Seòmar agus comataidhean

Yes, yes and yes. It is entirely reasonable to ask why there were varying rates of return between Scotland and the rest of the UK; it is a perfectly reasonable question to try to get to the bottom of. However, we should also be comparing our experience with experience elsewhere, especially in the rest of the industrialised world and especially through sociodemographic comparisons, to see where there are similarities and differences.

We are not yet at the end of the process of understanding the differences, but it is unavoidable to conclude that people being in their houses during the pandemic was a significant contributory factor in the ability to reach people—especially those from more challenged sociodemographic backgrounds.

I am not sure whether Mr Cameron was one of the MSPs who went out and saw the census collection. He is indicating that he was not able to see it. MSPs saw the efforts that went into knocking on doors again and again to try to reach people. If people are not in, which was happening a lot, it is difficult to get them to take part in the process. This is an unscientific conclusion, but I draw it as a non-statistician, and not as a census professional, but one might conclude that there is definitely something in that. However, that does not make me revisit the question whether the timing and the decision in Scotland were correct or not. I think that the decision that was taken in Scotland—as it was in the majority of countries—to not go out and send thousands of people into communities to knock on doors and have face-to-face conversations with people at a time when we were telling them not to do that, was the right response.

To answer Mr Cameron’s question whether we should be trying to learn every lesson from the experience in Scotland, in the rest of the UK and in the rest of the world, especially in countries with which we can compare ourselves best, I say that we absolutely should do that. The reason why is that I think that we are dealing with a societal trend; I do not think that we are dealing with a specific moment in time. If it was about a specific moment in time, it might have been in countries where a census was conducted during a lockdown. The rest of us are dealing with an on-going trend, and we are going to have to work out how to get information from people, in this context as in many other areas, when they do not want to provide it, do not trust the process, do not understand it or do not have enough time, as people said were their reasons for not taking part.

I am in favour of reflecting on everything. However, one person’s sensitive question is another person’s less than sensitive one. Therefore point 1 is: what is a sensitive question? For point 2, I go back to the statistical response that we received when we asked people what their reasons were for not taking part in the census. I do not want to repeat myself at length, but I note that concerns about certain types of questions being a main contributory factor in people taking part or not came in at less than 5 per cent. Does that mean that one should not think about that? No—of course one should. Frankly, we need to think about everything.

Because of the very nature of what a census is supposed to provide—so that we can understand society in the 21st century—we ask a wide range of questions to understand the kind of country that we are in. I will leave it to the statisticians to go through them. The census is a million miles away from where it was 20 or 100 years ago, because we require much more information if we are, among other things, to provide the public services that we wish to provide in a way that reflects our society. That is why we have to ask the broadest range of questions.

To return to the central question of whether we should be prepared to think about all kinds of questions, my answer is that we absolutely should.

There is the view through the other end of the telescope, which is of cultural organisations and institutions coming forward and saying that they have something to offer in this space. That can and, I hope, will come out of the exercise. We are having to rethink how we can deliver priorities across Government, which will be done by working in partnership with organisations. Sarah Boyack is absolutely right to highlight how important local government is in that, but it is also about what cultural organisations do.

I go back to my example of the meeting at National Museums Scotland yesterday and asking its trustees what they are thinking about. Our museums—they are not all in Edinburgh; they are in various parts of the country—lend themselves very well to providing services that social prescribing can offer. There are other institutions across Scotland that can do it, as well. That means that institutions will have to think about how they can make services accessible and understandable to practitioners who would prescribe them. Committee members will remember my evidence session with Humza Yousaf, at which we began to explore what we will need to do next to ensure that people who are likely to want to use social prescribing know what facilities are available to them.

That is why we have exercises such as the review. It is not an unforeseen consequence—it is actually at the heart of the matter and makes everybody ask where we need to be more innovative. It is not necessarily about cash or constraints; it is about asking what we can do differently to ensure that we use the resources of our museums, galleries and so on to fulfil that purpose.

We are working together on the matter. I am happy to give Sarah Boyack comfort on that; officials in the culture directorate and others are discussing how to take all this forward.

I took the opportunity to highlight something that should not be lost in all this: there are actors other than the Government, so we need to make sure that we involve all of them, and we need to do that at pace.

Of course, Mr Cameron left out the other option: that the UK Government respects the result of the Scottish Parliament election and the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, acts in exactly the same way that his predecessor, David Cameron, did. As the Mr Cameron who is on this committee knows, Scottish politics is full of UK Governments saying no, no, no, yes. I invite him to work with me to persuade the UK Government to live up to its democratic undertakings. After all, the UK Government is particularly keen on going around the world saying that the UK is a democratic country that upholds the highest standards of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It would be really nice if it did that in this case as well.

