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Policy paper

Culture Priority Places

Published 22 May 2026

© Crown copyright 2026

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dcms-place-targeting/culture-priority-places

Culture Priority Places

  • Ashfield
  • Barking and Dagenham
  • Barnsley
  • Basildon
  • Bassetlaw
  • Blackburn with Darwen
  • Blackpool
  • Bolsover
  • Boston
  • Brent
  • Burnley
  • Cannock Chase
  • Chesterfield
  • County Durham
  • Crawley
  • Croydon
  • Cumberland (NB only Copeland is previous ACE PP)
  • Darlington (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Doncaster
  • Dover
  • Dudley
  • East Lindsey
  • Enfield
  • Erewash
  • Fenland
  • Gloucester
  • Gosport
  • Great Yarmouth
  • Hartlepool (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Havant
  • Hyndburn
  • Isle of Wight
  • Isles of Scilly
  • King’s Lynn and West Norfolk
  • Kirklees
  • Knowsley
  • Luton
  • Mansfield
  • Medway
  • Middlesbrough (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • New Forest
  • Newham
  • North Devon
  • North East Derbyshire
  • North East Lincolnshire
  • North Lincolnshire
  • North Somerset
  • North Yorkshire
  • Nuneaton and Bedworth
  • Pendle
  • Peterborough
  • Portsmouth
  • Preston
  • Redcar and Cleveland (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Redditch
  • Rochdale
  • Rossendale
  • Rotherham
  • Rushmoor
  • Salford
  • Sandwell
  • Sheffield
  • Slough
  • Somerset
  • South Tyneside
  • St. Helens
  • Stockton-on-Tees (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Stoke-on-Trent
  • Sunderland
  • Swindon
  • Tameside
  • Telford and Wrekin
  • Tendring
  • Torbay
  • Wakefield
  • Walsall
  • West Lindsey
  • Westmorland and Furness
  • Wigan
  • Wolverhampton
  • Wyre

Introduction

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is committed to making a difference in the places that need it the most, through investing to build social and community cohesion and to enhance opportunity where outcomes are poorest.

Evidence points clearly to economic and social outcomes being systematically worse in places where both deprivation and community need is highest; places experiencing ‘double disadvantage’.[footnote 1] For this reason, across our programmes that aim to improve social and community outcomes, we will focus more of our activity and investment in these places of double disadvantage to ensure that our funding is concentrated in the communities where we can make the biggest difference.

Many cultural programmes supported by DCMS investment contribute to some social and community outcomes, alongside other outcomes relating to culture and growth, and we have therefore developed a set of Culture Priority Places, guided by the broader DCMS approach to place targeting. This list has been developed specifically for application (where appropriate) in programmes relating to museums, libraries, the visual and performing arts. It does not cover all areas of culture and the creative industries, and prioritisation lists for programmes focussed on other sub-sectors may be developed separately using specific and appropriate data.

DCMS will work with funding partners (including the Arts Council) and others to determine for which policies, programmes, and funds this list of Culture Priority Places will be used, and in what way. Those decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis determined by the objectives of the programme or policy in question. How this list will apply in such cases will be made clear through published documents (such as funding application guidance) made public for each relevant programme or policy.

Notwithstanding this flexibility, it is our strong expectation that this approach will support a meaningful shift over time of investment and participation in culture in these Culture Priority Places, and we are clear about our high ambition in this respect with our funding partners. In our response to the Independent Review of Arts Council England (‘the Arts Council’), the government set out that it would work with the Arts Council to publish a set of additional Culture Priority Places.

This note sets out what those places are, the methodology used to determine that list, and how it interacts with existing place prioritisation frameworks. It should be read in conjunction with the wider guidance on the DCMS approach.

The broader DCMS approach focuses on places with high deprivation and high community need, as measured by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and the Community Needs Index. Our approach (set out in detail below) builds on this by incorporating culture participation data and historic funding data to determine a list of areas that should be prioritised.

The methodology set out in this note uses the latest data to identify places with high deprivation and high community need, lowest participation, and without high cultural funding in the recent past. As it dovetails with available data-sources (in particular the Participation Survey) and existing approaches to place prioritisation, we have chosen to carry out analysis and prioritise at lower tier local authority level. The methodology creates a list of 81 local authority areas for prioritisation.

The Arts Council has been prioritising 54 Priority Places[footnote 2] since 2021, and has a public commitment to continue that support until 2027. Since 2021, the Arts Council’s Priority Places programme has been effective in increasing the level of funding focussed on local authority areas with higher levels of deprivation.[footnote 3] Many of these areas identified by DCMS’s new methodology are already in Arts Council’s existing Priority Places - but 23 are new.[footnote 4] DCMS-commissioned research has recommended taking a long-term approach to cultural development in places,[footnote 5] and DCMS has therefore decided to introduce these as additional places to the Arts Council’s Priority Places, resulting in a combined list of 81 places, rather than simply replacing Arts Council’s Priority Places.

