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In a move to help address the growing challenges around mid and large-scale regional touring, the Arts Council has today launched Incentivising Touring: Repayable Grants for Theatre and Dance. Developed in close collaboration with the sector, the new £5 million pilot scheme aims to support regional touring with commercial potential, and give more people across England access to a wide range of high-quality cultural experiences.

The new scheme aims to reduce the risk of touring large-scale productions around the country by offering repayable grants of up to 25% of a production’s capitalisation costs, to a maximum of £500k. The funding is intended to give boards and investors the confidence and incentive they need to support increased tours, and to attract wider investment.

But Incentivising Touring is about more than just supporting touring now; it is about exploring a sustainable option for the future. Should the supported tours be commercially successful, some or all of the grant will be returned to the Arts Council so that it can be reinvested in other tours. The pilot will test this new way of funding work at scale and could inform the development of a longer-term programme in the future.

Touring high quality work at scale is a vital part of our arts and culture ecology, enabling exciting theatre and dance productions to reach more people

Collaboration with the sector has been at the heart of creating Incentivising Touring, with an external working group and wider consultation with over 65 organisations informing the development the new scheme. As a result, it has been designed as a new way to invest in larger-scale productions with commercial potential, increasing audience opportunities and contributing to local and national economies.

The launch follows the recent publication of the Government’s Industrial Strategy Green Paper, which firmly positions the creative industries as one of the eight sectors on which the UK’s economic growth will be based.

The scheme will incentivise productions to tour at scale, shoulder some of the risk that touring entails, and deliver more great work to more people, in more places

The Incentivising Touring scheme comes in addition to our dedicated touring strand of National Lottery Project Grants, which has seen more than £27 million invested in 257 projects across multiple artforms and scales since November 2021. This new scheme will provide us with an alternative way to support larger-scale dance and theatre productions with commercial potential. As a result, it will create greater opportunity in our existing touring strand for us to support more small and mid-scale tours, as well as tours from other artforms.

In further recognition of the challenges for touring ecologies, we’ve also commissioned a major new research study. It will provide us with in-depth intelligence on the current touring landscape and inform how we can work closely with the sector to support it in the future. You can follow the progress of this study through our website.

Hannah Lake, Director of Touring, Arts Council England, said: “As the national development agency for arts and culture, an important part of our role is to have close dialogue and work with the many different parts of the sector to develop ways to best support their work. 

“Touring high quality work at scale is a vital part of our arts and culture ecology, enabling exciting theatre and dance productions to reach more people. Listening to the industry, we’ve heard just how tough touring is right now, so we’ve worked together to create the Arts Council’s first repayable grant scheme. The scheme will incentivise productions to tour at scale, shoulder some of the risk that touring entails, and deliver more great work to more people, in more places.”