Chamber and committees

Thank you.

Robert Rae, my opening question was about getting a reflection on your experience of what works to support communities and what the barriers are.

I remember taking my son to a taiko drumming event in a community centre in a very challenging area of my constituency. The local kids were all drawn to the noise, but the community learning and development officer had the sense not to shoo them away and instead invited them in to see what was happening. It was an incredible experience, and it absolutely illustrates the point about why these things need to be right at the centre of communities.

Finally, I wonder whether you can reflect on the democratisation of people’s access and so on. We have talked a lot about social prescribing, but is there more that we can do to empower people? Should they have, say, a social prescription for culture, the right to a cultural voucher of some kind or something else that would empower everyone by giving them the choice of how they wanted to use that offer to do whatever cultural thing they wanted to do locally?

Thank you very much for all your contributions—I see that we have finished on time. This has been another interesting evidence session, and it has been good to hear from you all about the amazing work that you are doing in your communities.

Thank you for the singing, too. I know that we are not allowed props, so I do not know whether we have crossed any barriers, but it was wonderful to hear both of the witnesses sing.

On that note, I briefly suspend the meeting for five minutes, after which we will move on to our second panel.

We move to questions from the committee.

The motto of a local music charity, which has been going for more than 20 years now, has always been: “It’s youth work we’re doing—but with stealth. Nobody knows that.” It is all about getting people to go along and, for example, play guitar or make films, and its approach is that such things do not need to be about mental health. Instead, it should be about giving people the right and the opportunity to choose to be involved in something.

Ben Macpherson has the final question.

That has exhausted the committee’s questions. Thank you very much for a really informative session.

Does anyone else want to comment—fairly briefly, if you can?

Mark, do you want to come back in?

Do you have any thoughts, Morvern?

We will move to the next questions.