Of all the 200-odd organisations about to have their Arts Council grants cut, the most astonishing victim is Birmingham Opera Company. Year after year I travel to Brum in the hope of being provoked, disturbed, exhilarated and refreshed by Graham Vick’s company and its unique, community-based approach to opera. I am never disappointed. And most of my colleagues feel the same way. Whether he is staging Fidelio in a big tent outside Aston Villa Football Club, Don Giovanni in a Victorian banking-hall (we sat on coffins supplied by a local undertaker), or Candidein a disused car factory, Vick has a happy knack of snatching triumph from the jaws of incongruity. Year after year, BOC wins rave reviews.

But titillating critics isn’t its prime point. Far more important is Vick’s policy of involving local amateurs – hundreds of them – alongside the professionals. This is truly opera “for the people, by the people”. Given that Vick also makes a point of casting his shows to reflect Birmingham’s ethnic diversity, it would be hard to think of a better exemplar of the Government’s policy of making the arts accessible to everyone.

Yet just before Christmas the Arts Council told BOC that its £324,000 grant would be withdrawn. The company also gets a £197,000 grant from Birmingham City Council, but it can’t survive on that alone. The most radical and challenging voice on the UK opera scene is about to be silenced by bureaucratic decree. Which, incidentally, will save a sum equivalent to just 2 per cent of the Arts Council subsidy lavished on the underperforming English National Opera.

Why? Well, as anyone who has dealt with the Arts Council will expect, the reasons have nothing to do with art or excellence. The Arts Council is miffed that BOC hasn’t established a “third income stream”. In other words, it doesn’t get much private funding, so relies too heavily on public subsidy.

That’s firstly untrue (its recent Traviata was backed by £50,000 from the Moores Foundation); secondly based on too narrow a definition of private support (many local companies support it “in kind” by donating premises or goods – such as those coffins in Giovanni); and thirdly misses the point. Of course swanky sponsors aren’t going to be attracted to opera presented on gritty industrial estates: where would they ply their clients with champers and canapés? But does this mean that opera must always be staged in venues where the middle-classes feel comfortable? Is that the view of James Purnell, the new Culture Secretary?

The underlying truth seems to be that Vick is a maverick, and the company he created and to which he lovingly returns (between directing engagements with every great opera company in the world) is created in his image - ie, structurally unconventional. Far too much so, clearly, for the pen-pushers at the Arts Council, who complain about BOC’s “high-risk strategy” as if risk is a bad thing in the arts.

Tidy-minded and small-minded, the bureaucrats seem determined to smother visionaries who don’t conform to their nitpicking systems. At their meeting this week to ratify their decisions, they should swallow their pride and reverse their decision.