Chamber and committees

It would be good to get that list. I think that about 20 per cent of our historic buildings or sites are not able to open at the moment, so it would be useful to get the scale of the issue. It is a fundamental issue, as it is not just one or two areas that are affected. Dealing with the issue is significant in terms of rebuilding tourism and restoring our culture.

I recently asked about employment issues in Historic Environment Scotland, and it came out that there was a real issue in terms of gender and pay. What are you doing to improve opportunities in the sector, particularly for women? I think that women were doing okay in band C and one right at the top but, in all the other bands, women were doing less well in terms of employment opportunities.

I echo that point. I was looking at the annex to Historic Environment Scotland’s written briefing, which refers to key performance indicators. Most of the KPIs have a green status; some are amber. However, the rating for improving or maintaining the state of Scotland’s historic sites and places is red. That really stands out. That issue has been quite a big part of our discussion today.

We used to talk about the need to spend to save as a way of helping future investment, but you are talking about the need to spend to save as a way of avoiding losing buildings. It would be very interesting to get your take on that. The evidence that you gave us is that the historic environment is not just good for who we are. The sector also brings £4.4 billion into the Scottish economy. For example, half our international tourists come to see heritage and 60 per cent of the heritage visits are to Historic Environment Scotland sites.

Will you give us a sense of what you need to do to deliver on that? You have gone through pandemic-related income reduction. You talked a bit earlier about flexibility and the levers that you need. Will you say a bit about public sector funding and then a bit about the flexibility that you want?

To be clear, it is not an either/or: you need continued capital investment in buildings and a bit of flexibility. The short-termism of funding is coming across really strongly, given the impact that that has on the whole of our heritage. I will come on to museums and galleries in a second.

Cabinet secretary, you refer to changes in society’s attitude, which you also referenced in your ministerial statement. How much work have you done on that issue? You just flagged that other countries delayed their censuses, but what are the comparative differences with the 2021 census in the rest of the UK in terms of low-turnout areas, and what lessons do you draw from those differences? What will the issues be going forward, because we have not had the same level of lower turnout rates historically?

It has been good to hear your powerful evidence today in addition to the submissions that we have had from lots of organisations. I cannot think of a committee meeting when we have had phrases such as “a perfect storm”, “dire financial situation” and “crisis” being mentioned by so many witnesses, not just here but in written evidence. Therefore, I am thinking about how we fix it and what evidence we need to take back to the Parliament. Quite a lot of comments have been made about the percent for art scheme and the transient visitor levy as potentially important new additional moneys. However, they tend not to be something that you could guarantee everywhere at the same time. Therefore, they might be important, but what about the overall status of culture?

In their joint submission to the committee, COSLA and the local government directors of finance said that funding in the collective cultural area in local authorities had been cut by nearly a quarter in the eight years pre Covid. Therefore, there is an issue with a reduction in funding at the local level. The committee also heard the comments about the challenge of flat funding at a time when all your costs are rocketing. Do you have thoughts on the equivalence of culture spending? It is not statutory, so should the committee recommend something on the status of funding for culture, given the complexity on the ground and all the evidence that we have seen in our work on social prescribing about the wider benefits of culture? There are benefits for health, wellbeing and the economy. How do we capture that in order to say that culture is important and needs proper funding? Does anyone have thoughts on how we ensure that it is ranked properly?

I thank everyone for their answers. That last discussion really reinforces the need to think about how we get the cross-government working that Kirsty Cumming referred to very powerfully. We have had discussions about health, wellbeing and culture and the potential benefits. With the budget coming up this year, we need to think about how we make that more explicit. Witnesses have given the committee powerful information about how to make processes and KPIs more straightforward, given the differences between very big organisations and smaller, lighter-foot, community-based organisations.

A couple of witnesses have mentioned staff changes over Covid, which is also mentioned in the submissions. We took evidence about that when we talked to venues about Covid earlier in the year and I think that it is in Prospect’s evidence. The loss of young people from the sector because they do not see it as providing a long-term career seems significant. Is the sector doing work to try to retain people and their skills and to make it a continuing career option for young people?

Thank you for those responses. It is clear that the issue has arisen in much lower-income areas. On communications with those communities, I asked about lessons from across the UK on numbers and outputs. People were surprised by the lower response rates. What lessons about communications for the future does the cabinet secretary draw from the census? Do we need education and stronger communications before the census, so that people are aware of it and prioritise it, given that important decisions are subsequently made on the basis of returns?

From looking at previous census data, do you have a sense of the differences between the 2022 census and the previous census in 2011?

That is great. Will the administrative data be published separately, or is that integrated into the final census results, so that it is transparent?

Thank you, Professor Diamond, for the briefing that you sent us, which has been useful. I have follow-up questions about the post-census work to which you refer in the briefing.

How do you fill the gaps that come from the higher non-response rate than we had in 2011? How do you avoid errors in the assumptions that are made in the final stage—pillar 3, which you talk about—in order to add value to the census returns that we already have? How do you ensure that the information that you add to the census will give confidence to people who use it—particularly in the lower response rate areas, to which you refer? How do you make that calculation about the geography of those areas and the different groups of people who have not filled in the census? How do you avoid errors there? What assumptions are made and how do you make sure that there is no bias in those assumptions? You talked about that being useful in relation to what groups might have been excluded.

Professor Martin, you talked about the difficulty of access to buildings. There are also buildings that are easy to access but produce incredibly low results. What is your perspective on how to get that right for the people who will rely on the data in the census?

Professor Martin, do you want to kick off, because you mentioned the issue of access? I live in a city that has loads of tenement flats, so there are always access issues. In the big place that I visited with the enumerators, what struck me was not the access but the massively low turnout; it was less than 50 per cent, and that was in the boost period after the census had officially finished.