Good morning, everyone, and a warm welcome to the 25th meeting of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee in 2023. We have a first agenda item to begin to take evidence as part of a pre-budget scrutiny on funding for culture. I'm delighted to be joined this morning by Duncan Dornan, chief committee member from Vocal, Pamela Talock, chief executive of Scottish Library and Information Council, SLIC, India Divers, policy and campaign officer for museums association, David Avery, negotiation officer with prospect, Kara Christine, senior programme producer for atlink and Liam Sinclair, co-chair of the Federation of Scottish Theatre. It's a round-table discussion this morning. We want it to be quite free-flowing, so not too formal. If you want to come in, please just indicate to myself or the clerks and we'll try and ensure that everybody gets an opportunity to come in. I'm going to open with a question on a report from last year, which I think the theme that came out of that was the perfect storm facing the arts culture. I thank you all for your written submissions that have come in, which have been very helpful for today. I would like to open with a question to each of you about what has changed in the operating environment over the last 12 months, what impacts the cost of living crisis, the current financial situation that has had on your organisation and whether that has impacted the services that you have been able to provide. I wonder if I could start on the left-hand side and we'll go around the table and jump in, please. A very essential question. The report last year identified that the sector was facing a perfect storm. At that time, we had depressed income on the back of Covid, budget pressures and increasing operating costs. Although the food fall into cultural venues has recovered very well after Covid, the impact of the cost of living crisis has meant that income has not recovered on an equal basis. Although we have more food fall and, ironically, in many cases, more costs, the income is still depressed, even relative to pre-pandemic period. At the same time, the level of funding from local authorities is continuing to be under pressure and that is having a significant impact across most cultural provision that local authorities provide. After 10 years of cuts, we have arrived at a point where the invisible reduction has now gone. Historically, we were able to take back-of-house functions out to reduce investment and maintenance and so on to maintain a level of public provision. We have now arrived at a position where that is no longer possible. We are beginning to see cuts in programming, cuts in workshops and cuts in the quality of public provision, which will have a major impact. We know that culture is a very cost-effective way of improving health and wellbeing and reducing expenditure on primary healthcare. At the same time, we know that it is very effective both in driving tourism and generating income and driving inward investment, but we are seeing a depletion of our ability to do that, which will have major long-term consequences. The sector, generally, after more than 10 years of budget pressure, is in a position where it is not only losing public-facing provision but its ability to bounce back and deliver major high-quality activities. This year, as an example alone, as you may well be aware, the Berlin Glasgow One Arc from Museum of the Year is a major international prize. Simultaneously, the service is removing 38 posts or 12 per cent of its workforce, so our ability in the longer term to deliver projects of that international status will be very heavily impeded. I echo much of what you said. The conditions continue to be really, really tough. The increase costs and standstill funding are eroding our capacity to be able to address the exponentially growing needs of people with complex disabilities. In the double whammy, we are also facing increased costs of living pressures and the reduction of funding to social care. We have even seen staging locally-based activities that people with complex needs are unable to get to because they do not have staff member to bring them. We are having to respond in a much more local way, a much smarter way and a much more partnership working way. The continued erosion of local government support for the arts is really marked at the moment. The move to transfer responsibility of cultural assets is also a challenge for local communities to face the maintenance costs of those buildings, so it is not necessarily an opportunity for some of the communities that we operate in—for example, West Lothian. We are trying to challenge the narrative of those difficult decisions and those annual budgets and the unknowns. We have done that for years and the arts sector is expert at responding to the unknown. We are consequently trying to develop a less uncertainty by developing quality work, which involves partnership working. We are identifying new resources and different ways of thinking and collaborating with our public partners and our third sector organisations. We are trying to move away from a transactional model, much more to a longer-term way of thinking and seeing how we can bring in investment and increase not just the cash possibilities of that but our experience, our knowledge and how skills can be valued. That is for the people that we work for as well as the sectors that we operate in. We are not thinking just about resources and hard cash, we are thinking about creativity and ingenuity of the people that we work with and the way that they see the world and how that can enrich and offer new opportunity. We are focusing much on what the Christie commission said in 2011, which is not an outdated document. In the slightest, we are still inspired by that document. We are still looking at ways to reduce demand or higher tariff public spend by working in a much more imaginative and early action way. I think that I might just let somebody else take on the next part of this discussion, but yes, we are looking much more about proactive ways of working. Thank you. I would say that the museum sector in Scotland is at a crisis point at the moment. We are seeing really difficult situations being faced by museums across the country. There has been a hollowing out of services and continued cuts, just keep putting more and more pressure on museums. In 2021, the Museums Association conducted research into local authority investment in museums after a decade of austerity. During that decade, local authority investment in museums decreased by 23 per cent. Of course, since 2021, we have seen the cost of living crisis and continued pressures with rising costs of maintenance, of energy costs, and because inflation is rising so quickly, a lot of the time that museums receive project funding, the project comes to deliver it. Those costs have gone up so much that it is not deliverable for what has been budgeted. The cost of living is continuing to have a real impact on museums. In terms of visitor numbers, we are seeing a lot of museums having really strong visitor numbers. I have returned to pre-pandemic levels, but we are also seeing some that are still struggling to return to the same numbers. A lot of the time, it might be the museums that charge for entry, some of the independent museums that are experiencing not the same return, and that is because of the cost of living. People are more likely to go to the museums that are free entry. What we are seeing is that visitors, if a museum is charging for entry, are perhaps only coming if there is an extra bit that is offered, so an extra event or activity that is running so that they can get more for their money. That is having an impact on museums' income. The museums that are free entry, we are seeing a lot of pressure now, that they are now thinking about going towards more commercial modules, considering maybe having to charge for entry. That does cause some concerns, especially in the cost of living crisis when we saw last winter many museums opening up as warm and welcoming spaces and being a really essential part of the community to offer that service. If museums are moving towards a charge model for entry, we need to look at who is then going to be excluded and who we are leaving behind if that is the path that we are going down, so I think that there are real risks there. To echo what my colleagues have said, while there is a recovery in visitor numbers, it is uneven, and we are seeing various different institutions and companies and so on, that some are recovering and others are not, but, as has been noted by others, that does not necessarily mean that income is recovered. In terms of budgets, we are seeing more of the same. We are seeing flat budgets and increased staff pressures, which are then leading into difficult conversations about staffing levels and about pay. I think that the National Museum has said that they have not had as yet the money for the April 23 pay round released. That continues to be the case now in September, and we are having further discussions with the Government about that today. We are continuing to have real issues around pay negotiations in these areas because of the level of budget that has been assigned to them. For the last three years, I believe that we have had to have an intervention from Government to bail out the museum, the library and the galleries, to allow them to pay a pay award broadly in line with what has been paid to other members within the public sector. That is looking like it is likely to happen, and it needs to happen again this year, because it is simply not possible to make savings within their budgets in a way that an organisation such as the Scottish Government is able to do so because of that frozen funding, because of those pressures that others have talked about. Unless they move to something like closing properties or starting to charge more, they are not unable to make those kind of savings. In terms of the cost of living and impact on services, we are seeing a higher turnover of staff, particularly in those visitor-facing roles where organisations are competing not just within the sector but against private sector organisations who will employ often unsignificantly higher salaries. That is having a real impact. We saw the closure of Mod 2 last year where, in part, they are not entirely because of staffing levels. We are also seeing a higher turnover in specialist roles as well where curator and conservation staff are leaving the sector because of pay and because of insecurity of employment, because of insecurity of funding. We have members coming to us saying that this is what I want to do, this is what I have wanted to dedicate my life to, but I simply cannot afford to stay within the sector any more. That has become more and more acute over the last two, three years with the cost of living crisis and the challenges that it is presenting to people about the cost of staying in Edinburgh. We are seeing, unfortunately, more of the same, more of that storm continuing to hit those bodies. While some are in a slightly better position and that they can come to Government for further funds, our members working in charities and smaller museums are absolutely the whim of Creative Scotland and often are only finding out what their funding is almost at the 11th hour, which, if it means changes to staffing levels, has a huge impact on those individuals. I will take the first question and then I will bring it in with a supplementary, Donald. I think that the perfect storm is actually a perfect way to describe the situation that libraries find themselves in at the moment. In the slick submission, we mentioned that, actually, it is not the last 12 months that have been challenging, it has been the accumulation of probably about the last 12, 15 years since the credit crunch and public sector austerity. As you will all know, public libraries are