A report into the handling of Arts Council England's funding settlement will be published next week. Photograph: Dan Chung
For those who appreciate the ironies of life, you'll love this one. Peter Hewitt - quondam chief executive of the Arts Council, and under whose aegis so much confusion and pain was caused during the last funding row in December - was given a payoff of £128,000 when he left the organisation earlier this year. That was in addition to his £149,000 salary. According to an Arts Council spokeswoman, this was because he was on a fixed term contract. When it came to an end, he was entitled to redundancy pay. "We have a duty to abide by employment law; this is no more than any other chief executive would get," she said. "We have a duty of care to all out employees.
"It is not," she added, "a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. That money is separate from the money that goes to organisations."
This information, by the way, is in the Arts Council annual report, which will be available on the ACE website in due course.
A report, incidentally, into the handling of the funding settlement will be published on Wednesday, and I will report on it for the paper.
