

As employees of UAL, we are not in control of our salary increases, which rise a small amount with each year of service in line with all higher education institutions in the UK. And we obviously do not control National Insurance levels, which are set by government, and rose in 2025 to 15%.

Our only expenditure at present is on staff salaries, National Insurance and pension contributions, and basic website maintenance and hosting, with research project development coming from reserves. There is simply nothing left to cut.

Our monthly income is about £2,000 more than our monthly expenditure. The next round of staff salary increases, set by UAL in negotiation with government and unions, is likely to reduce this further.

Put simply: as things stand, we won’t make it to the start of the next funding round without radical changes to how we operate and what we do. All costs are up. All real-term income is down. We must act now to find more income and cut public programmes. In a highly competitive funding environment and an arts sector that’s moved on from direct sector support, there are no easy answers.

At some stage before the extended next round of national portfolio funding opens, without significant change, our income will not be enough to cover our base expenditure, and Artquest is likely to close.