Arts Council England finally achieved the public recognition it deserves yesterday. According to the Public Accounts Committee, it is utterly useless. This will surprise no one who has observed its activities over the past 25 years.

In the visual arts it has long used its freedom to institutionalise what is now called “the cutting edge”. Everyone who did not share its blinkered understanding of what was “challenging” and “avant garde” was excluded, and continues to be. Its tyrannical censorship and prejudices in this area continue to beggar belief.

But it was when the council took control of the lottery money allocated to the arts that its problems really began.

In terms of its business qualifications, one wouldn’t entrust most of its leaders with care of the chestnut brazier outside the British Museum.

Lottery money doubled the funds it had to support what it — with its “developed, expert” sensibilities — wanted us to like. And because it gives us what it wants, instead of what we might like to see, its galleries and museums are often to be found empty of visitors.

So it’s no accident that the Public Accounts Committee attacked it so strongly for favouring ventures whose projected attendance figures were ridiculously optimistic. Business plans are always partial works of fiction but the versions accepted by the council could be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Who on earth was going to travel to Sheffield to pay eight quid to enter a pop museum? Other Arts Council England projects, such as Walsall Art Gallery and the Baltic in Gateshead, those that were fanfared as triumphs of the new millennium, mainly because huge sums were made available for classy pre-opening marketing campaigns, are now in serious trouble. The punters have realised that what they get is not what they want to see.

This waste has occurred at a time when the national museums, which could have put these tens of millions to good use, are on the breadline; closing galleries, laying off staff, threatening to sell off works.

More museums and galleries are being opened and refurbished every month when there is already insufficient money to go round. This is insanity.

We need to stop and take stock. If one were to design a system of administering arts funding, one would look at the Byzantine and wasteful way it is done now as a “how not to guide”.

We have far too many museums already without building any more. Where is the sense in an arts policy which sanctions more building when one of the world’s finest collections of Greek pottery at the British Museum is closed most of the time because it can’t afford to show it? Or when plastic sheeting is covering Rembrandt’s etchings at the marvellous Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester because rainwater is pouring down the walls? Most of our existing galleries are underused.

We need a better national strategy. This must address the plight of the national museums, which for decades have lurched from crisis to crisis. Their buildings must be made secure and sound and they must have all their galleries open all the time. Only after these flagships are on course can we look at proper revenue funding for the council’s own galleries in return for a broadening of its hitherto parti pris exhibition philosophy.

We can make an immediate start on building the New World by removing the council’s responsibility for spending lottery money. In this, as in everything else it touches, it has proved itself grotesquely incompetent.

The author is editor of The Jackdaw, an arts newsletter

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