funded either directly or indirectly through local government. In your papers for today's meeting, you will see that a 36 per cent decline in investment in libraries has been highlighted and has taken place over the last 10 years. Perhaps to make that real for people on what that means, we have heard about hollowing out of services and trying to manage on flatter, declining budgets. However, what we have seen is a reduction in opening hours, closures of libraries in some places, reductions in staffing levels, a real hollowing out of support staff, which are needed to enable the front line staff to carry out their duties effectively. We have also seen quite a decline in investment in the bread and butter of the library offer, i.e. the book fund. Over the past five years, a 26 per cent decline in investment has been offered to the public. Perhaps to make that real to people, that is over £2 million every year, a £2 million reduction every year in materials that have been spent for the public to borrow across Scotland. Of course, that has a direct impact on what children can borrow from libraries. Of course, that supports attainment and literacy, which is extremely important for life opportunities and, I suppose, chances in life. Digital inclusion, which we know is another big issue, is growing rather than contract, which is really disappointing, despite the best efforts of staff on the ground to support the public with their needs. We have heard talk just now of health and wellbeing and the role that culture and libraries play in supporting health and wellbeing. That has never been more important and never been more needed than now. It is not the time that the library sector cannot respond perhaps in the best way that it would like to. We have heard as well about collaborative working. There is a collective force for health and wellbeing, which supports the chief medical officer's realistic medicine agenda. That sees SLIC, the NHS, the Alliance and Digital Health Scotland, coming together to deliver services in local libraries, which help people such as NHS Near Me, working with Diabetes UK and also working with Alzheimer's Scotland, supporting people who are suffering from dementia and so on. It can only happen. One of the libraries is there. If they have reasonable opening hours and staff, they can help to support all that. There is also evidence that, for every £1 spent in public libraries, it brings £6.75 worth of benefit to the community. That is great, but equally, you can turn that on its head. For every £1 taken away from public libraries, that is £6.75 of benefit taken away from the community. It is a tricky situation that we find ourselves in. I think that the sector has been extremely resilient and creative in responding, but the kind of trajectory that is on at the moment cannot continue if we are wanting to offer what Scotland has had a proud history of, which is a very strong and vibrant public library offer. The Federation of Scottish Theatre members are quite a diverse body. It is maybe worth pointing that out first of all that we have people that are operating theatres and presenting professional production and touring professional production, but we have also got members that work right across a range of community education and social contexts, including picking up the point there, working in direct therapeutic interventions to address a whole range of policy areas. All of our members are reporting to answer your question, it has got worse that the impacts across services, the reduction of choice that is having to be offered, is all there. There is a material thing from probably the last time the committee took evidence ahead of the budget, which was the journey that the Scottish Government took with the culture budget through Parliament last year. It would be difficult to underestimate the erosion of faith and trust that that journey had on our members, where the culture budget was cut, albeit to be reinstated. It left people feeling less clear than they should about the clarity of vision that we are all operating to in terms of the delivery of cultural services for Scotland. That has a corresponding impact on the health and wellbeing of the workforce. To pick up points from colleagues, people are making significant choices now about whether this is a sector that they want to work in. Those are a talented and experienced workforce that Scotland has been proud of for a long, long time. However, there is a great amount of determination in the sector. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is one example that has just had members present a whole range of different work with once again international promoters from right across the world saying that the quality of work that Scotland produces is truly world-class. We stand ready to make a contribution, but I think that we are at a tipping point now. The passage of the next budget through Parliament and subsequent budgets will be a tipping point. As with tipping points, there is an opportunity to build forward. With reference to what that looks like, I would draw the committee's attention to the culture counts submission. Our colleagues there have done a great amount of work of putting a number to that tipping point change for the better. However, if it stands still, or indeed worse case, a cut, we will see a tipping point of regression. That will impact the culture sectors and our member's ability to deliver for the next decade or more. I will bring in Donald and his supplementary essay, and Neil has one as well. I have one or two, so if other members want to come in on the opening statements, that would be great. I was struck by the starkness of what many of you said today and your submissions. Liam, just now, from the Federation of Scottish Theatre, described the tipping point. I think that your submission is yours, because there is no space closer to the edge to move to. I suppose that my question to all of you is what does that mean in practical terms if we are at a tipping point or a breaking point? Pamela has touched on potential closures, staff reductions and so on. On practicalities, I am keen to understand what that means day-to-day and operationally. Liam, perhaps I could start with you. I think that what it would mean is our attraction of services right across what members do. That would be less productions of that world-class nature being presented. The cultural export agenda for Government would absolutely be impacted. At the therapeutic end, there would be choices made about prioritisation of service that has a greater chance of revenue generation. You have a commercial agenda outwewing the social impact agenda, and absolutely our members do not see it that way. They see the revenue generation as a necessity, but absolutely to deliver social purpose for cultural. You would have a level of mass redundancy in the sector. We have touched through a number of comments of people choosing to leave the sector. We have not quite yet hit a point of mass redundancy. There have been some notable cases in the past year that members will be aware of, but there would be no choice but to maintain the integrity of organisations that have to have a healthy balance sheet in order to trade to think about what that means for a workforce. Nobody wants to go there, because we are a sector that takes great pride in the skill, the talent and ambition of the sector, and that is built on a brilliant workforce. There is no more room to move. We are on the edge. It is a choice point, not to labour the point, but we are in that choice moment of what we want our culture sector to look like for the next decade. I do not know if anyone else wants to dunk in. Liam has mentioned that there are job losses. Those job losses are symptomatic of the fact that institutions have nowhere else to go, and the two last things are job losses and closure of venues. We are seeing job losses that will have an impact on the level of programming, the level of content, and the quality of content that has an impact in the longer-term of Scotland's ability to deliver world-class content. However, the next step from those job losses is the closure of venues. I think that your description is that we are absolutely on the edge. We are seeing job losses. It is a symptom of having nowhere left to go. It will have an impact on provision, and I think that, particularly in the public sector, provision for the most disadvantaged and excluded in society. Our latest data shows that, of our Scottish audience, 50 per cent are coming from Quintile 1 and 2 of SIMD, so the poorest people use our cultural provision. If that is reduced, those are the people who are going to be hit most directly by it. To add just how that would play out if libraries are put under further pressure, libraries remain the most popular service that local government provides, and we are seeing footfall returning to pre-pandemic levels. To make that real again for people, that is probably more people using their local public library than attend Scottish Premier League football matches. We are talking about a really strong engagement. We know that libraries at the moment support social isolation and help those who are socially isolated, that they have a positive impact on attainment, that they play well to support digital exclusion. They have really had a strong offer to support families and people through the cost of living crisis. They support people into work and help people to remain in work through skills development. They also reduce issues around mental health and wellbeing. Those are the societal impacts that you could expect to see exacerbated if the library offer was reduced. I have a quick question with all that you have said. Specifically, did you see the libraries being used as a warm space like the Museums? Yes, certainly. Public libraries have been a very strong anchor in offering families support during the cost of living crisis, so certainly warm spaces but also providing activities. We do not want libraries to be pity places for people to keep warm, so there has been a strong offer around programming to support people through the cost of living crisis. That is good for mental health and wellbeing, too. Add to what others have said and echo a lot of what has been said already about the risks of job losses, closure. A lot of the time that the first jobs to go are learning and engagement and audience-facing roles. A reduction in those roles is going to have a direct impact on our communities, audiences and those that are the most vulnerable in society. It also poses a risk to collections of buildings if the maintenance costs aren't there, if there are leaks, if there are just not appropriate buildings to store our collections in, then that is a real risk. Salaries, too. We are going to keep seeing people leaving the sector. It has already been mentioned in front of house rules leaving, and that is something that we are seeing, that a lot of museums cannot keep up with the competitive wages that you might get in accompanying public-facing sectors such as supermarkets and things like that. We are also seeing that in terms of IT roles and HR roles, that the competitive salaries in different sectors can offer means that we are going to find positions like this harder and harder to fill. I also wanted to highlight the picture across the UK, because in the Museums Association we are a UK-wide membership body. We are seeing in England some councils declaring themselves bankrupt, and the impact on that is anything that is not a statutory service, which includes museums. Of course, there is just no money left for those services, and that is quite a bleak picture if that is the road that we are going to continue on. We also saw in Cardiff the closure of the museum there to turn into a mobile attraction. That was proposed, and luckily there has been a U-turn on this due to campaigning, but we can