Chamber and committees

I am pleased, too.

I go back to my point on accountability and openness to the public. You have consulted on your initial plan and we have heard some of the feedback from that. Can you say a little more about how you are going to maintain that openness and accountability in the future?

We could see a bonfire of European Union environment law in the months and years ahead due to the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which is currently working its way through Westminster. In your respective roles in your organisations, what work are you doing to consider what the impacts of the bill might be, which laws should be saved and which could be legitimately replaced?

Have you set up a special unit to look at the issue? What are the resourcing implications? There are 570 environmental laws that might be covered by the bill.

Is SEPA looking at any areas of concern at the moment?

Obviously, as an organisation, you have a range of different approaches to your work, and you spoke about working more at the informal resolution end of things by trying to resolve issues first. However, you also have the ability to mount a judicial review—or to attempt to—in some cases, so how do you maintain flexibility in staff and budget? An informal resolution would presumably require a lot less staff resource and a lower budget than mounting what could be a lengthy judicial review, and it is obviously difficult to predict when you might need to use each of those tools.

What are your general thoughts about budgeting, and how did you come to make the request that you made to the Scottish Government? Also, how does your organisation maintain the flexibility and teeth that are required to take whatever action you need to take as circumstances dictate?

Yes—the relationship between the Parliament and ESS is very important.

I want to ask about the memorandum of understanding that you have with your counterparts in other parts of the UK and how developed that is at present.

How would Creative Scotland seek to work with the levy?

We have had quite a lot of evidence from cultural organisations about the potential use of the transient visitor levy. You all present quite a stark picture, with the possibility of a quarter of cultural organisations—many of which are anchor institutions in communities—going under. What are your thoughts about the transient visitor levy? Is that being built into council planning and income projections? Is there an appetite across all Scottish councils to introduce that, or is it just for the Edinburghs?

Should there be an expectation that, if councils are raising funds in that way, a proportion of them should go towards supporting cultural institutions, or should the use of such funds be purely at the discretion of councils?

I was reflecting on your points about the short-life working group and the mainstreaming of cultural work across other colleagues’ departments. How transparent will that be in the forthcoming budget? Will we be able to look at the health or justice budget, say, and see a thread of cultural and wellbeing work with numbers attached to it, ideally, that might or might not add up to 1 per cent, but which, regardless of that, will actually show what impact that work will have in the forthcoming year and where the spend will work in a cross-departmental way? Is it too early to have that kind of transparency in the budget?