Seòmar agus comataidhean

Forgive me for not having mentioned it, but there are cross-party groups in Parliament that do a lot of work in parallel with the formal subject committees. Unfortunately, I am not able to go to as many of those meetings as I might want to, but I would hugely welcome feedback from them. If you are learning important lessons and meeting important people who you feel we need to hear more from or understand better, please get in touch. We are keen to be as informed as we can be.

I am alive to the points that you are making. As, I think, committee members know, the challenges of Covid led to an unsurpassed level of dialogue between the Government, Creative Scotland and the creative sector, because we were dealing with an existential crisis across the entire sector. We were in the fortunate position of having funds to dispense in that emergency situation. The Government tried its best, as did Creative Scotland, to get funding to where it was needed through the different phases of the intense Covid period in order to deal with the specific challenges that Covid posed to the cultural sector. We were being very well advised as to what those challenges were.

My first observation is that having the funding to distribute undoubtedly made the situation a lot easier than it would have been had funding not been in place. Secondly, it is worth noting that when one is dispensing such a significant level of funds, there is always a risk that fraudulent applications for financial support could be made. We know that that happened with personal protective equipment and the like during the Covid period, but I am not aware of any significant parallel development in culture funding. In significant part, that is because of the experience of Creative Scotland as a funding organisation, for which it deserves recognition: we should not take that for granted.

The convener made the important point that we are talking about public money. People need to have confidence in the culture sector, the public agency that supports it, the Government and the Parliament, which oversees that funding and makes strategic decisions around it. We should never take that for granted. Creative Scotland deserves to be recognised for having managed the funding process.

I will move on to the substantive point about cultural organisations after the most extreme phase of Covid. I completely understand that it is a tremendous challenge that there is not now the amount of money going out the door to support organisations that there was during the height of the Covid period. People are trying to balance their books, recover from Covid and recover visitor numbers and the numbers of people who pay to come through their doors in theatres, cinemas or similar venues. I hear the warning that things are going to get more difficult, in many respects. This summer, festivals across Scotland have been very successful, in comparative terms. There is a feeling, however, that next year will be more difficult—not least because of inflation, among other reasons.

I will address the specific point: I will take it away and will be happy to write to the committee on how organisations are advised in relation to funds that they hold, and on how they are advised on funding decisions that might be made on the basis of their having £X in reserve meaning that funders are prepared to give only £Y in public funding. Organisations might have made difficult decisions about having reserve funding in place so that they can keep their heads above water, because they do not know what the situation will be like in three, six or 12 months. I am content to go away and look at the matter so that I can try to get the best guidance, because I want organisations to feel that they are being treated fairly.

However, again it behoves me to say that we are talking about dispensing taxpayers’ resource during a cost crisis. Therefore, decisions have to be made on the basis of who has funds—full stop. All I am trying to say is that it is not easy. I want decisions to be as sympathetic as they can be, but I also want people to be advised as best they can be advised. There is an additional dimension to that. I have had conversations with people in the culture sector who are looking at next year’s festivals or the following year’s tour, for example. They are having to make medium-term and longer-term financial plans, and it is extraordinarily difficult for them to work out how things will add up.

We will be as helpful as we can be. Unfortunately, I do not have the magic wand that can answer all the queries, but I want things to be fair and I want people to be well advised. I do not want people to feel that they are being penalised for running effective organisations or that they are hard done by compared with others.

Incidentally, I should say that, although we look closely at the public evidence sessions and the evidence that the committee receives, if you have information about circumstances that I and my officials might not know about—any information that might not have been said in public or that you have picked up during visits—please let us know. In that way, we can be as well informed as possible.

Of course.

If you ask a really difficult question, I will say that I have answered it already. [Laughter.]

I hope that all organisations, whether they be agencies or the cultural organisations whose funding flows from them, can have maximum clarity as quickly as possible for the obvious reasons that we have been talking about.

I agree 100 per cent that communities need to know what is happening with local buildings or cultural attractions for a number of reasons, including the fact that people want to access them and so want to understand when they are open.

Here is another thought: some places might want to support the maintenance, restoration or reopening of facilities. One might similarly say that there might be philanthropists or funding organisations that have a particular geographical interest or historical connection. One might have a name that connects one to a place or a building. We can think of people around the world who feel like that. North America is full of people with Scottish surnames, and they feel a genuine connection to a place because of their name. It has struck me for a while that helping people to make a connection with a place, a name, a building or a cultural site has potential as a funding stream.

I am keen to explore that, because if I meet people from the United States who feel that they come from a particular part of Scotland and they would want to make a contribution to that part of Scotland, it might be that there is potential to match people’s interest and support to address the challenge that we are talking about in the context of Historic Environment Scotland. I am interested in the committee’s thoughts. I am not fishing for reflections on that right now, but there is something in our being able to match up community interest in local buildings, historic sites and so on with the interests of others elsewhere. That might be a way to supplement the projects that are under way to protect our historic infrastructure. Anything that might secure additional funding streams or public support would be a good thing.

Was it something I said?

If Ms Baird wants to jump in, she is free to do that at any stage.