My colleague Neil Gray has been dealing with that matter, and internal communication is circulating on that. It would probably make more sense for me to write to the committee, because I am sure that Mr Golden is not the only member of the committee to want to understand the background to all that.

However, I make the general point that, over the coming years, funding constraints will impact organisations that do good work. Would I wish it to be so? No; I would far rather that we did not have the constrained circumstances that we have. I underline this point as we come towards the end of the evidence session, because it is important: we as the Government have to live within our means, because this Government does not have the normal levers at its disposal that other Governments do, such as the ability to borrow. Would I wish for us to be able to maintain our spending commitments as had been envisaged in less constrained times? Absolutely. Will issues come along where people, quite rightly, want to know whether the appropriate decision is being made? Yes; that is a perfectly legitimate approach to take, but I acknowledge the fact that difficult decisions will have to be made.

One of the challenges, which are also opportunities, on which we will have to be as good as we can be in Government is, if there is a traditional funding line that has supported a good organisation—Maurice Golden has highlighted one—how we ensure that there are other, parallel funding streams that might be able to bridge the gap. I am not necessarily saying that that is the case in the instance to which Maurice Golden referred, but we need to ensure that we get maximum value out of the resources that we have in order to maintain and support the organisations that are operating. However, I commit to writing back to the convener on the specific case so that Maurice Golden and colleagues can have better insight into it.

That relates to the questions on Historic Environment Scotland that Sarah Boyack asked. It is much easier to retrofit a relatively recent building to reduce its carbon emissions. It is more and more difficult to do that the older a building gets. There is a sliding scale of challenge in that.

On whether different allowances should be given for that reality, I would want to be better advised about how we are doing that in the first place. I observe that—I had this conversation yesterday—many organisations that have begun to go down the path of making the changes that we will all have to make have started with the lowest-hanging fruit. There is a general understanding that the closer we get to the more testing targets that we have, the more difficult will be the decisions that we have to make as we go along.

That fits in part with the appeal that Kate Forbes made for us to try to protect a space to have a mature debate about how we do that. If all we do is retreat into our ideological trenches and not allow ourselves to think in new ways in all directions, we will probably not be able to answer some of those really big questions.

I am not sure that I have to hand the answer for the question that Maurice Golden asked but I acknowledge that some buildings, specifically older buildings, will be next to impossible to upgrade to the latest environmental standards whereas most that are being, or have recently been, built are at it. I am content to consider how one accounts for that difference.

Getting through the Covid period has been an immense challenge not only for that part of the cultural world but across the whole cultural world. It was, I think, the second-worst impacted part of the Scottish economy. For people working in the cultural and arts community, it was an extremely testing time and I am proud of the level of resource that the Scottish Government made available to individuals and cultural organisations to ensure that they could get through it.

Now, we are faced with the resources within which we will have to live in the years to come and we will have to work very closely with all parts of the cultural community to ensure that we are able to protect and foster it as best we can, given those constraints. Whether one is in a smaller, organic, community-based cultural organisation or involved in a very large project that requires a lot of funding, everybody will be looking at the bottom line and will try to work out how they can manage, given the resource constraints that exist. We will all have to be innovative within the means that are at our disposal to ensure that we are able to deliver the level of cultural provision that we all want to see.

We are going to have a referendum, are we not?

I am not saying that there is no reason to worry. I care passionately about our heritage—as do all the members of the committee, I suspect. Our built heritage, much of which is very old, is facing environmental degradation. That leads to instability and dangers, which lead to the requirement to maintain and support castles and other old buildings and all the rest of Scotland’s built heritage. That was going to be a challenge with or without a resource spending review, and would have been a challenge if we were sitting here discussing the budget line, which we are not.

I acknowledge that there is a major challenge for Historic Environment Scotland in general, because of the nature of the estate and the nature of the decline in the built infrastructure, so we will have to work very closely together to work out how we can maximise the resources that HES has, from us and from elsewhere, to make sure that we can protect our historic sites around the country. To stress a point that Kate Forbes and I have made already, I say that those issues are at the heart of discussions with cultural organisations, trade unions, trustees and so on. Those conversations are happening because of information that we now have from the resource spending review.

It behoves all of us to be as imaginative as possible in working out what we can do to protect the built heritage in Scotland, with the resources that we have in constrained circumstances. I am the first to acknowledge that it will not be a simple task; it will not be easy not just in a financial sense, but in relation to all other considerations, given the size of the estate for which HES is responsible. We could probably spend the whole evidence session just on HES and the nature of the challenge that it is facing. It is absolutely at the top of my inbox and is an area in which we in the Government need to work with our agencies and arm’s-length external organisations to ensure that they can do what they are supposed to do.