PCI researchers co-author landmark ACH Taxonomies Report

Arts, Culture, and Heritage have been fundamentally redefined for UK government purposes following the publication

of the ACH Taxonomies Report co-authored by researchers from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries.

The collection of 16 reports, entitled Developing Taxonomies for Arts, Culture and Heritage: The ACH Taxonomies Project, is the outcome of a three-year project funded by the AHRC and the Department of Media, Culture, and Sport. It is the first of seven strands of research commissioned for DCMS's Culture and Heritage Capitals project. 

The research consortium, which included School of Performance and Cultural Industries Co-Investigator Dr Hughie Brown and Research Fellows Dr Lizzie Bennett and Dr Nina White, was tasked with creating a taxonomy of ACH capitals for the purposes of adding a capital account to HM Treasury’s Green Book and to support Social Cost-Benefit Analysis within ACH organisations. The aim was to develop a formal approach to measuring the full costs and benefits of culture and heritage to society in a consistent way, including an appraisal of “social value”: all significant costs and benefits that affect the welfare of the population.

This work was commissioned because “Traditional metrics capture only a fraction of culture’s true contribution. The most profound impacts on health, community, and economy remain largely unmeasured and, therefore, undervalued or not valued at all”, and a new approach was needed to replace the dominant models that evaluated ACH only in quantifiable terms.

Dr Hughie Brown said the report represented a seismic shift in evaluations of the ACH sector for the purposes of UK government policy. “When we asked the sector what is valuable in ACH, our research participants told us that they consider people their most valuable asset,” he said. “So for the first time, we were able to include human capital alongside financials and attendance figures in HM Treasury’s appraisals. People’s knowledge, their relationships, and their skills. It’s all in there now and we have shown a clear process by which ACH capitals produce wellbeing outcomes.”

Among the many engagement activities involved in the research and sharing the findings with the ACH sector, Principal investigator Adala Leeson and Research Fellow Dr Lizzie Bennett appeared on the Arts & Culture podcast. In it, Adala spoke about need for high-level arts, culture and heritage policy organisations to effectively communicate value in a way economists understand, while Lizzie highlighted the ways the new taxonomy allows cultural organisations to get better at assessing and expressing the full value of what they provide to their communities, especially within the contexts of climate change and AI.

Speaking at the report’s launch, DCMS Head Economist for Arts, Heritage and Tourism Harman Sagger said the project was already having a profound impact on the whole sector. “CHC is creating  transformational change to assessing value for money, which is a fundamental part of the decision-making process in public policy,” he said. “It helps decision-makers to understand the potential effects, trade-offs and overall impact of options.”

Mr Sagger said this report was just the start of ongoing work to transform evaluations of ACH in organisations large and small across the sector. The next step was to use this report as the foundation of specific guidance for HM Treasury. “Our aim is to have our first draft of the supplementary guidance ready towards the end of next year,” he said.

People who want to know more about the CHC programme should attend DCMS’s Culture and Heritage Capital: putting theory into practice online sessions on 3-5 November.

Photograph of the report authors' panel discussion at the Launch of the ACH Taxonomies Report at Cannon House, London, on 28 September 2026. From left to right are Adala Leeson, Dr Lizzie Bennett, Donovan Rypkema, Professor Patrizia Riganti, Dr Hughie Brown, Kate Clark.