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You did not.

I agree. What is often not said is that councillors are not trusted, really, but they are trusted more than every other elected member. Indeed, studies will show that they are the most trusted elected representatives. Going back to your earlier point, I think that, during the pandemic, people really appreciated the vital nature of local government services to an extent that they never had before.

Do any of the other panel members want to come in on my substantive points?

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 have two brief questions. I do not have the full report in front of me; I just have a précis of your section 22 report. At the beginning of your evidence, you mentioned that the archive house project had been abandoned but that expenditure continued to be made on it. Have you found out the reasons why that was the case?

It is worth saying at the start that I am a big supporter of the BBC, which might come as a surprise to some people. I am also a supporter of the licence fee. However, whether it is through the charter process or in other ways, we do see interference from Government. Of course, broadcasting remains reserved. Tim Davie fairly recently told us that he had four or five visits every week, with people from each of the two main parties beating a path to his door to complain about something or other. Scotland does not really feature in that. There is sometimes a feeling that the BBC is impervious to demands from Scotland for more balanced reporting.

I should say that one of our previous witnesses said that they had heard—I forget what evidence they quoted—that there seems to be a move among younger people to go back to things such as the BBC, teachers or parents. Rightly or wrongly, younger people see those as more stable and reliable, because of the whirlpool and diversity of the media that they can consume. There is a chance for the BBC to build on that through the licence fee.

I want to come back to the point about current affairs. I apologise to committee members, because I have mentioned this before, but the BBC in Scotland seems to have a pathological objection to covering reserved issues that impact on Scotland. For example, you have done I do not know how many investigative programmes on the ferries situation. That is fair enough, as it is legitimate news, but I do not think that the BBC in Scotland has done anything on the aircraft carriers, which were massively over budget and over time. Those were built in Scotland and had a major impact on the Scottish taxpayer. However, there seems to be a news blackout that comes with things like that.

Similarly, in the past, I have challenged both Martin Geissler and, going back in time, Gordon Brewer as to why there was not much more scrutiny of what we are told are the two Governments in Scotland. Both told me that they could not get UK representatives to come on their shows, which is not a reason not to cover those issues. There is an issue of balance, and it seems to be part of a deferential approach that the BBC in Scotland has to the UK. It would be interesting to hear comments on that.

Also, to live in a counterfactual universe for a minute, how, if at all, would the BBC in Scotland be different had broadcasting been devolved back in 1999?

I have to say that I am less than convinced by the answer—I would not even say that it was an answer—that was given for why the BBC Scotland feels that it was not important to cover the aircraft carriers situation. The carriers were built in Scotland and the cost overruns were huge. I would have that thought that the fact that they did not actually work very well would also have been an issue. I suppose that we will have to differ, because I think that the BBC would be very different if broadcasting had been devolved.

It might be the case—I very much hope that it is—that we have another referendum on independence, depending on the outcome of elections and so on. If that is the case, how confident would you be that we would not see a rerun of what we saw in 2014, which was the importation of journalists en masse—not only by the BBC—including some Scottish journalists who for a long time had not been based in Scotland, to take over the coverage? Are you in a better place to resist that now? Would you want to resist it?

It just seems that you have a very rich opportunity to cover some of the stuff that is native and unique to Scotland, such as the invention of televisions and telephones, through factual programming.

I will leave it at that, convener, as I know that time is pressing.

That was my final question, but I have a quick comment on that.

We have different views on the extent to which your office ranges across public activities, but I would certainly welcome the routine examination of where public bodies can do an awful lot more through their entrepreneurial activities, especially when, like Historic Environment Scotland, they have remarkable and unique resources. I would be interested to see what that report says.

I think that I am right in saying that the Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture has previously said words to the effect that he has taken the reins off Historic Environment Scotland to allow it to do that. Any suggestions about what kind of structure would be best able to facilitate that would be useful.