I have spent much of the past few weeks looking at spreadsheets, which is not where I naturally want to be. I am a choreographer. I would much rather be in a studio with dancers, dealing with bodies, music, space and the maddening, exhilarating business of trying to make something that does not yet exist. But Freedom in the Arts, which I co-founded three years ago, is preparing a submission to the UK government’s consultation on the future of National Lottery Good Causes funding, and that has forced me to look closely at something I have felt for years but had not properly tried to measure.

The question is simple enough: what is National Lottery arts funding actually for?

The government is reviewing how National Lottery Good Causes money is distributed for the first time in 30 years. At present, 20 per cent goes to arts and culture, 20 per cent to heritage, 20 per cent to sport and 40 per cent to the community fund, which covers areas including health, education, environment and community projects.

At Freedom in the Arts, we believe the 20 per cent arts and culture allocation should be protected. The arts are already under immense pressure, local-authority support has fallen dramatically, private sponsorship is increasingly difficult to secure and younger artists are struggling to find the time, money and routes through which they can actually become artists.

But protecting the percentage funnelled into the arts is not enough. We also need to understand what happens to that money once it enters the system, and whether it realises the high-quality art the country deserves.

So we looked at Arts Council England’s published National Lottery Project Grants data for 2025-26: 2,369 awards distributing £96.8 million. We took a random sample of 400 and started looking at what those projects were actually doing.

I went into the exercise with one set of suspicions and came out with another. I had expected to find a great deal of explicitly political or activist work, perhaps the familiar institutional preoccupations with identity, race, gender, decolonisation and political causes. But explicit advocacy and activism turned out to be a tiny part of our sample. What emerged instead was harder to describe and, I think, much more important.

We found a substantial number of awards in which artistic activity sat alongside another purpose, and another group in which art appeared principally to be the means of delivering a wider social agenda. There were projects concerned with wellbeing, education, confidence, community cohesion, environmental awareness, literacy, inclusion, identity, skills and health. Sometimes the art was clearly at the centre. Sometimes artistic and social purposes genuinely coexisted. Sometimes it was difficult to work out whether the art was the purpose of the grant or the delivery mechanism for a social goal.

The distinction sounds unexceptional until you consider what is happening here. Funding art that comments on social issues is not the same as funding art to fix social issues. There is a difference between funding someone to make a play about loneliness and funding a theatre project to reduce loneliness, or between an artist making work about climate change and an environmental arts programme attempting to change our behaviour.

All of these things may be valuable. I am not interested in sneering at community art, education, participation or access. I have done plenty of that work myself and value it hugely. Art can have profound social effects. But that does not mean social outcomes should become the purpose by which art is judged or made.

As we dug further into individual grants, another problem emerged. The publicly available descriptions are often so thin that it is difficult to understand the full purpose of a project. Looking at artists’ websites, project pages and public announcements, we found projects which appeared at first glance to be principally artistic but carried much more substantial social, educational or policy purposes.

I do not think artists or organisations are concealing this. Often they are perfectly open about what they are trying to do. The lack of clarity lies in the way these distinct functions get lumped into a single broad public category called ‘arts funding’.

And this is where the research became uncomfortable. A spreadsheet, website or artist’s publicity can tell you the stated purpose of a project, but it cannot tell you why it developed that way.

Which came first? Did an artist begin with a social objective and choose art as the way to achieve it? Did he or she begin with an artistic idea and learn that it needed to be described through participation, inclusion, wellbeing, representation or community benefit to become fundable? Or has the funding system gradually encouraged more projects to be conceived around those criteria in the first place?

I suspect all three are happening. That is not to say artists have somehow become social workers. They haven’t. Most artists I know still desperately want to make the thing. They want to write the book, compose the music, paint the picture, stage the play, make the film, create the choreography. The actual doing of it remains the obsession. Yet our research suggests that making the art itself is increasingly sharing the funding proposition with a great architecture of justification: who will this reach, which community will benefit, what barrier will it remove, what social outcome will it deliver, what policy priority does it address?

Each question may be reasonable on its own. Put them together and the artistic proposition begins to look strangely insufficient.

