Thank you very much. It is very good to be here. I thank the committee for inviting us to give evidence. As always with such evidence sessions, we are here not only to represent Creative Scotland, but to represent the people and organisations working in culture and creativity across Scotland. We have made 1,130 funding awards, worth a total of £66.2 million, to those people and organisations over the past year.
We welcome the increase in our grant-in-aid budget for 2018-19, announced in the Scottish Government’s draft budget last week, including, importantly, an additional £6.6 million to support regular funding. That commitment from the Scottish Government fills the gap left by the decline in income from the national lottery and brings the amount of money available to us to support the next round of regular funding, 2018 to 2021, into line with current levels. It is particularly worth noting the Scottish Government’s commitment in the draft budget to our budget for the next three years. That will help us to provide more certainty for those organisations that we are able to support and has been warmly welcomed by the cultural sector.
I formally thank the cabinet secretary, Fiona Hyslop, Government officials, Creative Scotland staff and the board, MSPs, this committee, the cross-party group on culture and everyone in the culture sector who has worked hard to raise awareness of the cultural, social and economic value that creativity brings to all our lives. I am in no doubt that that has been a significant factor in the delivery of a positive budget settlement for culture at a time when public finances overall continue to be under pressure.
We currently support 118 regularly funded organisations with a combined total of £32.7 million through grant in aid, supplemented with national lottery funding. The organisations are across Scotland, across art forms and across different scales, and they include the Edinburgh International Festival, Celtic Connections, An Lanntair in Stornoway, Mareel in Shetland, the Beacon arts centre in Greenock, The Stove Network in Dumfries, Hospitalfield in Arbroath and Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen.
However, although our settlement from the Scottish Government is positive, we are mindful that demand for regular funding continues to be high. We have received 184 eligible applications and, overall, the applicants have requested £153 million over three years. We are in the process of finalising our recommendations to our board. We will carry out an impact analysis of each recommendation and undertake an equality impact assessment. Creative Scotland’s board will meet on 18 January 2018, when it will set the 2018-19 budget and, importantly, make decisions about regular funding. Our provisional date for the announcement to applicants is 25 January.
I will look back to highlights from our annual review of 2016-17. We have shared the review with the committee and have now published it on our website. Over the past full year, regularly funded organisations delivered an 8 per cent increase in the number of performances, festivals, exhibitions, projects and events, reaching 23 per cent more people in more parts of the country, particularly in the most deprived 20 per cent of areas. That funding has supported jobs and skills development as well as the local and national economies. It is interesting to note that, across the creative industries, there are 11,000 more jobs now than there were a year ago, which is a tremendous uplift.
In the same year, we made nearly 600 awards averaging £19,000 each to creative individuals and organisations through our open project funding programme, awarding almost £11.5 million of national lottery and grant-in-aid funding to projects across Scotland. The increase in the funding that is to be made available from the Scottish Government next year means that we will be able to continue to allocate national lottery funding to project funding and to strategic funding.
Our open project funding, which runs throughout the year, sits alongside the 436 awards that we have made through targeted funding, which is time-limited funding for a specific strategic purpose that amounts to more than £22.7 million for key initiatives including our screen funding, the youth music initiative and the cashback for creativity programme. We have worked closely with young people through our creative learning work, developing current and future opportunities. That is particularly important to us in the run-up to 2018.
In 2018, we will have 12 separate funds for young people. We recently announced the year of young people traineeships, a nurturing talent fund and our really exciting our shared world project, which will bring together young people from across the world to voice their views on what they want their world to be.
Another key part of our 2018-19 budget is an additional £10 million that is to be invested in screen, which will double our annual screen budget to £20 million. That will help us to build on the record level of film and television production that we are seeing in Scotland.
In 2016, spend in that area was £70 million, which is up 200 per cent over the past decade and up 30 per cent over the past year alone, so there is much to build on. That proves that Scotland’s talent, crews, facilities and award-winning locations continue to be huge attractions to film and TV productions. In the past year, those have included “T2 Trainspotting”, “Outlander”, “The Wife” and “Outlaw King”, which has just finished shooting. The overall budget of “Outlaw King” is $120 million, so what has been achieved here is significant.
Growth will be accelerated by the new screen unit. The cabinet secretary signed off the proposal for the unit, which was published last week. The collaborative proposal was developed by Creative Scotland and screen unit partners including Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, with input from people and organisations working in the screen sector. I particularly thank the screen select leadership group, whose chair is John McCormick, for its invaluable input into the process.
Combining the expertise of creative skills and enterprise partners, the screen unit proposal sets out the shared vision and ambitious targets for the Scottish screen sector. We have begun the work to implement the plans and realise the ambitions that are set out in the proposal.
Creativity really matters to Scotland. This year’s figures show that 90 per cent of Scotland’s population think that public funding for culture and creativity is a good thing, and the arts and the creative industry currently contribute £4.6 billion to the Scottish gross value added, which is up from £3.7 billion last year. The industry also supports 86,000 jobs, and we know that 90 per cent of the population regularly take part in cultural activities. Culture has a huge role to play in the successful future of our country, and it is fantastic that the Scottish Government recognises that in the draft budget. The budget recognises the talent, energy and ambition of our creative sectors and clearly positions culture as a vital part of the fabric of our society.
I look forward to the discussion.