see the kind of picture that is forming across the UK and the kind of path that we are going down, and if action is not taking to stop, that is where we are going to end up. Yes, and I was going to make a similar point to a minute about facilities and so on, that we have seen in number of submissions from ourselves and from other respondents that pretty much everyone is now facing a choice between staffing levels, opening hours, property closures and other divestments, and that there is very little choice now for them. They would have to choose one of those things, and I am proud of, within the public bodies, within some of the larger charities, that we have slightly higher rates of pay for heritage stuff in Scotland than we do in the rest of the UK, but that, unfortunately, just speaks to how bad it is in the rest of the UK, rather than there being a good position here. I would also say that we are losing and would continue to lose work around collection care, around collection cataloging, around some of that less visible work. You still have, you know, the national collection itself, millions of uncatalogued items that they think they have but are not sure, and we have seen the problems that have caused for the British Museum, that that work is under pressure, work around digitisation, work around conservation, as the National Library talked about, having to delay work on critical infrastructure, which, if they have a failure of a temperature control system, has a huge impact. Some of this is stuff that you can choose not to replace it, but if it then fails, your costs to replace it are far higher or you risk losing irreplaceable points of the collection. Those are things that our members absolutely care about, are absolutely concerned about coming to us saying, I am really worried about what this might mean for the collection, and that is within, as I say, centrally funded museums. When I speak to members who work for charities and so on, it is even more acute. Thank you. India, you mentioned the speed of the cost of living crisis and inflation meant that funded projects were no longer viable. Does that mean that they are being cancelled or scaled down? I think that it is a really live issue, so I think that it is on-going. It is that museums are finding themselves at the moment in situations where they have applied for funding, and now they are going to have to try to find the money to deliver those projects. Although they said that this is the budget and that this is what we can deliver, now the costs have gone up. It might be that they are having to scale back slightly or that they are having to dip into their own money to try to deliver the project. I invite Ms Forbes to ask some questions. Thank you all very much. I suppose that, to Liam's point over the summer, I certainly got the privilege of seeing just the quality of the creative and the culture industry, particularly across the highlands. I wanted to focus a little bit more deeper into three questions that picks up on Cara's point about preventative spend and acknowledging and quantifying the wider outcomes that culture spend can deliver. I think that all of us have continued to be inspired by Christie. It has been notoriously difficult to do because, in any fixed budget, funding requires to go up in one way and down in another way. My questions are, firstly, when it comes to the public discussion about funding and funding the culture and creative industry, to what extent do you think there has been progress in actually acknowledging that culture contributes more generally to outcomes? When I say acknowledgement, I do not mean politicians saying that we accept that, I mean in terms of concrete movement of funding. That might be a short answer. When it comes to more general outcomes, Duncan talked about the impact on health and wellbeing, impact on education, impact on economy, a tool for reversing depopulation, as we have seen for example in the Western Isles, with spending on MG Allopah. What further work would you like to see to demonstrate to quantify the wider impact of culture spend that can be used as proof for want of a better word? My third and final question, and I am just throwing them all out there because I thought that you might be able to pick up on each on different elements, in terms of partnership working with the private and the public sector, in terms of, for example, joint projects with the NHS, with organisations that are tasked with delivering economic outcomes and so on. To what extent have you seen growth in that partnership working so that some of the risk around projects might be shared? It is not just the museums, for example, that are having to fork out, but other organisations can partner. I hope that you do not mind me illustrating your point with some life examples, if you do not mind, and do reign me in, Claire, if you need to. We have been developing not only our services to support adults and young people with new diversity, complex needs and mental health, but we also innovate at the same time. We are finding that if we can focus on the individual, really complicated solutions to individual and collective social problems become apparent. If we act at a local level, we can then scale up approaches. I will give you a couple of examples. We work with adults with profound and multiple learning disability and complex needs in our day centre in Bonnyrig. Through some innovative resource transfer from part of a care assistance salary, the manager has bought us in to provide creative learning for their staff team. If people with profound and multiple learning disabilities have unique views on the world, how they sense the environment and how they see skill development, what is the ambition for people to continue to learn despite having cognitive disability? Can we change what the centre looks like? Can we programme imaginatively what happens there? Can we use artists across disciplines to try and refresh and imagine what that would be? For a very small amount of money, you have a year-long programme where staff are engaging in sound, light, vibration, movement as communication, product design, and we have turned a team of action group workers into product engineers that are redesigning very simple objects to engage the people that they support on a deeper level. The university of Dundee identified the value and articulator. It is difficult for us as a sector to articulate the social value, financial value of what it is that we bring to the health and social care education community. The university of Dundee evaluated the role of our work on a relational level directly improving the quality of care in health and social care in learning disability. The interdisciplinary collaborations that we can explore through working with OTs, with healthcare, with social care, with education save so much money in terms of stopping referrals. One of the projects that I run is a children's project in eastern Midlothian. I am working with kids who have been out of school through emotionally-based school avoidance for some of them over three years. Nobody knows how to fix that and nobody has got simple answers to that, but the answers come from just listening to what the individual needs. I am the fairy godmother of the education world where I will go in and find out what a young person is interested in. That could be ferricare, astronomy, graphic design. We match that young person with a practitioner expert from the arts and non-arts fields, and we make something concrete happen that lifts attainment. We can then combine whole systems approach money, lack attainment funding, we can use community mental health framework funding and pool those resources to almost innovate a new service. If we do not have the innovation funding, what we are needing is longer-term strategic investment in a coherent way so that local authorities can be given the permission to bring in new services that solve those really complex problems. In terms of the work that you are doing in education, do you ever know where the funding is coming from? Is it PEPF funding? It would be PEPF. The other thing is that there is a double valuation earlier. If we use SDS funding in adult learning disability terrain, as well as mental health terrain, because the eligibility criteria for SDS funding has changed, families no longer have as much funding or they are not having funding at all. Therefore, they can only buy in what exists. If we cannot innovate—I suppose that it is becoming a transactional model—purchasing services and purchasing support, if we cannot innovate from what is there, we can only choose from what exists. Further, that is reduced by a reduction of our funding. What we are needing is multi-year funding. We have been moved from regular funded organisation to an open project funded organisation, which means that we have to fundraise for our own salaries at the same time as delivering and innovating the sector. That is a really hard job to do. Allowing us to do what we do best, to reduce costs and on-going costs, to reduce the camps waiting list because somebody does not need that assessment so much is where we should be at. The question about funding culture and impact on wellbeing is really quite central here. There is a widespread political acceptance that that is a fact, and we have enormous academic information to back that up and, within the sector, we accept that. The public do too. It is a widespread acknowledgement that cultural engagement is a good thing, and our audience demographics in Glasgow's museums reflect that. It is what the poorest in society do in leisure time. However, the funding models that we have do not support that are being delivered at scale to have a sufficient impact. The sector currently is essentially an annual cycle of managing decline. That soaks up enormous amounts of capacity. We simultaneously implement last year's cuts and begin to plan to deal with next year's cuts, and that leaves no scope to actually look at funding models and creating a longer term new sustainable models that actually respond constructively to the society that we are operating in. I think that that is one of the difficulties that we are able to achieve a period of stability to allow us to reimagine our services. We will be able to achieve more and to meet public aspiration, but currently we are all individually fighting for survival and we can't do that. I echo both what Kara and Duncan have said already. We know that there is a lot of good example of work out there, and we know that work works, but it is on a quite an ad hoc reactive basis at the moment, and that is all the more strain because of all the things that we have talked about in the first round of questions. I suppose that there is an opportunity. I am going to stick with this tipping point and theme if that is okay, but with the refresh of the culture strategy to move from a reactive to a strategic position on that, and I think that there is a couple of things that could be really quite transformative in there, one would be to agree a commitment to ring fencing that portfolio money that has been talked about for quite some time across Government. Kara talked about a design process there, and if you are designing product or service, you commit to a prototyping phase, so let's commit to some mass prototyping of interventions across portfolio that builds on the extraordinary work that has already gone on there, and ring fencing some money from that, but together I think that that needs to look at what the agreed metrics will be, because I think that there is a lot of understanding at quite an implicit level that that contribution to health and wellbeing and education outcomes is there, but we are all working to slightly different evaluation metrics if we could work to a unified set of metrics while prototyping inside a refreshed culture strategy towards the Government's goal