Ms Sarah Bannan:

It is great to know the work of the Arts Council is felt up and down the country. Regarding voluntary groups, the Arts Council is running a number of schemes at the moment that are open to voluntary groups where organisations do not necessarily need to be limited by guarantee. That is mostly through our festival investment scheme, which often involves community-led groups. I hope I am getting the question right. For groups or individuals that are thinking about writing local histories, without knowing the particulars, it might be an area slightly outside the Arts Council’s remit and more in the remit of a local heritage office. In some cases it might be for the arts office or the library service. The Arts Council’s focus is on professional artists in literature, that is, professional writers. Professional writers can come from anywhere and always start out as non-professionals, which is why we support so many journals up and down the country to enable them to work on creative work as well. The line between what is creative and what is historical gets a little blurred but our focus is on those works of the creative imagination. We have a long working relationship with the local authority arts offices going back a long time. Depending on the nature of what a group is looking at, the arts office should usually be their first port of call.