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It would be useful to get that information. If possible, it would also be good to get information for Stirling. I represent quite a chunk of Stirling and hope to represent a larger chunk of it after the election. It would be interesting to see what the pattern has been there. I see that the figure sits at around £12 per capita, which is still below the average, although it is an awful lot more than nothing at all, as we see in Clackmannanshire. I want to try to understand why that is. It is hard to judge until I get the information on how the different patterns have emerged.

You have said that you keep a close eye on the situation, but we are now 16 years into Creative Scotland, and its investment in Clackmannanshire, at least through multiyear funding, is zero. That is an area of substantial deprivation, so I find that hard to understand. It is no consolation to folk in Clackmannanshire to say that 28 other local authorities now receive funding. They are not receiving it, and their need is substantial.

It is not just about being seen; the experience of the arts and culture sector in Clackmannanshire also concerns me.

You mentioned Stirling. I would have thought that Stirling would be relatively vibrant due to the creation of Creative Stirling and some of the activity that has been associated with that, but, at £12, the figure for Stirling is still well below the average for multiyear funding, which is £17. The discrepancy in that chart is striking. You have said that you will provide a pattern over the past 16 years for Stirling and Clacks. In some ways, they are cheek by jowl and pretty hard to disentangle, but can you give us an idea of how many RFOs there are in those respective local authority areas?

You have, quite rightly, over the years, pushed and pushed for multiyear funding, because of the particular advantages of multiyear funding for organisations. For all the work that you said you have done, you have ended up in the situation in Clackmannanshire, as well as in three other local authority areas, where there is no multiyear funding.

Perhaps it is time to have a wee look at what has been going on and whether it is the right approach. Perhaps a different approach is needed for those authorities. North Lanarkshire is not much better—17p per head. Such a discrepancy should be a very urgent issue for Creative Scotland. I will leave it at that.

You rightly mentioned the huge uplift in culture funding in Scotland, not least as it compares to England and Wales. We have all supported that. You also mentioned the extent to which you are focused on multiyear funding, but that is utterly irrelevant in places such as Clackmannanshire, which receives no multiyear funding.

In the previous session, we had a little hint about why Creative Scotland believes that to be the case. It implied that it was down to those areas, because they cannot get their act together and make applications, which is an explanation that I find completely unacceptable. I hope that Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government will consider that because, although I understand the constraints on the Government when it comes to specific applications, it cannot be acceptable for those areas to get no funding whatsoever. More applications are being granted and more money is being given to organisations outwith Scotland from that funding, than to four local authority areas in Scotland.

Do you need an answer to the question?

I endorse what Mr Harvie is saying. He is not without experience in this area. It may well be an exceptional case, but the Government should have in place provisions that allow it to deal with exceptional cases. I urge the Government to look at this very seriously. It may be more for Mr Hogg, given that it would be a cross-Government issue to be brought to ministers, but I would like to hear back from the Government on whether it intends to put in place any provisions that would allow it to take action, given the constraints that the cabinet secretary has rightly pointed out.

The detriment to the service and the public image of the organisation has been very costly. We have had a number of sessions on this matter. We had evidence from the Auditor General at the most recent session, and we have gone quite exhaustively over the things that have gone wrong.

I have only one question, so I will not take the half hour that Mr Kerr did because, if we all did that, we would be here for three and a half hours just for this panel. My concern is that, as well as the things that went wrong, there were underlying concerns beforehand. One of those concerns was a point that I have made a number of times. For a number of years, there was no sign of any kind of entrepreneurial initiative or spark to do things differently, for example, to maximise the monetisation of the assets that HES has. I am very comfortable with HES monetising its assets, and it should do much more of that. I am looking for an assurance that that push is not going to be lost in all of this. HES might have been good at using credit cards, having booze at all sorts of events or getting all those tickets for whatever reason, but was it good at looking at new opportunities to bring in more money? Given the budget, which we will discuss shortly, I know that bringing in more money is a fundamental aim for HES, but what assurances can the Government give us that the importance of monetisation will not be lost in all that is going on?

