Chamber and committees

I will go straight to questions from committee members. If anyone would like to come in, please indicate as much.

Does anyone else want to come in on those points, or have they been covered by Fran and Chris? It seems that they have.

Mark, if you have covered your theme we will move to questions from Keith Brown.

I am looking to see who would like to go first.

David—can I force your hand?

Does anyone else want to add anything?

I do not see any hands desperately going up, so I think that that has exhausted our questions today.

Oh—I see Keith Brown.

Good morning, and a warm welcome to the 25th meeting in 2023 of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee.

Our first agenda item is evidence as part of our pre-budget scrutiny on funding for culture. We are delighted to be joined this morning by Duncan Dornan, who is an executive committee member at VOCAL Scotland; Pamela Tulloch, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Library and Information Council; India Divers, who is the policy and campaigns officer at the Museums Association; David Avery, who is a negotiation officer at Prospect; Kara Christine, who is a senior programme producer at Artlink; and Liam Sinclair, who is co-chair of the Federation of Scottish Theatre.

This is a round-table discussion and we want it be quite free-flowing and not too formal. If you want to come in, please indicate that to me or the clerk and we will try to ensure that everybody gets an opportunity to come in.

I will open with a question on our report from last year. The theme that came out of that was the perfect storm that is facing arts and culture. Thank you all for your written submissions, which have been very helpful. I will open with a question for all of you. What has changed in the operating environment over the past 12 months, what impact has the cost of living crisis and current financial situation had on your organisations and has that impacted on the services that you have been able to provide? We will hear from Duncan Dornan first, please.

We will leave it there. It has been a long but very helpful session, and I thank you all for your submissions and for coming along today. You will no doubt see the outcome in the coming weeks when we make our recommendations on the budget.

We now move into private session.

We shall move on.

India Divers mentioned that the speed of the cost of living crisis and inflation meant that funded projects were now no longer viable. Does that mean that they are being cancelled or scaled down, or is it a bit of both?

We have just published our culture report, which talked about what has been described as “donut funding”, which involves project funding but not core costs such as funding for staff—I think that you mentioned that you are fundraising for your staff. Would you like to see a more realistic funding model that reflected the support costs for projects rather than the projected outcome? I am seeing nods of the head. That is not good for the Official Report. Does anyone want to comment?