Chamber and committees

Thank you convener. Cabinet secretary, you mentioned meetings with the Music Venue Trust. My question is about the longer term rather than the coming financial year. One aspect of reviewing the creative landscape is about diversifying funding sources, so I think that there is some longer-term relevance to my question, and I hope that I can get a yes or no answer. When I raised the idea of a stadium levy, which the Music Venue Trust is arguing could help to fund many independent cultural venues, your answer was mostly focused on whether it is a devolved or reserved matter and whether it could happen in Scotland or would need to be UK-wide. Does the Scottish Government wants to see a stadium levy happen, and does it want it to be used for that purpose?

Good morning. I find a great deal that you have said interesting, especially on some of the cross-portfolio stuff.

I will come on to what Caroline Sewell said about where we raise the money from and finding more creative ways of doing that, but first can I be a bit unfair? You have made a very strong case that the scale of investment needs to go up and is a high priority, and that the stability and certainty that have been lacking are a high priority.

One of the factors that have been part of Scottish Government budgets pretty much since austerity began is that there is a tension between those things. The more money you put into a particular budget, the more risk you create that, halfway through the financial year, you will have to hit the spending controls. If that happens, legally or contractually committed stuff will be protected, whereas a sector that does not have that protection is immediately in the firing line and you are back into instability.

You should not have to pick one or the other—the scale or the stability. Everybody on the committee and probably everybody in the Government wants to give you both. However, can you give us more of a steer on where the priority lies between the two? There have been parts of this conversation where the priority was clearly scale and quantum, and parts where it was clearly stability. I know that that sounds unfair to ask.

My other question leads on from the points that Caroline Sewell mentioned earlier about where we get the money from. I will try to join the dots between that and the interdisciplinary, multi-portfolio—holistic, if you like—approach. That sense of joining the dots between different public revenue streams and the public objectives that we are trying to achieve is only one part of the issue.

It is not all public funding, it is also charitable funding, which has taken a serious hit in recent years. It is about the amount of money that individuals spend in the economy when they choose to go out, whether it is money for a ticket to a cultural event or money that they spend behind the bar at the same venue; it is about the commercial operation of some of those venues, whether they are charitable or purely businesses that are looking to get by; it is about local authorities, too, as two or three people have mentioned.

What scope is there for more innovation in relation to where we raise the revenue from? We have seen the tourism levy, which has the potential to fund culture, among other work. Arguments are now being made about a stadium levy, so that highly profitable cultural events do something to fund independent venues. There is the chance to give local authorities more powers to raise revenue at a local level, too, rather than just relying on national funding. How much scope do you see for innovation and change in the way that we raise the money, rather than just focusing on the delivery model for how it gets spent, given the benefits that that could create for the wider cultural economy, rather than just the stuff that the public sector funds?

Good morning. You have acknowledged that you do not yet have a great deal of information about what the review will consist of or the timescale for it. You have used the phrase “in due course”, which is the same one that the cabinet secretary used in his letter. We can only assume that that means that the Government has not decided yet, either. In the next few weeks, we will be looking at the budget for the coming financial year. I acknowledge that you cannot say what the outcome of the review or the process for it will be, but those decisions will have an impact on the ability of Creative Scotland and the wider sector to deliver in the short term on some of the issues that witnesses have raised with us.

I want to offer you the chance to reflect on what we have heard. I do not know whether you were listening to our earlier session, but you might be aware of some of the issues that came up last week, and similar themes have been discussed today. There is a tension between the scale of funding and the certainty of funding. There is a desire to avoid unexpected bumps in the road as a result of a lack of certainty in the middle of the financial year. There are issues relating to how public funding interacts with charitable funding and commercial funding and to whether revenue that is available nationally and locally, as well as in independent venues, can deliver a fair work agenda.

As well as the challenges, there are a great many opportunities. There are opportunities to invest in net zero, which could reduce venues’ operating costs, and there is the opportunity for the culture sector to tell that story, which is what we need, because there is interaction in that regard when societal change is coming.

Could you reflect on the opportunities that exist—under the current funding model or in the longer term, if changes are made—to respond in the coming financial year to the issues that witnesses have raised with us, given that we will be looking at the budget in a few weeks?

