Seòmar agus comataidhean

I absolutely concur with the cabinet secretary’s comments about Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership on the issue. However, given the scale of loss and damage around the world—some estimates put it at $580 billion by 2030—many states are considering going beyond just funding reparations to address loss and damage. They are also considering establishing in international law a crime of ecocide. Is the Scottish Government open to considering how we could embed the concept of ecocide in Scots law in the way that the EU is looking to adopt it? Some states, such as Belgium, have already started to implement that.

The disturbances are deeply distressing for residents in Vale Grove. What kind of assessment of noise was conducted by SPS during the design phase, especially given the proximity of the residential wings to housing in the local area?

I thank Labour for using its time to debate the plight of the cultural sector in Scotland.

It is a privilege to sit on the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee and be given the opportunity to learn from an incredible array of cultural organisations and artists every week. What is clear to me is that many of those bodies are real anchor organisations in their own communities. They are the spaces where artists get opportunities for paid creative work that would otherwise simply not exist and where pipelines of talent are nurtured from the grass roots up, and they are places where mental health and wellbeing can be nurtured and communities can come together to educate and organise.

During the depths of the Covid crisis, it was often cultural organisations such as Creative Stirling that helped communities to look after each other. Whether it was through opening safe spaces when others were closing them down or through delivering core services such as food ladders, those organisations were central to supporting and galvanising action. Scotland’s cultural sector is not just an economic generator. It is about life, creativity and community.

I had hoped that, in this debate, we could all agree that Covid’s impact on the economy, coupled with Brexit and the cost of living crisis, has helped to create a perfect storm for the cultural sector. The funding outlook was already challenging, but in this environment a small change in public funding can have a disproportionate impact on delivery. Some organisations are already stuck with what has been called doughnut funding, whereby project delivery costs are funded but the core running costs are missing.

I understand why many in the cultural sector have been concerned about recent changes to Creative Scotland’s funding from the Scottish Government and what that might mean for funded organisations. However, the cabinet secretary has confirmed that £6.6 million will be paid to Creative Scotland in the upcoming financial year, which means that the reserves used in this financial year will be replenished by the Scottish Government.

Of course, that does not mean that everything is fixed. The long-term future for cultural funding remains challenging. The funding settlement that has been given to the Scottish Government from Westminster does not keep pace with inflation and it is forcing difficult choices. We must find a way forward that provides the financial security and certainty that our cultural sector deserves, so I am pleased that the First Minister has made the commitment to double cultural funding. Like many members, I look forward to examining the detail of that in the forthcoming budget.

We now need to take the opportunity to radically rethink the way in which the sector is funded in order to secure a future for it and its workers. We need a long-term strategy for culture that pivots away from stop-start funding towards multiyear budgets and values the wider benefits that culture brings, including through preventative spending and creative use of the transient visitor levy at local level. We need a strategy that co-produces with the cultural sector and reflects calls from artists’ unions for fair work conditionality on arts funding to value, protect and grow the workforce while attracting even more talent, and a strategy that encourages the big culture sector to support its grass roots, whether that is through a levy on stadium tickets or through screen companies giving back to communities that host big-budget productions.

Cultural organisations have shown the incredible value that they deliver. It is time for the Government to help to reset its relationship with the sector, build on trust and allow it to thrive.

Have the difficulties with 801 and 802 affected you as a business? Would you have expected to have more work coming in, or is the work on the frigates what you would have expected to have right now?

Returning to the issue of overhead recovery, you said in your letter to the committee that some of the overheads for the yard would be covered by “other business”. Will you describe what that other business is? Has that other business come in since nationalisation?

So you do not see any reputational damage.

The budget for your portfolio is minuscule compared with that for many other portfolios. It is several orders of magnitude smaller than that for health. That poses challenges, particularly when your portfolio includes responsibility for major events on an international stage involving big, multimillion pound budgets, as well as responsibility for culture, the budget for which is primarily about funding the incredible organisations that exist in our communities and all the benefits that they deliver.

It feels as though there is a tension there with regard to funding. What you have announced today suggests that there has been quite a major shift in thinking within the Government about how major national events should be funded. Could you explore that a little more? It feels as though that shift is partly to do with lessons that have been learned from hosting the UCI world cycling championships, which I agree were a fantastic success. Are there other factors to bear in mind in that context?

The nub of the concern from the creative sector relates to the demand on the multiyear fund that Creative Scotland has set up and the expectation that organisations that did not get approval for multiyear funding would be able to apply for a separate fund, which would come out of Creative Scotland’s reserves, to provide more single-year funding.

How does the current set of decisions impact on that? Will Creative Scotland still be able to fund those organisations that have not been successful in achieving multiyear funding and are still very much on the brink and in need of that year-on-year funding to survive into the next financial year?

I am aware of the background, and I think that many people who are watching this will have watched last week’s evidence session and they will be in the thick of it with regard to putting in applications. I come back to the question, which is: what changes now?

What do you see as the role of the UK Government in funding those major events? We have discussed previously that despite the UCI world cycling championships being a major success, there was really no funding from the UK Government for what was ostensibly a Great Britain event. Do you see a way of working with the UK Government that could bring in more partnership funding from that side for other events that are still to be bid for?