I know this ecology because I live inside it. I have been applying for arts funding, working with venues, touring companies, commissioning artists and making work for decades. I know what it is to have a strong artistic idea, something I can see and feel very clearly as a choreographer, and then have to translate that vision into language that will survive a funding panel, a programmer, a producer, a marketing department and sometimes a board. Artists quickly learn what gets a warm response and what does not. We internalise criteria and absorb the language because we need the work to survive.

At a Freedom in the Arts consultation with artists, arts leaders and cultural professionals recently, one participant described watching administrators change the names and framing of projects because they believed it would improve their chances of funding. Others spoke about the burden of applications, disappearing routes into artistic careers and the time spent navigating criteria rather than making work.

This is the part I find genuinely tragic, because artistic practice is fragile and takes years to build. Developing physical technique, musicality, writing skills, acting depth or visual perception requires immense dedication. Beyond mastering craft, becoming an artist demands judgement, taste, instinct, courage and a distinct voice.

None of this means that artists receiving public money should not have to explain themselves. Of course we should. If I am asking the public to fund a new dance work, I should be able to say what I intend to make, why it matters, who I need to make it with, what it will cost and why I am capable of doing it. Artists should have vision, ambition and a serious proposition, while funders have a responsibility to safeguard the public purse.

What concerns me is what happens when the artistic vision alone seems insufficient, and artists realise their work has a better chance of being funded, commissioned or programmed if it also satisfies other priorities. This is where incentives matter, because they do not simply determine how we describe work after we have conceived it. Given enough time, they can influence which ideas we pursue, which parts of an idea we emphasise and perhaps even which ideas we quietly put aside.

An artist might strengthen a community-engagement strand because it feels authentic to the work, emphasise wellbeing or social impact to suit application guidelines, or adapt to a programmer’s feedback. Individually, these are sensible compromises necessary to get work made.

But multiply those decisions across thousands of artists, applications, commissions and programming conversations, year after year, and something happens to the ecology. The incentives start upstream. They can begin to influence the ideas that seem possible in the first place.

This is not an argument for a romantic world in which artists announce they are geniuses and public money duly arrives. Judgement and accountability are necessary. Artists should be challenged about the quality, seriousness and feasibility of what they propose. What I am questioning is what we have decided they must prove in order to be judged worthy of support.

Nor do I want artists to stop making work about social or political questions. A feminist play, a work about race, a dance piece about sexuality, a film about Israel or Palestine, climate change, motherhood, religion, patriotism or war can all be extraordinary art. Political subject matter is not the problem. Artistic freedom must include the freedom to go into all these places, including places I and others may personally dislike or disagree with.

The danger is not that artists no longer have artistic visions. It is that the funding ecology can slowly alter which artistic visions have the best chance of becoming real.

That is why the DCMS consultation matters. Freedom in the Arts will make a formal submission and we hope artists, companies, producers, programmers and cultural organisations will respond themselves. We will shortly publish simple guidance to help them do so.

Our emerging position is to protect the 20 per cent Arts and Culture share while demanding much greater transparency about what National Lottery arts money is actually buying, with a clearer distinction between artistic creation and funding principally intended to deliver participation, education, wellbeing, community development or other public purposes. We want less bureaucracy, particularly for individual artists and small organisations, and a serious examination of the incentives created by funding criteria. We want artistic excellence, experimentation and serious artist development closer to the centre, alongside greater plurality and local expertise in decision-making without simply creating another layer of closed gatekeepers.

Above all, we want a funding system confident enough to support artistic freedom itself, including work that is difficult, unfashionable, politically heterodox or apparently useless, without requiring an artist to bolt on a secondary social justification simply to appear fundable.

Because the thing I am most worried about will never appear neatly in the statistics. It is the work that was never made: the choreography somebody abandoned because they could not find a route to fund it, the challenging book that never fitted a programme, the composer who learned that another kind of project was more likely to succeed, the artist who slowly shifted the questions they asked themselves until the original impulse became almost impossible to hear.

There will still be festivals, programmes, strategies, mentoring schemes, engagement plans and beautifully articulated outcomes. There will still be an arts sector. But somewhere inside all of that activity we may discover that the thing the ‘arts and culture’ allocation was supposed to protect has become strangely peripheral: the making of art itself.

Rosie Kay is a choreographer and co-founder of Freedom in the Arts.