of transforming to health and wellbeing economy. That could be truly transformative over the next decade, and in 10 years' time I'd love to imagine some people sitting around this table going, wow, look at the evidence base of how we've transformed Scotland through cultural intervention across every area of Government portfolio. Pamela? I would like to again echo what everybody else says, but I'm again coming at it from a library's perspective and having a real hard think about that acknowledgement that you were asking for and the progress that's been made and what would be proof of that, and focusing on a collective force for health and wellbeing, which is the collaborative approach within the library environment. I think one of the real strengths of that is that all the partners were at the table together at the beginning, they had a common goal and I think that really punches above its weight, so it wasn't in some scenarios libraries or the culture sector invited later on on the stage and expected to contribute and do something, but actually think being at the table right to the start and being able to outline what the culture offer is can be very impactful, and I think libraries do have a real strong evidence base of doing that with a range of partners, and I think part of the USP of libraries in line with Probley Museums as well as their trusted safe spaces and that the staff of the skills to work with a range of organisations to bring things to life. If I reflect on last year, we had a national reading moment called, Keep the Hidden Read, which had a focus on mental health and wellbeing, and it had a range of third sector organisations promoting it, it had a range of private industry promoting it as well as the library sector, but everybody was there at the planning stage, everyone was there at the start and they all had a common goal. Similarly with the NHS Near Me, that wasn't about NHS approaching libraries and asking can you help us with near me, it was a true collaboration that came through from a collective force for health and wellbeing, so again the discussion, the development of the project, the rollout of it involved all partners, and I think that kind of model starts to move away from who's bringing what to the table, but actually how do we collectively bring things together to achieve an outcome? There is a recognition of the role of museums in contributing towards health and wellbeing in Scotland's museums and galleries strategy, and we were really pleased to see that. At the museums association, our museums changed lives campaign really recognises the role of museums in contributing to health and wellbeing as well, and we really encourage this work in the museum sector. However, I do think that there needs to be more work done to formalise this work and move away from it being, like Liam said, ad hoc and to really join up the work that is taking place. There is partnership working happening, particularly when it comes to social prescribing and museums doing work in that area, but I think that there is a risk in the way that museum funding comes into a lot of of organisations is that a lot of the time it's project-based, it's short-term rules that are working on this, and effective partnership working, it takes a lot of time and effort, and these relationships have to be built over a long period of time and handled very sensitively, and there is a real risk when the people delivering this work are on short-term contracts that when they leave at this work stops the relationships are lost and the people who have been involved in this work are left quite vulnerable because the work has suddenly stopped, so I think that we need to look at how we're funding this work, and it really does need to be permanent staff working on this. It needs to be part of the core of what our museums deliver and cultural organisations deliver, and I think that we are at risk of damaging relationships if we don't formalise this work and provide adequate funding towards it as well. Just to supplement on the point that India's made, it is this project work in this insecure employment that we're seeing particularly a turnover in professional roles in, so you're employed on a fixed-term project or something because the funding is insecure, even if it is something like something that isn't described where you're working with more vulnerable groups trying to deliver something, and the staff in it have no idea what happens to them at the end of that contract period. They are the ones who are leaving. That is the group to which we are seeing the biggest turnover in among staff who just do not know where the next job is. It doesn't have to be like this. There are plenty of other areas where project work is normal, but it is undertaken by permanent staff. There is an understanding that there will be more projects and that you will keep those people on, retain those skills and be able to give them security of employment. That is one of our biggest areas of concern at the moment. We are seeing almost a two-tier workforce, a permanent workforce that has security, fair work and the things that the Scottish Government talks about, but there is a second group who are on fixed-term contracts who don't have any security, who don't have certainty about what will happen if their funding runs out, or who are often leaving before the most crucial phase of a project. Last six months, they are looking for a job somewhere else because they just don't know what will happen next. Kate, do you want to come back in? Just really briefly, I think that that's all been extremely useful. I suppose the point perhaps that we could return to, maybe not in this session but in future, is the point that Liam made, which is that if we accept that there are significant outcomes when there is joint working, how do you formalise on a macro basis that joint working? The only way that it worked between health and social care is when joint boards had to share budgets. That is formalising it on a macro level, on a universal level. That is where we want to unpack that further. How do you get to a point where we are sharing budgets in order to embed preventative spend? I believe that it is on the Government's radar to look at metrics and measuring and trying to get some standardisation because we are also hearing from our previous work the amount of time and effort that it takes to prove anything, any outcome and any kind of metrics or toolkits or whatever to do that, I think, would be very helpful. Thanks for the evidence so far. I definitely agree with Mr Cameron about the bleak picture that's been painted about the impact of budget pressures on the sector. Mr Sinclair said earlier that he pointed to the culture counts evidence that was submitted around a specific figure that was required, 30 per cent increase in the portfolio budget that was required. Obviously, we have heard about the impact that the current budget cuts have been having. I just wanted to ask the rest of the panel, is that a figure that others would support? What culture counts have said, if not, is there a specific figure that you are looking for in terms of the budget? I genuinely don't know what the specific figure would be. I know what a figure we need for this year's pay round, but that doesn't necessarily reflect the need for wider increases in the budget and to address some of the areas that have been cut over the last 10 years. What we absolutely need for those centrally funded organisations is for their funding to be at a realistic level where they can achieve the goals that we want to achieve around fair work, around sustainability, around the wage and to allow them to compete on salary in a way that others can, and that is not what we have seen in the past four years. Ultimately, that meant that the budgets have had to be revised to fill the gaps, which takes time. I talked in our written submission in a cycle last year where we eventually got that intervention and I rushed to make sure that staff got paid before Christmas. I am not at a point right now where I know whether or not anyone who is working in the museums, the National Museum, National Library and National Gallery, will get their April 23 pay rise before Christmas this year. I suspect that it is quite unlikely now, because paying negotiations have not even started and that budget intervention is needed. Rather than just saying to those organisations that it is a flat budget to try and make savings when they have repeatedly been unable to do so, it is acknowledging that they are not in the same place as some other public bodies and saying, okay, fine, we do need to look at this. Alternatively, we need to give you more options around how you can raise funding elsewhere. We talked in our submission about the museum freedoms that have been granted to some of the museums in England. We are not overly positive about some of them, I have to say, but being able to look at multi-year budgets, look at multi-year funders and be able to retain your reserves in a way that they are not able to do right now is a huge challenge for these institutions. Certainly, we would support changes around some of their finance rules to give them more freedom to do that kind of work. It is not without challenges. If there is not an increase in central funding, as it referred to previously, where does the money come from? Is it reduction in services? Is it reduction in opening hours? Is it charging more? Is it looking to sponsorship, which brings its own problems as the book festival has found this year? I would not put a number on it, but it is a choice that Government has to make. If, and I do not think that 30 per cent is an unreasonable figure, if it is not coming from that, if that is not coming from central Government, they will go into need to find it from somewhere else or cut services to the same level. It is difficult to put a figure on the increase that has been necessary and that figure is somewhere around 30 per cent. It represents the level of cut that we have had, but the key thing is that the services that we delivered 10 years ago are now dramatically different. Public expectation of services and how we might deliver is quite different, so it is hard to estimate in the basis of what has happened over the past 10 years what we would need. I think that what we need is a period of stability to allow us to design services that are genuinely fit for the 21st century and are genuinely effective in the current model that we do not have. We have just published a culture report that talks about what was described as donut funding. It comes to the nub of project funding and the core staff. You mentioned your fund raising for your own staff. Would you like to see a more realistic funding model that reflected the support costs for projects rather than just the project and outcome? I am seeing nods round the head that it is not good for the official report. Does anyone want to come in? I will go to leave and then dunk in. Absolutely, nodding dog, nodding dog. There are a couple of points to pick up. If you provide a good value level of stability at the heart of all of this, you get better outcomes, you get more systemic change, you get all those health and wellbeing stuff that we discussed around the questions. We can apply more focus to that transformation agenda if it is stable. I am not going to go into the specifics of culture accounts, because I think that Laurie will come in next week, so I will let her talk to that. However, it is safe to say that it was done with a lot of research and it still represents extraordinary good value for the public purse in terms of that intervention. If you can get the intervention of an amount of money plus multi-year stability that allows the base to be consolidated and stable, you can have much more of that energy and skill and talent focused on the transformation agenda for a world in a