Culture Priority Places will change over time, and places will no longer be deemed a Culture Priority Place when they have achieved real change in their cultural participation and provision. We will work with the Arts Council on a robust methodology to determine which places will leave the Culture Priority Places list, and when. We will set this methodology out in due course. While local government reorganisation continues we will also consider how this list or its practical application needs to be adapted to respond to boundary changes.

Methodology for Culture Priority Places

Summary methodology

There are three key steps to our prioritisation methodology:

Focus on engagement

Our first step was to identify local authority areas with low engagement with culture. Lower tier local authority areas were ranked using three separate measures of physical engagement with culture. All of these engagement metrics are taken from the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey annual publication, the relevant data tables are specified below:

  • Physical attendance at an arts event in the last 12 months 
  • Physical attendance at a library in the last 12 months
  • Physical attendance at a museum in the last 12 months

Focus on high deprivation and high community need

Our next step, in line with the DCMS approach to place targeting, was to identify areas experiencing the most ’double disadvantage’: Lower tier local authorities were ranked based on their share of neighbourhoods (LSOAs) experiencing both high deprivation (worst-performing quintile for IMD) and high community need (worst-performing quintile for CNI).

Exclusion of local authority areas that have historically received high levels (top quintile) of the Arts Council’s funding since 2021

Finally, as one of the impacts of this prioritisation exercise will be to shape where funding is concentrated, we excluded areas that have had very high per-capita levels of funding in the recent past. Because most central government culture programmes are delivered through the Arts Council, this is the best single funding source that can be used to understand the distribution of central government culture funding.

Detail on the steps we took to implement this methodology is set out below, along with details on the data-sources and metrics used to inform this analysis.

Detailed methodology, with commentary on considerations

Step 1: Rank local authority areas based on the 3 measure of attendance

We ranked lower-tier local authority areas based on physical attendance metrics, using the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey annual publication. Ranks were generated for the following three categories:

  • Arts Engagement: Based on the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey (Table A31).
    • This includes the proportion of people in a local authority area who have gone to any of the following events in the last year[footnote 7]: 
      • An exhibition of art, photography or sculptures
      • A theatre play, drama, musical, pantomime, ballet or opera
      • An event connected with literature, books, reading, poetry reading or writing
      • A cinema screening of a film or movie
      • A craft exhibition (not a crafts market; crafts include for example textiles, woodworking)
      • A live music event (for example, pop, jazz, electronic, choral, orchestra or folk)
      • An arts festival and or carnival (for example, a food, craft or other cultural event)
      • A street art event
      • A live dance event (for example, contemporary, world, street or urban)
      • A fashion show
      • A comedy event
      • An in-person esports contest or video game competition event
      • Some other cultural event in England
  • Library Attendance: Based on the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey (Table C3).
  • Museum Attendance: Based on the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey (Table E3).
  • Data sources for step 1

Step 2: We ranked local authority areas based on their number of constituent LSOAs that rank in the top quintile for both deprivation and community need, as defined by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and the Community Needs Index, respectively. More detail on this step can be found in the DCMS approach to place targeting.

Step 3: We created a combined rank for the attendance and double disadvantage metrics

  • Calculate a weighted average score for each local authority area to produce a singular ‘Average Rank’.
  • The weightings to be used are as follows:
    • Double Disadvantage - 50%
    • Engagement 50% (of which):
      • Arts - 16.67%
      • Libraries - 16.67%
      • Museums - 16.67%

Table 1: 20% with highest levels of need and lowest levels of cultural engagement

  • Ashfield
  • Barnsley
  • Bassetlaw
  • Birmingham
  • Blackburn with Darwen
  • Blackpool
  • Bolsover
  • Boston
  • Burnley
  • Cannock Chase
  • Chesterfield
  • County Durham
  • Cumberland
  • Darlington
  • Doncaster
  • East Lindsey
  • Erewash
  • Fenland
  • Great Yarmouth
  • Hartlepool
  • Havant
  • Hyndburn
  • Isle of Wight
  • King’s Lynn and West Norfolk
  • Kingston upon Hull, City of
  • Knowsley
  • Leicester
  • Lincoln
  • Middlesbrough
  • Newcastle upon Tyne
  • North East Lincolnshire
  • North Lincolnshire
  • Nottingham
  • Nuneaton and Bedworth
  • Pendle
  • Peterborough
  • Preston
  • Redcar and Cleveland
  • Redditch
  • Rochdale
  • Rossendale
  • Rotherham
  • Salford
  • Sandwell
  • Sheffield
  • St. Helens
  • Stockton-on-Tees
  • Stoke-on-Trent
  • Sunderland
  • Swindon
  • Tameside
  • Telford and Wrekin
  • Tendring
  • Torbay
  • Wakefield
  • Walsall
  • West Lindsey
  • Wigan
  • Wolverhampton
  • Wyre

Step 4: We excluded local authority areas that have received high per-capita levels of Arts Council funding in the recent past. We removed any local authority area identified in the top 20% (quintile) of all Arts Council’s per-capita funding since 2021, primarily local authorities that contain large Urban settlements. In these areas we believe that the more pressing policy challenge is not the level of funding, but how it is deployed and who it is reaching.

