Chamber and committees

Returning to the issue of overhead recovery, you said in your letter to the committee that some of the overheads for the yard would be covered by “other business”. Will you describe what that other business is? Has that other business come in since nationalisation?

So you do not see any reputational damage.

The budget for your portfolio is minuscule compared with that for many other portfolios. It is several orders of magnitude smaller than that for health. That poses challenges, particularly when your portfolio includes responsibility for major events on an international stage involving big, multimillion pound budgets, as well as responsibility for culture, the budget for which is primarily about funding the incredible organisations that exist in our communities and all the benefits that they deliver.

It feels as though there is a tension there with regard to funding. What you have announced today suggests that there has been quite a major shift in thinking within the Government about how major national events should be funded. Could you explore that a little more? It feels as though that shift is partly to do with lessons that have been learned from hosting the UCI world cycling championships, which I agree were a fantastic success. Are there other factors to bear in mind in that context?

The nub of the concern from the creative sector relates to the demand on the multiyear fund that Creative Scotland has set up and the expectation that organisations that did not get approval for multiyear funding would be able to apply for a separate fund, which would come out of Creative Scotland’s reserves, to provide more single-year funding.

How does the current set of decisions impact on that? Will Creative Scotland still be able to fund those organisations that have not been successful in achieving multiyear funding and are still very much on the brink and in need of that year-on-year funding to survive into the next financial year?

I am aware of the background, and I think that many people who are watching this will have watched last week’s evidence session and they will be in the thick of it with regard to putting in applications. I come back to the question, which is: what changes now?

What do you see as the role of the UK Government in funding those major events? We have discussed previously that despite the UCI world cycling championships being a major success, there was really no funding from the UK Government for what was ostensibly a Great Britain event. Do you see a way of working with the UK Government that could bring in more partnership funding from that side for other events that are still to be bid for?

Hold on.

You piqued my interest, convener, by talking about the licensing of hunting and I would like to get NatureScot’s view on that. Do you think that there is any circumstance in which a mounted hunt could credibly claim to meet the criteria for the issuing of a licence?

That is useful to know.

Are no other changes planned on the back of ESS’s review?