On reading yesterday's report in the Sunday Times that Arts Council England is now likely to backtrack on its much-publicised projected cull of up to 200 arts organisations, my first reaction was relief. Since those ill-conceived letters arrived on the mats of arts companies around the country before Christmas, the Arts Council has been at pains to emphasise that the provisional funding decisions they heralded were exactly that - provisional.
How gratifying, therefore, to see that some of the companies which have shouted most loudly that they stand to lose everything now look likely - if the Sunday Times article is right - to be spared. These include Exeter's Northcott theatre; the Bush in west London; the National Student Drama Festival; the London Mozart Players; and the Manchester-based gay and lesbian festival Queer Up North - five of the six companies I spoke to at length earlier this month.
But my relief quickly gave way to concern. What was ACE's chairman, Sir Christopher Frayling, doing giving a briefing to the Sunday Times ahead of tomorrow's board meeting, at which the Arts Council is expected to finally make up its mind about where the axe will fall? Frayling is, of course, free to make his own decisions about when and how to brief journalists - but his indiscreet revelations are the latest twist in ACE's bizarrely inconsistent approach to the disclosure of information.
Frayling and the Arts Council do not appear to have stated categorically which organisations are likely to get a reprieve. The Sunday Times's Richard Brooks must have good reason to believe the list will include a number of the above companies, some of whom have, in their vociferous campaigns against the projected cuts, uncovered massive errors in the Arts Council's evidence against them. At the Bush, artistic director Josie Rourke and her team found, through freedom of information legislation, that the Arts Council had underestimated the theatre's audience attendance figures by two-thirds. And apparently ACE's Yorkshire body has admitted failing to take into account the significance of the National Student Drama Festival on a national level.
But what about the many companies who have not been fortunate enough to garner the support of Harold Pinter and Salman Rushdie (in the case of the Bush), or thousands of signatures on an online petition (in the case of the Northcott)? How do they feel about seeing other companies in the same boat apparently pre-selected to be spared? Ever since news first broke about the funding letters - and it did so only because some of the companies affected were quick off the mark in composing angry press releases - the Arts Council has adopted this strange approach of disclosure and reticence. It has refused to publish a full list of the prospective winners and losers, for which its excuses have wavered between the need to protect confidentiality, and concern that the letters' provisional nature be forgotten.
The Arts Council is answerable not only for the outcry these proposals have caused - and the apparent factual and strategic errors that lie behind some of them - but also for its piecemeal, blindly groping approach to the disclosure of information about them.
Whatever final decisions it reaches tomorrow, it has created a climate of misinformation, mistrust and confusion, in which the people who ultimately suffer are, inevitably, the artists themselves.
