‘Bonfire of red tape’ as Jeremy Hunt orders cuts for arts budgets

Arts organisations were told to prepare a bonfire of the red tape today as new Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt demanded cuts in administration costs.

In his first keynote speech, he was set to profess his personal commitment to culture and promise that the arts would "not be singled out as a soft target" for future cuts.

But he repeated his pre-election demand for bodies such as the Arts Council to spend no more than five per cent of their budgets on administration. Arts Council England currently spends six per cent and other funding bodies are higher.

Mr Hunt acknowledged it would be a "tough" spending settlement. In the run-up to the election, Treasury officials told departments not singled out for protection to produce worst-case scenario economic plans modelled on having their budgets halved.

But the new Culture Secretary was expected to promise they would be "open, fair and as rapid as possible" in letting people know their allocations. And he hoped to "turn the current funding crisis into an opportunity" to reform arts funding so culture was never again vulnerable to booms and busts in public funding.

His first step was to cancel ministerial cars, saving £250,000 a year, and to ask every member of staff at the Department for Culture for suggestions on savings. Today he also wrote to the top 200 cultural philanthropists to ask for their advice on how to encourage more people to give.