Almost all the projects are over-budget and half are running late some by more than a year

“Almost all the projects are over-budget and half are running late, some by more than a year. It appears all too easy for grant recipients to go back to the Arts Council for top-up grants when they find they run short of cash.”Mr Davis said it appeared that the Arts Council’s weak monitoring of projects meant much of the money looked at by the NAO had been wasted. “I am extremely concerned about the financial sustainability of some projects. There is a real risk that ultimately lottery funds may have been used to no long-term effect at all. They may end up with some nice buildings, but if the arts bodies cannot sustain themselves, their buildings will sit empty,” he said.The Royal Opera House, which has struggled with successive financial crises over the past four years, was the centre of a political storm during the last Tory government when its pounds 78m grant was one of the first uses of lottery money.What has now emerged is that the Royal Opera House was given the grant after claiming it would be able to balance its budgets with a refurbished home, then admitted once most of the money was spent that it would still lose pounds 2m a year.Alongside a grant to buy Winston Churchill’s papers from his grandson, the Royal Opera House award was seen by some as an elitist misuse of lottery funds. Mr Davis is worried that the poor use of funds by the biggest projects, half of which are in London, leaves less money for other schemes around the country.The NAO has told the Arts Council it has to be “more vigorous” in monitoring the building work it pays for, and to toughen up its responses to requests for more money.

In the case of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Court Theatre, the Arts Council allowed funding to continue, despite both organisations’ failure to meet conditions laid down by the council to safeguard against financial risks.The Arts Council, which had approval of the NAO report’s contents, welcomed the report. In a statement, it said: “We accept its recommendations, and we have already acted on or are acting on all of them. There is welcome recognition in the report that the Arts Council has, from the onset of the Lottery, adopted a pro-active approach to monitoring lottery projects.”. THE FIRST piece of work to be commissioned by the new Tate Gallery is from an 87-year-old French-American sculptor. Louise Bourgeois is regarded as one of the world’s most influential artists and her sculpture will be one of five piecesdisplayed in the 500ft long and 100ft high entrance hall. Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery, said the works would be commissioned in a pounds 1.25m sponsorship deal with Unilever. One piece will be commissioned every year and will be on display for six months at a time.
The Tate Gallery of Modern Art is due to open next May in a converted power station on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.Ms Bourgeois’s work, which will consist of three 40ft-high steel sculptures, will be the first thing visitors will see.

She is frail and it is not certain that she will make the journey from her home in New York to install the piece, the details of which are a closely guarded secret.. THE LEAK of the inquiry report into the death of Stephen Lawrence came from within the Government, the Home Secretary disclosed yesterday. In a highly embarrassing admission, Jack Straw told Parliament that the source of the leak was likely to have been one of the officials or advisers within his department. Mr Straw announced that an indepen-dent inquiry into the “deplorable” leak of the Lawrence Report had not identified the individual responsible.
However, it had found that the “most likely route” for the breach of confidentiality was from within Government rather than the Macpherson inquiry team or the report’s printers.Mr Straw said that the only other minister with relevant access to the material was Paul Boateng, a Home Office minister, but Mr Straw accepted his minister’s assurances that he was not responsible. With Mr Boateng cleared, the spotlight falls on the small group of officials in the Home Office who also saw the report. Mr Straw refused to name them.The Home Secretary provoked controversy in February when he sought an injunction attempting to stop a Sunday newspaper from publishing leaked extracts from the report.It revealed that Sir William Macpherson of Cluny had found evidence of institutionalised racism in the Metropolitan Police in its handling of the Lawrence murder inquiry.The Home Office injunction was granted but later partly lifted, allowing details of the report to be revealed three days before its official publication in the House of Commons.A senior civil servant within the Cabinet Office was given the task of discovering how such a tightly controlled document could fall into the hands of journalists. Mr Straw said yesterday that despite intensive investigation, the inquiry had not been able to trace the exact source of the leak, although it was clear that it stemmed from a summary of the report that was circulated only within Whitehall.The inquiry concluded that all appropriate security arrangements had been followed, including a ban on advance media briefings, and “no one was found who had unauthorised access to the material”.Sir Norman Fowler, the shadow Home Secretary, said: “The reply shows, predictably, that the two-month investigation utterly failed to reveal the identity of the leaker.

What it does reveal, however, is that this was a deliberate leak from inside the Government itself. It means therefore that the Home Secretary sought an injunction on the media even though the information was deliberately leaked from inside the Government itself.”The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Alan Beith, said: “The failure to identify who was responsible suggests that the inquiry was ineffectively carried out.”. PARENTS WHO work too hard could be responsible for the worsening sexual health of British teenagers. Experts believe that the lack of time families spend together, combined with low self-esteem among young people, is to blame for Britain having the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and sexual disease in western Europe.