context that is changing fast, and everyone accepts that. I think that your question is really central, so Scotland has an amazing track record of delivering large-scale capital projects, and the Scottish National Gallery is opening the Scottish galleries this month, for example. There is a recognition of the need for staff to support them, but the long-term impact of the funding pressure means that that is dissipated, so projects can start to use it successfully. It will be staff for a period of time, but eventually it succumbs to the general pressure on funding and becomes part of that revenue challenge. I think that we are not sustaining some of the great things that we are achieving through that capital investment. That doughnut model is really good. We are describing it. I think that the challenge with any assigned or hypothesised funding—this is not just a criticism and comment, but it is also something that you get with charitable donations. If it is funding that must be used on ex-purpose, it cannot be used to build the foundations that that project is standing on, so it does not pay for the building, it does not pay for the IT, it does not pay for the infrastructure that pays the staff, and the inability to then that foundation has been eroded over time because it cuts the rest of the budget, it is harder and harder to deliver those things or move that money around. As I say, it is a challenge for charitable organisations whether given a donation that must be used for something—sometimes it was more than 100 years ago—and that does not translate into a modern context now, but we are also seeing it with funding from Government where we want to use it for this and to support it, and that is just something that we are not able to do. I suppose that it reflects on what everyone has been saying and echoing that, but if we are looking for some quick fixes or something to relieve the immediate pressures that the sector finds itself in, I suppose that it is about looking for that stability that Duncan mentioned. I am really not asking for efficiency savings at this point in time to really let the sector just find that, find its feet, and hopefully, yes, if there was an extra 30 per cent funding, that would be fantastic, but I actually start to move forward because I certainly feel as far as libraries are concerned that we cannot go on finding efficiencies without seriously disrupting the business model. I think that another kind of question that I had was about what we could potentially do if there was extra funding and particularly focused on health and wellbeing. I was struck about some of the evidence that was given by Pamlet earlier about the impact on library cuts on children and young people. I have a concern that, irrespective of what we would like to do in the future in building up the culture sector, children and young people have less opportunities than they previously had. If we carry on the current trajectory, they will have even fewer opportunities. I just wanted to specifically press the rest of the panel on the impact on children and young people on potentially charging from museums, as was mentioned earlier. I know Cara was talking about the impact on disabled children and young people. If we are talking about outcomes, I am particularly interested to hear what people think about the current budget trajectory that they will have on life opportunities for children and young people. I have touched on it a little bit already, but I think that there will be a limiting of opportunities to children and young people if more museums move towards the funding model of generating income through entry fees. It is a real barrier. We are going to see less family visits, less school visits, and that is a real concern. On top of that, I think that there is a concern that I have mentioned already that when cuts are made, it tends to be learning engagement staff that go first. It tends to be a reduction in learning engagement activities that are cost saving measures made first. That has a direct impact on children and young people. A lot of the time, museums offer a plethora of exciting and engaging activities for children and young people to engage them in the museum because we know that we have to build those relationships and we have to do a bit extra to engage audiences. We cannot just expect them to come into the space and find it engaging. We have to work with our communities and identify who is not coming and work to attract people to those spaces. That includes young people and children to make sure that the museums are not engaging space to them. There is a real risk with continued cuts that it will have a direct impact on them. A lot of our members work in provision of participation for children and young people right across the country in terms of geography and actively looking to reach across social divides. A lot of that work is done on a zero cost or a very limited cost basis. All of that is under threat in terms of the cost pressure to maintaining that. That raises quite profound questions around equality of opportunity and access. We have members who deliver performance opportunities at world class level. In Edinburgh, we have Imaginate delivering the Edinburgh International Children's Festival. It is one of the festivals that is held up around the world as an exemplar of how to do that and do it well in terms of partnership working. The commitment of that is about giving people and children and young people the opportunity to transform their world view and their confidence and how they feel about the world, regardless of what they go on to do next. Some people do go on and choose a career in the culture sector, but the intention is about giving people better life chances and children and young people. There is a huge commitment to that, but, as we have already touched on, it is under enormous strain. The risk is that, in order to provide the service on an on-going basis, you get a kind of creeping of a charging agenda, not through choice, but through sheer necessity. That is what nobody wants because the fundamental principle that people are trying to deliver is a quality of opportunity and that everyone deserves the opportunity to participate in those activities. Just to build on that point about cultural careers, I think that this is one of the other areas to which we have a concern about where we are with funding within the sector, particularly the museum and gallery sector, in all just that diversity is already a huge problem within their workforce. One of the concerns that we have about this insecurity of funding is that we are struggling to see what career paths into the sector now look like without having to go through a series of temporary fixed-term insecure jobs, or, in some cases, unpaid jobs entirely volunteering, because to get into it, you will have had to get into a point where you will have had to have done that work to be able to get in. We do not see how what a career path now looks like to get into the sector unless you have some means of support beyond the salary that you get paid to do the work. The challenge that we get put back to us from some of our members is that I can afford to work here because my partner works for a bank, but that does not help with the next generation coming in. I can understand why people from the outside looking at a career in culture will be asking themselves a question about, can I afford to do this? Is this something that I can afford my children to do? I think that your point, Neil, is really valid. The children and young people that we work with are, I suppose, the most hidden in society and face the largest barriers in terms of accessing what is already there in terms of supports, and there are huge supports there. The myriad of different initiatives that the Scottish Government has taken in terms of the looks after children attainment fund are really creative ways in which we can support young people. I guess that there is a lot of fragmentation and sometimes a lot of coherency in terms of how local authorities can administer those funds or allow us to innovate services to be able to access those funds differently. I think that we probably need a clear framework for that cross-departmental cultural investment on a national level but also on a local authority level. I guess what the strategy refresh is trying to do is to look at the role of culture across all those sectors but to empower local authorities to take the risk to buy in different ways of commissioning services to look at what can be enhancing educational cultural access for those children. Just to give you an example, you were talking about the ring-fencing. That would be amazing. That would be an absolute springboard. Even if you took 1 per cent SNP commitment just on the level 4 funding, you would release £18.5 million ring-fenced funding for arts to be able to levy in different types of resources. We try to raise £1 for every pound of public expenditure that we are given in a local authority. We try to raise another pound on top of that. That is a pretty good value. The cultural sector has been very effective at diversifying its audiences and attracting young people and to move to their audiences, reflecting the communities in which they operate. However, the kind of activities that support that are those that are most vulnerable given the kind of financial pressure or experience and the desperation to keep the doors open is the last final sign of collapse. Those kinds of things go by the wayside. What we do is build in a problem for audiences down the line because we are not attracting the current generation of young people, we are not becoming part of their everyday life. It is the very area that is most vulnerable given the current financial situation. I should say that I spent two and a half hours in Edinburgh central laggy this year, which means that I will spend more time in the laggy within a Scottish premiership game this week. That is pretty unusual for me. For me, I am a new member to the committee, I think that context is quite important here and some of the points that India made about the fact that you have seen local government, as far as we are talking about local government here. Of course, it is not just local government. Eight councils have gone bankrupt, so it is at the border of a 40 per cent reduction in funding to local government. The idea that Scotland can be immune from that is just a nonsense debate, as far as I am concerned. You mentioned about the example in Wales where assets are being sold off. Much of what is being said just now has been said for at least 35 years. When I first joined local government in 1988, the same discussions were taking place, much like Cliff Edge in Crisis. I think that we have had continued, as Duncan said, managed decline. In fact, he goes back to the mid-70s when the Government had to go to the IMF to get funding, but if it had managed decline in public services over that time, and 13 years of austerity does not help that, so what is really useful to me is to understand the context. For example, in your paper, Duncan, you mentioned two figures, 36 per cent decline in public library services between 2010 and 2011 in 2021, and also 22 per cent another figure in relation to museums. It is useful to me to know how that compares with the rest of the UK, because we are not talking about a different, the comparison is valid, because the same funding is underlying much of it. The reason for that is that I quite like to know where it is that the Scottish Government is doing either something good—I do not expect to get too much of that—but where it is doing something that is neglectful or impinging on the cultural sector, which it could change. Liam has made a couple of suggestions in terms of potential ring fencing and other things as well, but getting a context and a feel for where—I like part of the committee's