An amount of money will be allocated in the coming budget, but you are also looking for a plan for the five years ahead. You want to have a sense of what the longer-term plan is for the course of increased funding. Is that right?

Rather than going round the table again, I will direct this question, which is about broadening or diversifying local sources of funding, to Susan Deighan, who has spoken the most about the local level. The Parliament has legislated to give local authorities the power to generate revenue through the introduction of a visitor levy—the City of Edinburgh Council has been the first mover on that, but I hope that it will not be the last. That might be particularly relevant for parts of the culture sector that do not have core funding. Some music venues are making the case for something similar through a stadium levy. How much further could we go? Are there opportunities not only to create a different way of using central Government funding but to introduce more local powers, so that revenue can be generated and put to use according to local priorities?

Good morning, everyone. I will come on to some of the longer-term issues that have been raised in the discussion so far, but first I will focus on the coming financial year, because we are looking forward to the Scottish Government producing a budget for 2025-26, in the context of the commitment to increase funding so that it is at least £100 million more a year by 2028-29.

Obviously, we do not want to have to wait until 2028-29 for that extra funding to come along, but we would not expect all of that £100 million more a year to come right at the start. When we see the budget, what should we be looking for as being a credible step in that direction, in terms of either consistency or scale of funding? You have all mentioned the precarity and the different sources of funding—the Scottish Government’s funding is only one stream; there is your own income generation, other institutions and local government, as Susan Deighan was saying very clearly. However, in terms of the specific £100 million commitment, what is a credible path towards achieving that by 2028-29? What should we be looking for in the budget when we see it?

I want to build on that. The culture sector is very diverse. You all represent fairly substantial institutions and organisations within the culture landscape. Does the Scottish Government engage with you directly? Do you have access to the thinking that is being done within Government about what the increased funding that has been committed to will look like? It seems to me that there is a worry about whether it will end up being spent on culture activity or on the other costs that culture organisations have. A few minutes ago, someone—it might have been Anne Lyden—mentioned net zero. Whatever proportion of the £100 million goes to museums and galleries could very easily be swallowed up by decarbonising your buildings. To what extent do you have a sense that the Government is thinking about how that funding should represent an addition to your culture activity, rather than be used for other costs?

I am saying that only because all local taxation is devolved and we do not have that constraint on national tax.

Good morning. A few of you have talked about this already, but it seems to me that we are using the term “commissioner” to mean very different things. There are those that carry out significant functions on an on-going basis; it is clear that the Scottish Information Commissioner, for example, needs to be a public body with serious resources, and most people would think it inappropriate for that to be part of Government. In other areas, however, what a commissioner does might be a piece of policy work that would happen within Government anyway, and it is all about carrying that out separately, perhaps beyond the Scottish Government, and bringing in the wider public sector.

As Jackson Carlaw has described on a couple of occasions, there is the slightly more amorphous space of advocacy, in which a call for a commissioner lands in much the same way as calls for other kinds of interventions to elevate the status of an issue. That seems an entirely legitimate thing for people to advocate for; indeed, it is consistent with the notion that we had 25 years ago that this would be a Parliament that shares power with the people, whether through citizens assemblies, which have been tried a few times, or the older idea of a civic forum, which was not brilliant but was abolished instead of being improved. There are various ways for that sort of thing to happen, and the creation of commissioners is a legitimate way of filling that space.

However, if the worry is that commissioners are proliferating and costing too much, I wonder whether, instead of closing them down, we should give them their space, but in a lighter-touch way. It would be like the difference between, say, an ambassador and an honorary consul. At the moment, the corporate body gives committees resources to appoint committee advisers on particular issues. Is there not space for something with a bit more status?

Such a person could be the Parliament’s adviser on a particular issue, who could perform some of the advocacy role and help to bring in marginalised voices, without the need for a public body in its own right. They would undertake that role and have a degree of status with Parliament directly. That would avoid the need to create a big range of new public bodies that need constant resourcing. The corporate body might even decide to cap the amount of money that was provided in each session of Parliament for appointing such people, and we could start each new session with a clean slate. Would that be one way of giving legitimate space to the very reasonable argument for a connection with civic society and a role for advocacy, but without all the baggage?