I have a couple of reflections on that. With regard to multiyear funding certainty, I have given evidence to the committee before that, in the Government, we appreciate the need for the maximum certainty about medium and longer-term budgetary projections, regardless of whether people get the happiest news. The need to have some sense of the planning horizon is absolutely understood. I hope that people will appreciate that the current economic situation, which is not of our making, is making our lives more difficult with regard to the ability to satisfy that perfectly reasonable demand. However, we still aim to give projects and organisations the maximum possible longer-term understanding of their financial outlook. That is point 1.

Point 2 is that there is another dimension to Mr Ruskell’s observation, which he did not mention but which is important to consider in this context: many projects are supported to start up, grow and find their feet, because they believe that, once they are up and running, they will be self-funding or significantly self-funding. There is also a tension in that context, because it is not always the case that they reach the position of being as self-funded or totally funded as they initially planned to be.

Therein lies a challenge for funding bodies, whether that is Creative Scotland or any other, which is wanting to make sure that one uses funds to let a thousand flowers bloom while not always being the ultimate paymaster for everything for ever. It takes the wisdom of Solomon to work out how one can always get that right.

As with our present budgetary challenge, organisations that are trying to set up and become as financially successful as they can be suddenly find being themselves buffeted by these kinds of challenges and others. We do not need to go into Covid as the most recent example of something that very few people saw coming as a challenge at the scale that it was.

I am just adding another dimension to Mr Ruskell’s point, and I agree with him that the intention is, for obvious reasons, to give people the maximum potential understanding of where funding support is and will be over a number of years, but the issue of sustainability of funding also has the added dimension that not all projects are supported with a view to being funded for ever—for example, if the funding is starting up, the project is time limited or the organisation is doing a particular job.

I understand that there are a load of organisations out there that are funded regularly, deserve to be funded regularly and are assessed as being good value for money and worthy of support. We need to do that as well as we can in constrained times. I will be absolutely frank with the committee: it is not easy for those organisations, and it is not easy for colleagues in the Government or agencies such as Creative Scotland and others to match the ambition of maintaining public support for cultural institutions, but we will have to try and do our best to get through the very bumpy period that we are entering. We are not even in the eye of the storm yet.

Is there anything from your side, Lisa?

The committee is seized of the subject—let us just leave it at that. I commend the committee’s interest, and I want to hear any suggestions and feedback that it has.

We did not talk about that before the evidence session; I feel as though you have been reading my mind on that very point.

Those of you who were at the culture summit will know, because I mentioned it, that we have an opportunity to take twinning a lot more seriously. I raised that point with UNESCO yesterday, because it seems to me that it is ideally placed to help to drive that, together with the Ukrainian authorities, which, of course, would have to be at the heart of making such an approach work.

For those of you who have not heard me make the point before, after the second world war, it was decided that, for a number of reasons, twinning arrangements would be a very useful way for countries to be able to help one another to rebuild, come together and emerge from conflict. If you look at the twinning arrangements that we have had in Scotland, which were largely with French and German towns and cities, that purpose was very clear. There was an exchange of people, especially with France and Germany, which was very important after the first and second world wars.

I think that there is an added dimension to that. UNESCO told me yesterday that, in Ukraine, 198 sites of particular importance—I think that I am right in saying that—have been totally or significantly destroyed. It is using satellite imagery to log the damage to cultural sites in real time. That is something new that it is doing—it has not done that in the past. It was not able to do it in Syria, for example, and although it was not able to do the preparatory work, it is now involved in the rebuilding of parts of Mosul.

UNESCO is very keen to do a lot of the preparatory work during the conflict so that when it ends—pray God it ends as soon as possible, with a victory for Ukraine and the restoration of peace and justice—cultural organisations such as UNESCO will be able to work in partnership with the likes of the Ukrainian culture ministry to find out exactly where one should intervene to help with rebuilding. High-profile commitments have already been made to rebuild the theatre in Mariupol, for example, but there are countless hamlets, villages and towns where the church or synagogue, or other sites of particular importance, have been destroyed.

To come back to my point about twinning, it is great that cities such as Edinburgh have twinned with Kyiv and that cities such as Glasgow have been looking at twinning arrangements with Ukraine, but would it not be all the more effective if towns, small towns and villages as well as cities here, but internationally too, twinned with other communities in Ukraine? That is the point that I was making about UNESCO: as a United Nations organisation with national delegations, it is in an ideal position. If it could push that sort of thing down through its organisation and encourage multiple twinning arrangements with small villages and towns that have lost their hospitals, their libraries and their public services as a way of rebuilding those communities and their cultural sites as a priority as they emerge from conflict—as soon as that might come—that would, I think, be the best way forward.

There might well be other ways of doing such work, but that solution strikes me as a particularly attractive one. I have raised it at the Edinburgh international culture summit and with colleagues in different political groups in the European Parliament in an effort to get them to adopt it and push it down through the system, and I have talked about it with the British ambassador to UNESCO in order to get her to encourage the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in England to think about it, too. If there is any best practice that we can establish here, let us do it. I know from speaking to the Ukrainian consul general in Edinburgh about it that the Ukrainians are extremely keen on the idea. Why not have a look at what we can do and encourage others to do likewise?