In previous sessions, the committee has heard witnesses talk about the fact that the City of Edinburgh Council’s culture spending is lower than that of many other councils, for various reasons. The council has tried to protect, to a degree, the funding that has been allocated to third-party organisations through grants, but over the past three years and the next two years, the funding for the festivals will have dropped by 18 per cent. That is happening at a time when there is a crunch in public funding and getting other sources of funding is becoming more competitive, which means that local authorities have a difficult conundrum to solve when supporting culture.
There has been an interesting development in Edinburgh, which started from conversations about the Edinburgh and south-east Scotland city region deal. We thought about how we could make the most of the platforms that the Edinburgh festivals provide to foster inclusive economic growth through culture. Obviously, the city region deals focus on inclusive economic growth, not on other objectives in relation to culture, hence our focus on those conversations. That got the festivals, the council, the Scottish Government and the UK Government around the table, which was very exciting. Unfortunately, at the 11th hour, the UK Government concluded that it would not invest in culture as part of the Edinburgh city region deal, because of the terms in which city region deals are drawn.
However, the positive outcome for Scotland is that we carried on those conversations. Out of them came the platforms for creative excellence—PLACE—programme, which is a place-based initiative for Edinburgh festivals. The funding that we raise is matched by the funding from the council and the Scottish Government—each partner puts in £1 million every year. The commitment to a five-year programme has been completely transformative, because leveraging additional funding through that long-term lens means that we have been able to reach out to and work in more communities than ever, in the way that they want to be worked with. We are going in and asking what is important to them and how culture can help them to achieve that.
A lot of funding is on an annual basis and communities get understandably fed up of people coming in and saying, “I have some money this year to do something with you.” We are at the start of the PLACE approach and we are confident that it will transform how we can work with not only the communities but the creatives of the city region.
Also, because a lot of funding comes in annually, it is difficult to organise support for new commissions that have a tour around Scotland built in. The only organisation among our cluster that can do that is Imaginate, which has a year-round programme and produces the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival. Because of where it sits in the festivals calendar, it gets 15 months’ advance warning of the funding that will be available for new Scottish commissions through the festivals expo fund. That means that, in addition to featuring in Edinburgh, it can set up a tour of locations across the whole of Scotland. If there is local and national alignment between timescales, objectives and the governance of the funds, amazing things can happen.