role—the Scottish Government could improve or where it is doing well and should do more of it is probably more relevant or more useful to me in trying to get a handle on some of those things. I think that that is a very good question, and the paper quotes some figures in terms of the cuts. In relation to the rest of the UK, certainly from museums, it would appear that local authority cuts have been a bit more severe. That is slightly misleading if you look pure at local authority direct funding to museums in Scotland. The cuts have been less drastic. The figure does not recognise this. There is some direct central government funding to most local authority museums in England, which compensates for the difference. The overall level of public funding has declined by about the same amount. You are right that I have been a public sector for a long time. We have been cutting pretty much for the entirety of my career at Murrachudais, but the problem that we have now is twofold. The cuts have been going on for a very long time, and the level of funding does not match the level of public aspiration. Public aspiration is probably going up. Critically, the problem of what the Scottish Government may be able to assist is that currently we are in a furious process of continuing to mine that decline, but if we could rethink the sector, it may be that with a little bit more funding, we could still deliver a great deal. At the moment, we are having multiple conversations across the country all about shrinking what we are doing. That makes it difficult to look at co-operation and shared services, and there is not really a conversation identifying what it is as a society that we wish to see delivered for our population and to maintain our economic prosperity and to encourage inward investment. That is being lost in the white noise of managing the endless rounds of cuts. That is the difficulty. If you look back over time, I was reading some memos from Julian Spalding, a predecessor of mine in the late 90s, be mourning the budget cuts that were experienced at the time, and some of the sentences I had written myself. However, we had a period of stability that followed that and regrouped and created a service that was different, but I could cope with its contemporary environment through the North East and up to the last 10 years. At the moment, we do not have that breathing space and an opportunity to reimagine and to restructure and to amend our services. That is the difficulty. It is a rapid process of decline that is soaking up all of the capacity. If we could stabilise that, it would make a huge difference to how we can actually meet the Government's agenda. I have your downmarker coming in next, but I will go to India and then to Liam. Just to do a comparison between Scotland and the rest of the UK, I mentioned the figure earlier about a decrease in investment of 23 per cent in the decade between the financial years 2019 and 2020. Obviously, it is likely to be even more than that now within the past two years and the impact of the cost of living. However, when we did that research, we did have a similar picture in the rest of the UK in relation to a reduction in investment in the decade of austerity. However, when we look at England, we can see that there are two key sources of funding for the museum sector that are not available in Scotland. One of those is the Arts Council England through the national portfolio organisations between 2023 and 2026. 77 museums across England will receive £36.5 million, and that is to go towards core funding, which I have already mentioned is just so essential for the museum sector. Of course, that figure would need to be proportional to the population of a sector in Scotland, but that is still a significant investment that would make a massive difference to the landscape in Scotland if there was a source of core funding that museums could access. Once the core funding into the infrastructure that museums provide into the buildings, into the staff and into the collections will generate all the other outcomes that we have been talking about, such as health and wellbeing, engaging new audiences and delivering for young people and children. That is what needs to be invested in before all those other outcomes can be realised. The other source of funding is the museum estate and development fund, which is a capital fund and goes towards urgent maintenance and infrastructure. We have already mentioned about the real issues with buildings that museum collections are housed in. A lot of them are very old and have a lot of issues that come along with that, so it would be really welcome for a similar fund like this in Scotland to address the urgent issues that are needed to the maintenance and infrastructure of buildings. You also asked about something that Scotland is doing well, and I would say that ambition set out in the museum strategy is fantastic. We are really pleased to see that Scotland recognises the role that museums can have in anti-racism, in decolonisation and the role of museums in all that. That is something that is absent in England, so it is really great to see that ambition. Along with that ambition, we need the funding to accompany it to fully realise that. Those ambitions will not be realised without that core funding. Liam, do you want to come in and then bring David and Pamela as well? Great, thanks. We are not immune to the global economic dynamics to all of this. I will pick up the ambition theme in the first instance that India has introduced. When I talked to theatre and dance colleagues south of the border, consistently over many years, one of the things that they have said is that you have a Government that gets this. I do not think that that is what they all say about the UK Government in universal terms. It is about how we turn that ambition into reality. One of the things that we look slightly more enviously north south on is the stability of multi-year funding. If the Scottish Government could enable Creative Scotland to go through its multi-year funding process over the next 12 months and to award genuine multi-year commitments, that could be transformative in terms of the stability that it would provide and then be a platform on which to build that ambition. In a UK-wide context, members are probably aware that the UK Treasury and HMRC are consulting on the cultural tax relief legislation. There are some quite worrying amendments being discussed, certainly as it relates to theatre tax relief. Two of them are particularly worrying to our members. One is that the guidance around what qualifies as an exempt or tax relief eligible piece of performance would change, so it would remove from scope some of the more immersive theatrical experiences. That is something that the sector in Scotland is excellent. Back to the children and young people point, a lot of those experiences are designed to be immersive, to involve the participants as audience members rather than to stand back and take it in. That would have a huge implication in terms of the overall stability of the sector of that relief. The other one is that they are consulting that they would not potentially pay out any tax relief if the tax relief is material to the solvency of the claiming applicant. You can see that back to the perfect storm analogy, because theatre tax relief, particularly at the current levels that the Treasury has said that will uphold to 2025, and there is a massive amount of lobbying to extend that forever. If you get into a vicious circle scenario, where the theatre tax relief is the underpairing element, because of all the other cost pressures and income pressures, you could have a real exacerbated collapse if that guidance goes through. Anything that the Scottish Government can do to bear lobbying pressure on to UK Government as it goes through this exercise on tax reliefs would be hugely important. So, multi-year funding has come up and stability funding has come up quite a few times. The cabinet secretary in the letter to us has talked about, he is keen to work on it, but he says that future years could be best only indicative in terms of budgets. Is that not a bit pointless? Is it not impossible to plan future years on figures that are just best indicative? I think yes, in short, yes. Again, with the overall level of budget that the culture budget represents, I am not sure that there are many in the sector that understand why we cannot get to this sooner. I am slightly hesitant to say what I am about to see next, but in a way of finding some central ground, even indicating on a multi-year basis a minimum amount of money that would be awarded, no matter what scenarios the Government might face would bring stability. The constant caveat of every year that the entire sector has to wait and go through a budgeting exercise is fundamentally destabilising the sector in the way that we have already discussed. So, the national library is actually almost a metaphor for the points that we are making that are visible to the public is, in fact, the 11th floor. There are 10 floors of stacks beneath it, which are storage for their collection, and one of several sites of storage for the collection that the public does not see, all of which are the foundation that that experience has built upon. In terms of what Scotland does well and maybe is not in the rest of the UK, I will play a little bit to type and talk about pay. Our research this year has been backed up by similar research done by ICON, the curators organisation, shows that staff in Scotland are now better paid than staff in London, unbelievably. The salaries now have gone ahead of the London service. I genuinely have no idea how our London membership afford to live in London and work for some of those collections. Some of that has been because of work done by the Scottish Government to insist on minimum standards around living wage and that we have managed to replicate some of that out of charities. We would like to see more of that and that being pushed out to other bodies funded through Creative Scotland and others to raise those standards in some of the smaller charitable organisations, but it has to come with funding. It has to be carrot rod and stick, saying to them, you must pay the living wage to qualify for funding. It may well, in some cases, force them to close. We want the funding to be there to make sure that they can pay a salary at the level at which people can afford to survive and live and have those standards. I would like to say that it is fascinating to compare Scotland with the rest of the UK, but as far as libraries go, colleagues elsewhere in the UK would say that libraries in Scotland have a much more co-ordinated approach to their service delivery and, to a certain extent, colleagues down south envy the opportunity that we have to develop services in Scotland, and that is partly because we have a national strategy for public libraries in Scotland, which is supported by both the Scottish Government and COSLA. That is enabled us not just to attract project funding from the Government for different work packages, but also from the private sector. We have been able to leverage funding outside the public sector to support public libraries. However, if I was going to benchmark libraries, I probably would not benchmark the rest of the UK. I would probably be looking to the Republic of Ireland, Scandinavia and Australia. All those models of funding include direct funding from the Government to the library sector. Some of them are a mixture of local government running libraries, but there is direct funding to help to deliver programmes. I think that that might be something that would help support the sector through these challenging times, but also supporting Government priorities, supporting the national performance framework and so on. I do not look to England and the delivery model there as something that we