Arts policy consultation

Overview

The Department for Communities (DfC) is the Northern Ireland Executive department with responsibility for the arts and is currently developing a new Arts Policy.

DfC plays an important role in setting policy direction for the arts and provides funding, primarily through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The Arts Council is an Arm’s Length Body of the Department and the main funding and development organisation for the arts in Northern Ireland. The Arts Council’s legislative duties and responsibilities are set out in The Arts Council (Northern Ireland) Order 1995.

DfC also plays a role in supporting the creative industries and provides funding towards cultural, educational, careers and outreach initiatives through Northern Ireland Screen, the national screen agency for Northern Ireland.   

DfC has developed a draft Vision Statement for the arts along with 17 draft Policy Aims. The draft Vision and Aims are suggested as the basis of the new policy for the arts.

Through this consultation your views on the draft Vision and Policy Aims are being sought. Your views are important to us and will help inform the future policy development work for the arts in Northern Ireland.

DfC is seeking your views through a questionnaire. If you are responding on behalf of an organisation, we would ask that only one person from each organisation submits a response.

A paper-based questionnaire is available on request from HCCpublicconsultation@communities-ni.gov.uk. To support an effective and holistic analysis of all responses, we ask that all respondents answer the questions set out in the questionnaire and use the questionnaire format.

For this consultation, we may publish all responses except for those where the respondent indicates that they do not wish for their responses to be published. All responses from organisations and individuals responding in a professional capacity may be published. We will remove any personal data, including email addresses and telephone numbers, from these responses; but apart from this, we may publish them in full. For more information about what we do with personal data please see our consultation privacy notice.

Your response, and all other responses to this consultation, may also be disclosed on request in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR); however, all disclosures will be in line with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).

If you want the information that you provide to be treated as confidential it would be helpful if you could explain to us why you regard the information you have provided as confidential, so that this may be considered if the Department should receive a request for the information under the FOIA or EIR.

In order to facilitate the survey, Citizen Space, which is not operated by DfC, is used as a data processor. Details of Citizen Space's privacy policy can be found online at Citizen Space Privacy Policy.