Chamber and committees

I come back to your comments about how the additional £6.6 million will be allocated, and the priorities and themes in relation to that spend. The impression that we got from Creative Scotland last week is that there is to be a discussion with Government about your priorities. In your initial comments, you said that it is up to Creative Scotland to come forward with its priorities, but you also said that you expect a focus on the recovery of the sector, the sustainability of the sector and innovation in the sector. Will you say a bit more about that? It is not a vast amount of money, but where do you expect the focus to be? We hear that all those things are needed, but the creative sector has the potential to address wider societal needs. How much of that can really be developed with £6.6 million?

Thanks for that detailed answer.

Other members might also be interested to come in on this issue, but I want to go back to your comments about the need to find additional sources of revenue. There is a question in my mind about whether there are pots of money that are not being utilised but which could be used to really drive innovation and sustain the cultural sector.

I will raise one source of money in relation to city deals. It is understood that a vast amount of money that has been allocated to the Stirling and Clackmannanshire city region deal remains unspent, and that the value of that money is going down every single year because it remains unspent. Are city deals in particular focused enough on delivering a cultural offering, or are there city deal or other sources of funding that could be utilised to really support and bootstrap the initiatives that you are looking to drive forward with the £6.6 million?

To put that into context, the unallocated spend in the Stirling and Clackmannanshire city region deal is more than £15 million. Therefore, the money in Stirling and Clackmannanshire alone dwarfs the revenue that you are putting into Creative Scotland. It feels as though there are potential sources of revenue out there, but maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part.

I have a final question about news coverage around the general election. There is obviously a very different political context in Scotland. We have two Government parties in the Scottish Parliament that do not stand candidates in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I am interested to know your emerging thoughts on how you will bring the general election alive in Scotland and reflect the particular nature of Scottish politics. The various political platforms here exist in a very different way from those across the rest of the UK.

Radio 6 Music’s “New Music Fix Live” series of events in Glasgow made for some great listening, blending in jazz and other genres for a different audience. All of that is available on Sounds, of course.

It comes back to the fundamental point that we were discussing in the committee the previous time, about bandwidth and the opportunity to be heard. Listening to “New Music Fix Live” was great, but that was just four days of content. Given where we are now, particularly with the removal of “Jazz Nights” and “Classics Unwrapped”, I am interested to know whether there is more or less airtime for new and emerging Scottish artists as a result of the changes that you have made. The “Scotland Young Jazz Musician” programme was fantastic, but it was only two hours. I am interested in the metric of how much space there is now for artists to get heard. Even though some of the content that I am hearing is very good, it is only little nuggets.

No.

Obviously, basic legal requirements are enforced by the commissioner. I get a steady stream of complaints about buses regularly failing to turn up, which, presumably, is something that the commissioner could enforce. However, now that we are in this space of how we improve bus services working in partnership and given the substantial amount of money that is going in, I am interested to hear more about how the Government can extend conditionality further and beyond just basic legal compliance with a timetable.

Yes—unless other witnesses wish to offer insights.

Going back to the deputy convener’s questions on the environmental court, the case for that and our lack of compliance with Aarhus, how do you see the debate moving forward? Lloyd, you mentioned, I think, that in the previous parliamentary session there was a round table on environmental governance that was chaired by Campbell Gemmell. It feels like we have been going around the issue for some time. If you see a way forward, what does it look like? There have been calls in evidence for a further governance review. I am interested in how that would be different from what we have seen coming through and what the Government has already conducted.

All done.

It has been an interesting evidence session. I was just reflecting on the number of constituents who write to me every week with concerns about the quality of services. They write not just about whether the services are running but about whether they are running on time or whether buses are breaking down.

I want to ask you about the conditionality applied to public sector funding. Jenny Gilruth, as a previous Minister for Transport, announced a review of bus sector funding, part of which was going to be a consideration of what conditionality could be applied. Obviously, we have the Traffic Commissioner for Scotland, who is able to hold some of the bus companies to account, but I am interested in hearing about the work that the Government has done to make the substantial investment in the bus sector every year conditional on some basic standards of service and improvements going forward.