  • Per capita funding was defined as total Arts Council funding for organisations headquartered or individuals based within a particular local authority area, using funding data available on the Arts Council National Funding Dashboard.
    • It includes data that includes grants for 2021-22 to 2025-26 (including published grants up to 31 March 2026).
    • While we are aware of the risk of headquarters effects on this data, we feel it is the best available general measure for historic Arts Council funding in a particular area;
    • We considered there may be a rationale for excluding emergency funding (e.g. through Culture Recovery Fund). This option does not change the outcome of the analysis of the top quintile. Excluding this set of grants - while possible - is challenging to replicate using published data. Given no impact on the outcome, we have chosen not to exclude this set of funding, on the basis that our approach supports transparency and replicability. Similarly, we could have taken the decision to exclude other types of funding (such as capital funding), but have chosen not to in the interests of transparency and simplicity.
  • This figure is then divided by population for that area, using population data from the  2024 mid-year population estimates. 
  • This figure is then averaged to produce the mean per-capita figure for that local authority area.
  • Local authority areas are ranked by average per-capita funding, with the top quintile being selected for exclusion from the DCMS list.
  • Data sources for step 4:
  • The table below shows the excluded local authorities:

Table 2: Places excluded based on high levels of funding

  • Barnsley
  • Birmingham
  • Kingston upon Hull, City of
  • Leicester
  • Lincoln
  • Middlesbrough
  • Newcastle upon Tyne
  • Nottingham
  • Stockton-on-Tees

Step 5: We added Arts Council England Priority Places to the overall list.

  • Combine the overall list with the Arts Council’s existing Priority Places.
  • To note, this adds back in three local authorities that were excluded due to high levels of funding. These local authorities were Barnsley, Middlesbrough and Stockton-on-Tees.
  • This will create a combined list of 81 places, including 30 existing Arts Council Priority Places not identified through DCMS’s methodology (Table 3c).

Table 3a: Culture Priority Places: Additional Culture Priority Places (not previously Arts Council Priority Places)

  • Bassetlaw
  • Burnley
  • Cannock Chase
  • Doncaster
  • Erewash
  • Havant
  • Hyndburn
  • King’s Lynn and West Norfolk
  • North Lincolnshire
  • Pendle
  • Preston
  • Redditch
  • Rossendale
  • Salford
  • St. Helens
  • Sheffield
  • Sunderland
  • Tameside
  • Telford and Wrekin
  • Torbay
  • Wakefield
  • West Lindsey
  • Wyre

Table 3b: Culture Priority Places: Existing Arts Council Priority Places also identified by DCMS methodology

  • Ashfield
  • Blackburn with Darwen
  • Blackpool
  • Bolsover
  • Boston
  • Chesterfield
  • County Durham
  • Cumberland (NB only Copeland is previous ACE PP)
  • Darlington (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • East Lindsey
  • Fenland
  • Great Yarmouth
  • Hartlepool (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Isle of Wight
  • Knowsley
  • North East Lincolnshire
  • Nuneaton and Bedworth
  • Peterborough
  • Redcar and Cleveland (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Rochdale
  • Rotherham
  • Sandwell
  • Stoke-on-Trent
  • Swindon
  • Tendring
  • Walsall
  • Wigan
  • Wolverhampton

Table 3c: Culture Priority Places- existing Arts Council Priority Places not identified by DCMS methodology

  • Barking and Dagenham
  • Barnsley
  • Basildon
  • Brent
  • Crawley
  • Croydon
  • Dover
  • Dudley
  • Enfield
  • Gloucester
  • Gosport
  • Isles of Scilly
  • Kirklees
  • Luton
  • Mansfield
  • Medway
  • Middlesbrough (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • New Forest
  • Newham
  • North Devon
  • North East Derbyshire
  • North Somerset
  • North Yorkshire
  • Portsmouth
  • Rushmoor
  • Slough
  • Somerset
  • South Tyneside
  • Stockton-on-Tees (part of ACE PP ‘Tees Valley’)
  • Westmorland and Furness

  1. See for example: OCSI. 2020. Left-behind areas 2020 - Interim Set. ↩

  2. These 58 prioritised local authority areas are sometimes referred to by the Arts Council as ‘54 places’ due to the five local authority areas of the Tees Valley being counted as a single place. ↩

  3. Arts Council England Culture and Place Data Explorer - This interactive tool is designed to support ACE and its partners to understand the impact of ACE investment and development work in communities across the country. ↩

  4. One further, Cumberland, is only partly prioritised at present, due to boundary changes. Three further areas (Redcar & Cleveland, Darlington, and Hartlepool) are currently within the broader Priority Place of ‘Tees Valley’, but are also individually identified for prioritisation by the DCMS methodology. For the purposes of this list we are treating them as areas previously prioritised. ↩

  5. Alma Economics for DCMS: What works to increase equality of access to culture for lower socio-economic groups, 2023. ↩

  6. to note, the overall figure for physical engagement does not appear in the published data tables, therefore we use the estimate for the proportion of people who haven’t attended any event in the last 12 months. ↩

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