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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.

Yes. I am sorry to take issue with you, Mr Cameron, but I am not sure that it is a vexed question. We can differ honourably—as we do—on how we would vote in such a referendum but I hope that, as democrats, all of us believe in having democratic votes. When a Government is returned in an election on a platform for a vote to be held, as democrats, we should all agree that that is what should happen.

There is a cost associated with a referendum, and there are costs associated with Scottish Parliament elections and UK Parliament elections. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having Scottish Parliament elections is a vexed question? I hope not. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having UK Parliament elections is a vexed question? Of course they are not. Those are democratic votes and, as a democrat, I respect the results of the Scottish Parliament elections last year, in which a majority of the parliamentarians who were elected believed that there should be a vote. The people voted for that.

The Government has set out its timetable. I gently suggest to Mr Cameron that it would be helpful if his UK Government colleagues were not just as amenable but as respectful of democratic election outcomes in Scotland as the former Prime Minister David Cameron was. That would be helpful, because it is not a vexed question. The decision has been made. The electorate has asked for a referendum, and that is what should happen.

I am not sure that I have much to add to that. The logic is sound, but making it work in practice is the challenge and we will have to be mindful of that. This will be the subject of the committee’s deliberations, as part of which the cabinet secretary and I will come back on a regular basis to look at whether the switch is beginning to happen. If we can see some bite or progress being made on those things, that will give the committee the confidence to say at what point a particular strategy or approach, which is certainly being pursued, is working. When will we begin to see that happen? That depends on how quickly we get up and running with doing some of those things.

Another observation that does not necessarily make things easier is that some things might take longer to change than some other things do. I do not know which those might be and how long they might take, but that echoes the point that Kate Forbes was making about having a mature debate about some of those things. If we are agreed in general terms that this is the best way to go forward—and I think that there is large-scale consensus that it probably is—we have to find our feet by working our way through the process. I know that I am committed to making it happen.

As I have said to the committee before, I am very interested in any ideas or pointers that you and other colleagues on the committee have about how we ensure that the Government thinks about how it can make some things work faster and some things work in different ways. Are any areas being missed as part of the process? It is one of the models of how the Scottish Parliament is supposed to be working. In that sense, we are a collegiate whole, which is trying to make sure that we are able to deliver, particularly on big cultural changes in how we do our business.

I would not rule anything like that out. We need to be open to suggestions of how we make sure that we understand things as well as we can and that we are doing everything that we can. I would need to know more about the proposal but, as I said a moment ago, I am open to suggestions about ways in which we can ensure that we are leading the change that we know is necessary.

If I, as the MSP for Edinburgh Central, can join the MSP for Skye in talking about Skye, I will say that I am strongly in favour of the visitor levy. Such levies are the norm in parts of the world that have significant tourist numbers. As people who travel, we are used to that, and I am perfectly content to make a financial contribution to the places that I visit to ensure that the visitor experience is everything that it can be and that the quality of life and the public services of the people who live in that place are as well supported as possible.

Obviously, this issue gets to the heart of the debate about empowering localities to make appropriate decisions for their locality and the extent to which there is national guidance around what are the good things to be thinking about in that regard. No doubt, we will be talking about these issues at greater length at another time, but I think that the literally millions of people who visit places such as Edinburgh will have little to no difficulty in paying the kind of levy that they would be paying in any other capital as part of their overnight costs. I think that that revenue stream could be transformational in many ways. However, getting maximum benefit from such a funding stream will involve local decision makers having innovative ideas and focusing on the right areas.