I want to ask about two issues, the first of which is the mature conversation that has been mentioned, and the other is the asymmetry that Mr Garrett referred to. I will make just a couple of comments, and I would be interested in hearing the panel’s views on them.

First, I think that we do have a fair understanding of local government—it seemed to be implied that we did not. At least half of the committee has spent quite a considerable time in local government. I worked in it for 19 years: I was a councillor for 11 years and a council leader for four; and I also have served on the Parliament’s local government committee. Our knowledge might not be up to date, but there is certainly a well of knowledge here.

As for Councillor Bell’s points about the pressures on local government, I understand that some of those pressures are very different from those that we faced when I was in local government. You are saying that there should be a mature debate about this, given the extent of the underfunding that local government has experienced over a long period of time. I agree with you, and you will just have to take it on trust that many of us make the same argument on a regular basis.

However, I do not think that there is a mature understanding of the other side—that is, the pressures on the Scottish Government. If there were that understanding and that acknowledgement, it would help us to have that mature discussion as we go forward. For example, Mr Roth mentioned 2010-11—I wonder what could have changed in 2010 to account for the constrained budgets. We have had a financial crisis; we have had Brexit; we have had a pandemic; and we have had 15 years of austerity, which we have been told by the Office for Budget Responsibility is going to continue. These things have an impact on the Scottish Government, and I think that, just as you want it to understand the pressures that you are under, you have to acknowledge some of the pressures that it is under, too.

As for asymmetry, Mr Garrett talked about the situation in Glasgow, and I think that he was referring to the asymmetry between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Perhaps I can bring another perspective to this. My council does not have a museum at all; it has one council facility with some artefacts in it, and there is a very small part-time museum. I, and many other people in my constituency, go to Glasgow, and I have regularly spent money in all the museums that you have mentioned. They make that contribution. So, it is not just the asymmetry between Edinburgh and Glasgow that we should be concerned about, but the asymmetry across the country. You say that there is no support for facilities in Glasgow, but the same is true for the rest of the country, too.

Very often, when we in the committee have a discussion about the cultural sector, we end up talking about Edinburgh this or Glasgow that. As Mr Halcro Johnston was trying to point out, there are other big chunks of Scotland to think about. I know that two or three of the panel are from Glasgow and therefore have that perspective, but I think that it would be useful to compare yourself to others as well as Edinburgh. By the way, we get an awful lot of special pleading from Edinburgh, too, and I say that as somebody who was originally from the city.

When it comes to having a mature discussion, I have to say that I just find it hard. I think that the figure that we were looking for earlier is around £600 million; I do not know whether that is the cost of the increase in national insurance contributions to local government or to the whole of the public sector—I am not sure what that figure applies to—but is the response of COSLA or the arts organisations, when they get hit with something that must be a bolt from the blue and a bit of a hammer blow to their budgets really just to turn to the Scottish Government and say, “Can you cover this?” without any acknowledgement of the huge impact on it, too? That is the impression that I am getting from COSLA, mainly, but from other organisations, too. Surely the mature discussion that we should be having should recognise those pressures—surely that has to be the foundation for a better discussion about local government and cultural organisations.

I realise that that was a wee bit contentious, but I am happy to hear any views that challenge that perception.

I will just add, convener, that it relates to this inquiry because there is every reason to suspect that HES might take a risk-averse approach when it gets through this and, if that is the case, it will be a continuing failure.

What is crucial to having that serious, grown-up conversation is an understanding of the general financial environment, and I do not get the sense of that, to be honest. Nobody—neither you nor the previous two speakers—has mentioned the impact of the increase in employer national insurance contributions, which I cannot imagine will have had no impact.

I cannot speak for the Greens, but no other party in the Scottish Parliament suggested an amendment to the budget that would have increased the local government settlement, so there seems to be tacit agreement in relation to that. Did COSLA have conversations with any Opposition parties on the budget?

Thanks.