Recommendation 13

We asked the Department whether in retrospect it had struck the right balance between applying due diligence and how quickly funding reached organisations. The Department and ACE assured us that they were not aware of any organisation that had fallen into difficulty because of the timing of the receipt of an award.32 ACE told us that at the start of the pandemic it had made an emergency response fund of up to £160 million available to organisations from April onwards as a stopgap to manage, for example, cashflow challenges. It believed this funding gave the sector some time before the Culture Recovery Fund came along.33