would want to emulate. I would be quite sorry if we ended up moving in that direction, because I think that I have got something worth protecting. It was not so much about a King Parris, and I was really interested to hear that between the different services. It was not so much about a global economic situation. It is simply the fact that in Scotland the budget is driven by what the Government and Westminster want to spend on its services, and we get what we get as a consequence of that. It is not thought about what we need, it is what we should get as a consequence. There is a vital difference between Ireland and Australia, which is pretty obvious. I am not looking for an answer, because I know you are pressed for time, but I was really interested in the Van Gogh exhibition, which happened last year in Edinburgh, thinking that it is going to other places now. I know that one of the issues is the cost for a lot of people you cannot, you want to be able to pay to get it, but I wonder if there is anything in that kind of initiative that might be helpful to museums, given the treasures that they have, that kind of bespoke kind of exhibition travelling around. Anyway, I am not looking for an answer just yet, because I know that you have got to move on. We shall move on. Thank you for that. Mr Ruskell. Yeah, thanks very much and thanks for your evidence. This morning has been really useful, I think, to get an updated picture for this year. I had a couple of questions. I wanted to go back to Liam's point around what a strategic transformative approach to embedding culture would look like. I saw a lot of colleagues nodding their heads around the table when you were talking, and others have come in and explained what that might actually look like in terms of services, particularly struck by some of the work that Art Link is doing on the ground links for education, mental health and everything else. Can you point to an area in the UK where councils, devolved administrations and other bodies have actually taken that leap and said, yes, we are going to do this, we are going to do the full Christie, we are going to tackle preventative spend, we are going to invest in culture for all the transformation that we know that it can achieve? If there is an example, we could point out that would be useful. I have a second question, if you want me to wrap this in right now. It is just around other sources of funding. We have had more evidence coming in for the music venues trust about not just cultural tax relief, which we have already mentioned, but relief for small venues, potential for levy on stadium and arena shows. I am struck by the fact that clearly culture makes a lot of money and a lot of wealth, but there is big culture, and then I would make a distinction between big culture and the cultural organisations and practices that you are involved with. It is how we can see a transfer of wealth from big culture to community culture. I will link to that if you have any thoughts on transient visitor levy, other sources of income that could come into the sector during these difficult times. I am struck by that figure of 1 per cent, £18.5 million. That could come from government, it could come from a variety of other sources as well. I am interested in those two points. In terms of strategic vision, I think that the museum strategy for Scotland and the culture strategy provide clear ambitions for the culture and museum sectors. Of course, we are waiting in anticipation for the refreshed action plan to come along with the culture strategy. I have just reiterated in the same point that I have already made that any kind of actions or ambitions do really need to have funding attached to them for them to be meaningful and for those ambitions to be realised. In terms of ways that we could generate more funding, I would really welcome the idea of the 1 per cent of budgets being ring fence for culture. We have also heard a lot of talk about the percentage for the arts and the money that that could generate, but I would encourage the scope of that to be broadened to percentage for culture so that all cultural organisations can benefit from that. I think that that would be really transformative. The visitor-living bill, I think that there is real potential for that to bring income. We know that museums contribute greatly and the wider culture sector contributes greatly to the visitor economy, but we need museums to be in the room during those discussions. We need them to be able to contribute to how the progress of the bill is going. If it is fully realised, we need them to be in the room when the decisions are being made of where the money should go to make sure that it is being reinvested back into the museums and the cultural organisations that are really making Scotland an attractive place to visit and a vibrant place to visit. I have one contextual example that I will pick up in a moment, but it is about starting with the context that we already understand here but need to understand better. There is something about the sum total of the parts that exist within our cultural ecology that, if we could create mechanisms and ways of bringing that sum total together, that would be transformative. One of the things that is really exciting about being a citizen in Scotland is that we have a Government that is committed to the wellbeing economy. That is truly transformative and that is not a UK-wide thing. For me, it is about what is the cultural contribution to a massive transformation agenda as we move towards net zero that is going to place wellbeing and economic prosperity at the heart of that.  I do think what is going on in Manchester's interesting in terms of how they understand that kind of network. They have looked north of the border on a whole host of things, whether it is international festivals, venue development, and they are absolutely got their act together and really thinking about what that kind of north-west cultural regeneration agenda looks like, not only in terms of big culture to use your term but also that kind of wider impacts piece. I think that you make a really important point about the different components in a cultural ecology that are really important. You do not get the headline acts in a music or performing arts context or probably any context if they have not had the opportunity to hone their craft. There is something about how we generate ways of taking levy, ways of taking some of that economic impact that people are benefitting in the big culture arena and really reinvest it into that grassroots agenda, which includes participation, because then you get the health and wellbeing outcomes but you also get that kind of stability of talent pipeline that is absolutely vital and all of that. I love local initiatives that are worthwhile mentioning here in terms of creative commissioning models. The Thrive Edinburgh is a network of emotional mental wellbeing network who have looked at what they can do collectively through the arts and others to protect the mental health of their communities and the Edinburgh community commissioning through EVOC. That is through the community mental health framework funding. I think that that point around big culture is really interesting. When I have been talking about organisations budget channels, I have been particularly talking about the National Museum, the National Library and the National Galleries. I have not particularly been talking about Historic Environment Scotland. It is not that they are not without budget challenges that they absolutely are, but they have the Edinburgh Castle and Sirling Castle. It is an oversimplication to say that they pay for everything else, but it is not so far away from the truth. That is big culture paying for little culture, but it is a quirk of history that those are part of Historic Environment Scotland, rather than an strategic plan, rather than sitting with local government or with a charity or some other. If there are more opportunities to link up that big culture into little culture and get that grassroots funding from the big high-profile attractions into small areas, as happens in Historic Environment Scotland, I think that that would be really an interesting to see. A lot of our structures do not allow that to happen just now. Just to pick up on the point that Liam has raised, we do have a cultural ecosystem in Scotland, which is actually currently very effective at developing talent both front-of-house and back-of-house talent. It is why Scotland, in many respects, punches above its weight culturally and we have some amazing world-class content coming out of the country. However, it is a delicate system, and one of the problems with the current situation where independent decisions are being taken is that it jeopardises that, because you can take one element of the way that seems in itself relatively modest, but the impact tax on the ecosystem can be quite dramatic. That is one of the concerns that I have that some kind of overview to have a sense that we are inadvertently losing something that is really important is something that we do not currently have. That was all good. I am going to bring Alexander in and then I will come to him. This has really been an excellent session, because you really have been very candid about where you are and each of your organisations and how you feel. Long-term finances from local government have been discussed. Local government is still probably the one who is the most significant funder in many aspects of the culture sector throughout Scotland. However, you have talked about the managing decline and fighting for survival. In all my time, I had the opportunity to spend 18 years in local government from 1917. During that time, I said similar when I was in that sector on trying to manage where we are. Since I have come here since 2016, the Scottish Government has come forward with action plans, strategies and working groups. You have all participated, I am sure, among all those. It would be interesting to hear from you if you feel that you are listened to within those action plans and working groups and strategies. What is the future of today's meeting? It sounds quite bleak in reality, but is there a sector or a way forward that you see within your organisation that you can and want to achieve? You have talked about other parts of the globe and things that are done differently. We have said that we have punched about our weight and that Scotland gets it when it comes to culture and does understand, but there is still a massive gap that we still need to fill. It is how we manage to fill that gap and how we manage to really be the world leading, because we are. There is no question that we are world leading in many sectors and we have the pride of that. Our culture is very strong in our identity in Scotland. However, we need to see the future. What is the future? Do you believe that you are listened to and given the opportunity among all those strategies, plans and working groups? I would say that the answer is yes, but with a caveat. The caveat is that there will have to be some material change being seen in what comes through in the budget bill. That is twofold. That is one around a commitment to what stability of central cultural funding looks like. To pick up your point, that translates beyond that into local government funding, so that local government does not retract any further than it already has done. The third strand is that this last bit is probably the most complex if we want to move to a cross-portfolio approach of cultural contribution. That is probably not achieved in one budget round, but we need an active pathway to that over the rest of this parliamentary term. I echo exactly what Liam Kerr said. I do think that we are listened to in the working groups that we participate in. The situation that we have got—I kicked off with this—is not something that has happened