The collapse of the charity that ran Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture in 2021 has left a trail of financial devastation, a BBC investigation has revealed. Significant accounting errors and “incompetence” within the Coventry City of Culture Trust led to a £1 million budget shortfall, triggering a crisis that ultimately resulted in the trust’s demise.
Documents obtained through freedom of information requests show that the trust’s executive board was warned of “real risks” to the organisation’s financial situation, including the possibility of running out of cash, just weeks before it went into administration in 2023. The trust had borrowed £1 million from Coventry City Council to plug the gap, but this loan was never repaid, leaving the council and other creditors facing significant losses.
The trust’s former CEO, Martin Sutherland, has acknowledged the mistakes, saying he is “sorry that errors we made have contributed to these difficulties.” However, he argued that other factors, such as missed commercial sales targets and uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, also played a role in the trust’s downfall.
The Charity Commission has been investigating the trust’s collapse since 2023, but has not yet opened a statutory inquiry, which would grant it additional powers to request information and potentially disqualify trustees or senior charity managers. Calls are now growing for a more comprehensive investigation to establish where the accountability lies.
Councillor Gary Ridley, leader of Coventry’s Conservative group, has described the revelations as “truly shocking,” saying the saga “tells a tale of incompetence” and “chaos.”
The collapse of the trust has had a significant impact on Coventry’s cultural sector, with dozens of staff made redundant and a two-year programme to boost the city’s cultural scene scrapped. Some organisations, such as the Edinburgh-based events company that delivered the Assembly Festival Gardens, were left with substantial unpaid debts.
While an official evaluation found that Coventry’s year as City of Culture engaged nearly half of the city’s residents and brought millions of pounds into the local economy, the trust’s failure has left a lingering sense of disappointment and reputational damage. As Sarah Worth, the executive director of Highly Sprung, a local arts organisation, put it, the collapse “means that we’re kind of tarnished with a really difficult and challenging story to take forward.”