Jeremy Hunt has been confirmed as Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport.
The Conservative MP was previously the Tory Shadow Secretary for Culture.
He will inherit an enlarged brief that will include responsibility for the London Olympics in 2012 in addition to those held by his Labour predecessor Ben Bradshaw.
Colin Tweedy, Chief Executive of Arts & Business, said of the appointment:
“We welcome the appointment of Jeremy Hunt MP as the new Secretary of State for Culture and look forward to working alongside him and his colleagues to ensure the private sector can deliver the best for the cultural sector.
We know all elements of our mixed economy model are currently under strain. As a consequence, the challenge for arts organisations, our challenge, and that of this new Government will be to make every public pound go further. Arts & Business has produced a Private Sector Policy for the Arts to outline our recommendations for how best to reboot and rewire the mixed economy to those ends.
They reflect our knowledge and mature understanding of what works in terms of creating high levels of sustained private income and support, which is often interdependent with the effective leveraging of public funds.
A clear programme combining matching grant schemes, challenge funds, new tax incentives, city-based fundraising campaigns and a greater uptake on legacies for the arts will all drive new business engagement and inspire a new generation of cultural philanthropists.
There is collective agreement that the private sector will recover faster than the public purse from this recession. What we need to do is ensure that the private sector has more voice in how to make culture more enterprising and more opportunities to invest in culture in innovative ways. Our Private Sector Policy is a crucial step to make that happen.”