over the past 12 months or so. It has been going on for a considerable period of time. You cannot keep reducing what is now miniscule budgets without the model having to change. That means a reduction in the service. That is where we are. That is the reality. Although I too have worked in the public sector for many years and have experienced various budget rounds, I think that we are in a different scenario at the moment. I think that some of the points that Liam Kerr made are perhaps ways to mitigate that. Is there anyone else? I am not seeing any other people jumping at that one. There has been talk in the past about the central belt in Scotland that seems to receive the biggest lion's share of things. Do you think that that is the case? I know that there are fantastic organisations at the length and breadth of the country, but is the lion's share of the resource, manpower and cultural involvement central belt-based? I believe that it reflects the unbalanced spread of our population. We have an odd demographic mix and that distorts the way in which culture is delivered. That is often a difficulty for us in comparing ourselves with models south of the border. What we are trying to do is wildly different, so I think that that is inevitable. In terms of local authority funding, I do not think that it is particularly skewed towards the central belt. It just reflects the investment of those authorities. You will get that impact of national institutions if they are in the major cities and inevitably create that. The same as London has in England is the same factor. The risk in which we are now is that the smaller-scale provision, not in the central belt, is existentially vulnerable. You can end up with an even more skewed pattern of provision than we currently have. We need to have a sense of what is the minimum provision that we aspire to. We have to deliver effective cultural provision across the whole of the country. I do not think that we have a sense of that. There is no way that that has been put together. I think that at least some of it is what I was referring to as the quirks of history, whereby organisations and properties that have run by central-govern bodies like Historic Environment Scotland or the National Museum happen to be in the central belts or on the east coast, whereas those that are in the Highlands and Islands—again, I am making generalisations because it does not overly have tended to form more to organisations like National Trust of Scotland and other smaller charities. They are the ones for whom they are facing challenges around fundraising, tourism and particularly issues. We have had members reporting to us about particular issues around urban and bend laws about retracting staff, not necessarily simply because there is no accommodation. You cannot get visitor services or catering staff for anything because they cannot afford to live in the area, because there is no accommodation for them to get. It is a wider issue around accommodation without any of the country, but it is not necessarily funded directly out of the cultural budget rather through Creative Scotland and then out into those charities, so it is several steps removed. I appreciate that we are here to discuss the Scottish Government's budget, but I just wanted to ask about the role of the private sector. It has been touched on a few times already this morning, but do witnesses of the panel feel that there is more potential here to help with funding in relation to the private sector? I mean, there have been some, I think that David mentioned, well documented issues over the summer in relation to the book festival here in Edinburgh, but I am not really talking about sponsorship. I am more interested in imaginative ways of involving the private sector or, indeed, the charitable sector in helping with the dilemma and whether anyone felt that that was viable and ways in which that could happen. I do not know if anyone has any reflections on that. I think that the short answer is yes, and I am glad that you said beyond sponsorship, because I think that that is absolutely—we have got to move the focus collectively beyond that, not least because the discretionary spend budgets that sponsorship arrangements have traditionally come from are under challenge for the private sector as well. I think that there are some interesting ventures that have been set up in the last year or so. I am thinking of culture and businesses marketplace venture, which is looking at the reciprocal skills exchange that can happen between those in the culture sector and those in the private sector around presentation training, for example. In our sector, there are a number of our members who actively sell or exchange on a common exchange basis presentation skills. Do you have staff that need to deliver presentations, hold meetings, can we help, and vice versa, what can the private sector help with? That needs expedited in terms of that. I think that it also fits really well within the frame of the wellbeing economy, which is looking at other economic transaction models, rather than just all being about selling necessarily. How can you exchange skills? I think that it would also be interesting to see how that sort of model scaled up would fit in a cross-portfolio agenda, because you have a kind of examination of the skills within a wider economy and looking at who has got what particular strengths and what areas. I think that there is some interesting work on the ground. Is it transformative yet? No, we are near it, and at the same time, we are seeing the sponsorship agenda come down. We have to really think about that pathway across the next few years that brings together, because every bit of the economy is under strain at the moment. I think that we all accept that, certainly in the theatre and dance sector, we understand the private sector as well, so it is about how we can pull together with common cause. I think that going back to what I said earlier on about collaborative working and calling goals, it is about finding that territory with the private sector. Recently, libraries had a bit of success working with the John Lewis partnership, where they had a circular future initiative on the go, and they were looking to support work or, if you like, to reach out to the community to promote that whole circular future discussion. Through discussion with ourselves and the application from SLIC, they have sponsored a number of lined-in main hubs across libraries in Scotland, which has not only involved libraries, but has seen them engage with the third sector and community groups to deliver a new service through libraries in Scotland. It exists. I have seen other examples of libraries working, not just in Scotland, but beyond Scotland as well, with journalists in the newspaper industry, again around common goals and freedom of expression, curating collections and maintaining collections. It is not every industry that is in the culture sector, but I am sure that there are many examples where common purposes exist. It is a very good point, and what I have seen in the past 10 years is a sector that has become much more imaginative in engaging with the private sector and is much more hard headed about how much it charges to do that. It is a significant income stream. The challenge, as Liam alluded earlier, is that the scale of that does not equal the budget pressures that we are facing from public sector funding, and it is how you sustain organisations. However, one of the aspirations absolutely has to be to continue to maximise that source of income, and I think that there is real potential there. Do you find, Donald? I think that that is, unless I can say any, a hand is going up desperately. I think that that is exhausted as old today. Oh, Keith, yes, isn't it, Mike? I don't have an answer, but if anybody has got any thoughts on it, if he could maybe write back to us. On Donald's point, I think that the point I was raising about the Van Gogh exhibition, I don't know enough about it, other than the fact that it's probably only that exhibition I've been to, but it seems to me that that probably raised an awful lot of money, and I don't know who it raised money for. If there's anything that can be learned about that, because he probably used pieces of art that were in public collections, so just to see whether any thought can be given, because I think that he made a huge amount of money just in Edinburgh, but it's gone into, I think, London and Manchester. On the other hand, just to say, I mentioned there's an Edinburgh city library yesterday, the central library, it's got an exhibition there on witches. It sits just right next to where most witches were killed in Edinburgh, and yet there's virtually nobody in that building at all. The streets were packed still, even post the festival, with tourists from everywhere, and I think a little bit of advertised you could have had folk going in there. I mean, even the library part of it was virtually empty, but you could have folk going in there who may also have gone into the library, and you could possibly monetise it as well. That may be anathema to some people, but any kind of entrepreneurial ideas that might help with their funding situation, I think, would be worth hearing about, and I think for the work of the committee, certainly for me, if anyone's got any ideas, if they want to send them in. Thank you. I think we'll leave it there. It's been a long session, but it's very, very helpful. Again, thank you all for your submission work for coming along today, and no doubt you'll see the outcomes in the coming weeks when we make our recommendations on the budget. Thank you very much. I'm now going to private session, and we'll have a brief five-minute suspension.


I started out being a physiologist so I guess that's what I'm interested in is the structure and function of cells. But now we do a lot of biochemistry and molecular biology as well as physiology. I think those names have become much broader now. There's very few people that just work on one aspect of the problem. We're working on projects in skeletal muscle and in the heart. The skeletal muscle projects are basically coupling between the electrical signal and the release of calcium arms that generate contraction. That probably sounds like a very small project but we're getting down into the nitty-gritty as the proteins and which amino acids are important, which subunits of the protein are important. So we're dealing with proteins that have hundreds and hundreds of different amino acids in them but only one or two of those are important in the coupling process and so we're homing in on those amino acids and how they affect the function of the protein. In the heart we're basically doing similar experiments but we're focusing more on changes in amino acids which lead to heart disease. So in a protein that's got say 500, 600 amino acids, a change in just one of those can give you heart failure and so we want to know how that amino acid affects the structure of the protein. Early on we discovered how to measure electrical signals from proteins that detect an action potential from the brain and we were some of the first research group in the world to do that. There were probably four or five groups and we were all working at much the same time but that definitely was one of the major successes. We also discovered that the proteins that we're interested in, this is more recently, are affected in myotonic dystrophy and the changes that occur in those proteins are probably responsible for the myopathy in myotonic dystrophy and what we're working on at the moment is some of the connections between individual proteins that actually allow the electrical signal to communicate with the release of calcium ions and contraction and that's been a mystery in the field for the last 40 or 50 years and we still don't know but we think we're getting very close.