The government has announced the launch of a new internship initiative to help graduates from deprived backgrounds gain experience in the arts. The Creative Bursaries Scheme plans to create at least 40 internships a year with arts organisations for those unable to pay for their own training or take on unpaid internships. Each graduate will be given a bursary at the rate of £15k per year.

Funding for the project, which begins in September this year, is being provided by The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England and The Jerwood Foundation will manage it. Gordon Brown says of the scheme: "It is a vital boost for some of our great future actors, artists and musicians who may otherwise have slipped through the net".

A report commissioned by Arts Council England has revealed that subsidised theatres are putting on three times as many new plays as they were a decade ago.

The report, designed to assess the impact of the council's 2003 funding boost for theatre, has discovered that that 47% of works staged in large subsidised theatres are new, a significant increase from a figure of 14% back in 2000. The British Theatre Consortium report concludes: "New plays no longer appear to be ghettoised in small spaces. New play productions are evenly divided between auditoria of under and over 200 seats. Over the period of our sample, nine out of ten tickets for new plays were sold for main stages".

BTC member and playwright David Edgar welcomed the news, telling The Stage: "That I think is good, because it demonstrates that playwrights are being employed in a variety of different ways and that playwrights are now much more a part of theatre-making than they were ten to 15 years ago". He went on, however  to criticise ACE’s removal of new writing from its funding priorities a couple of years ago. "One of the ironies is that the arts council has slightly turned its back on new writing and new writing is not a priority because it is more interested in experimental and innovative ways of theatre-making, including devising", he said. "Just when that is happening, their earlier policies and support for new writing has suddenly become successful".

Arts Council England has announced a £34,000 fund which will be put towards developing arts opportunities for older, and a number of  London organisations are to benefit from the cash. Greenwich Dance Agency has been given £5,000 towards its Enliven project, whilst South Asian Dance organisation Akademi will receive another £5,000 to enable its work in care homes in Ealing and Camden.

Other organisations whose projects will benefit from the fund include Battersea Arts Centre, Arts Depot, who are to work with the Alzheimer’s society and Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust on drama workshops for those living with dementia, and Westminster Arts, who will run a similar programme.

The chief executive of Arts Council England Alan Davey has cautioned future governments against cutting arts funding, not just because it would affect the quality of the UK's cultural life, but also because it would have economic repercussions.

Speaking at the Culture is Right conference in London, Davey told his audience that each £1 of public money invested in the arts generates £2 from elsewhere, and also creates jobs. The Stage quote him as saying: "I want to get away from any idea of the arts as a monolithic public service ripe to be cut and instead assert the truth: that the arts live in a complex, mixed economy, which could provide a model for how public investment could work elsewhere".

He continued: "The model is a model of the future, not of the past. It’s one that works with public money levering in private money, with the arms-length method of making decisions putting it outside the vagaries of short-term political whim. How we do this should be better understood, celebrated and strengthened by any government".

Responding, Tory arts chap Ed Vaizey offered reassurances that his party "have no hidden agenda to wean the arts off public subsidy, and we recognise that public subsidy plays a vital role in pump-priming arts organisations".

Boris Johnson has said that he will restart recruitment for the London Chair for Arts Council England.

The process was recently stalled when culture secretary Ben Bradshaw vetoed the appointment to the role of Veronica Wadley, former editor of the Evening Standard, said to be a close ally of the London mayor. Bradshaw said that Johnson's actions were "a clear breach of the Nolan principles" - which were set down to stop politicians from meddling with public appointments.

Johnson has now written to Bradshaw to accuse the culture secretary of blocking Wadley's appointment for his own, political reasons. The mayor wrote: "This was a bad decision and flies in the face of the mayor's government sanctioned responsibility to nominate the London chair at the arts council. Without a doubt Veronica Wadley was the best person for the job – her support for the arts and pivotal role at the helm of a major newspaper mean she is highly qualified to help steer the arts in London through these difficult times".

It would seem that Bradshaw is not the only person who was dissatisfied with the decision, however; ACE's Liz Forgan, a member of the shortlisting panel who called Wadley "underqualified" has suggested that Johnson consider the candidates she and her colleagues originally put forward, and not restart the process from scratch. "It is good that the Mayor has recognised his duty to nominate a candidate for the position of chair of Arts Council England, London as soon as possible", she says. "The published process states that the competition should be re-run only in exceptional circumstances, and so we feel that the mayor should first consider the three strong candidates previously put forward by the panel".