Chamber and committees

Just as it does in wellbeing, culture has a hugely important part to play in community cohesion, particularly now. We talked about the separateness that we can experience as humans behind screens, losing connection from one another and an understanding of people in different cultures. That work, and all the wonderful people who are delivering it throughout Scotland, can help to overcome a lot of that.

I certainly do not intend for it to be strictly within Screen Scotland—I think that it will come under Creative Scotland.

It is undoubtedly a broad portfolio, and I am certainly feeling that this morning, having just been in front of the Education and Gaelic Committee. However, the synergies between education, culture and the languages, as I refer to the role—it covers Scots and British Sign Language as well as Gaelic—are obvious. Those synergies were obvious from the start, and I am increasingly creating and looking for opportunities to bring each area together.

When I was appointed, I said that the areas in the portfolio are a precious combination of our past and our future. There is no better articulation of our future than our education system, while culture and languages help us to understand our past and forge our future. I consider the portfolio to be very broad but interlinked.

The commitment is intentionally that we will consult on the content of a culture bill by the end of this parliamentary session. That is, very deliberately, a commitment that spans the whole five-year term. Equally, although I know that there are organisations that have certain views on what could usefully be included in the bill, I do not have a predetermined view of what exactly that is. I view the bill as an opportunity to spend the next however many years, in all the engagement that I have with the committee, stakeholders and the Parliament, looking for and shaping the ways in which legislation is required to move forward with our objectives in the culture portfolio.

We do not need primary legislation to do a lot of what I want to do in this parliamentary session. Equally, in the coming years, I will look for the key objectives that require a primary legislative vehicle and gather those into a potential bill.

There was rather a lot in that question. I will try to take each issue in turn, but let me know if I do not cover any important parts.

First, I would absolutely reiterate from my perspective the link between art and culture and what they mean for our society. You mentioned examples in your area; I am utterly convinced of the role that arts and culture plays in bringing people together. It is about wellbeing—in this case, moving away from the highly digitised and sometimes acrimonious society that we live in; putting devices away and connecting with one another. It is part of the human condition, and it is important that we support it.

The second part of your question was on how we will continue to support that. I would point again to the commitment to increase culture funding by £100 million between the 2023-24 budget and the 2028-29 budget. With this year’s additional £20 million, we are £70 million into that £100 million commitment—and I would note that, in our manifesto, we committed to an additional £50 million by the end of the parliamentary session. That sort of trajectory of increased culture funding is unprecedented in recent times, and it is underpinned by better multi-annual certainty, allowing organisations to plan. As I said, I think, in my opening remarks, the number of bodies throughout Scotland that are supported multi-annually is more than double the number of grants previously offered.

The other really notable thing is the geographical spread. Communities throughout Scotland are being supported. However, I would like that to be better still, and I will look to prioritise the geographical spread of the support from Creative Scotland’s multi-annual funding.

You are right to highlight the excellent work that our national performing companies do across opera, ballet, theatre and the two orchestras. Between them, those companies are receiving almost £25 million of Scottish Government funding in 2026-27, and, by way of increases, they have shared an uplift of £1 million this financial year, following an uplift of £700,000 the previous year. That is an uplift of 9.4 per cent since 2023-24. However, future budget decisions have yet to be negotiated and discussed, and I will have the national performing companies in mind, along with the rest of the culture portfolio.

As for the second part of your question, on how the new traditional music company sits alongside that, I had a really excellent round-table meeting with sector leaders in traditional music, and, among many other things, we discussed funding. A series of funding streams supports music exports; the sector leaders were keen to know from me that this move would not take away from that funding, and I was able to confirm that it would not. Equally, though, next year’s budget is a matter of negotiation, and I will confirm that to the committee once we get to that part of the year.

As you would imagine, those thoughts and proposals have already been coming to me, not least through the round-table discussion that I had, but also from the public, who, as you have said, feel that traditional music has a special resonance in the Highlands and Islands. I have not decided on the final form and structure of the proposed company, so I should not be too definitive about this, but I will certainly be mindful of locations as well as ensuring that Gaelic and Scots have equal parity with English within it.

I am hurriedly looking through my pack of papers, because I have some excellent statistics on Screen Scotland and the growth that it has experienced since it was formed in 2018. What might at one point have seemed like a very—and rightly—ambitious goal of achieving £1 billion of GVA by 2030 is now possible and, with the right moves and the right support, can be realised.

I can give you some facts for the record. The “Economic Value of the Screen Sector in Scotland in 2023” report, which was published in 2025, shows the exceptional growth in Scotland’s film and television sector that I have just spoken to. It is set out in a number of ways, but I point out, for example, that employment in Scotland’s screen sector increased by 12.1 per cent between 2021 and 2023, and that GVA in Scotland’s screen sector increased by 14.5 per cent over the same period. That is really substantial growth, and it has been achieved in Screen Scotland.

However, I very much share the view that, for its next period of growth, Screen Scotland should stand alone and have the flexibility that comes with that. That is why creating the stand-alone body is one of my priorities in the portfolio.

It is challenging. I had a really good conversation with my creative industries leadership group; it has representation from screen experts and from folks who understand content creation as a connected but separate issue, and we discussed issues such as the commissioning landscape—and funding from commissioning—being very different from what it was before, and the issue of intellectual property being all the more challenging in a modern landscape. I think that Screen Scotland has done a really good job at being nimble and seizing opportunities and, as I said, its being a stand-alone body will help us in that respect.

We have also been really adaptable, with, for example, the loss of the TV festival from Edinburgh. We, Screen Scotland and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society were able to move quickly and make it clear that we were not going to go backwards or allow a vacuum to emerge. As a result, from next year, we will have a new screen industry festival to complement the other Edinburgh festivals.

I do not for a moment underestimate how changeable and complex the landscape is, but equally I think that Screen Scotland has been particularly good and nimble at navigating it, and I want to keep supporting it.

It is right that I should begin with public service reform, given that it is going to be a prominent feature of the committee’s work and the Government’s work across the current session of Parliament. The sentence is broadly worded because we are at the beginnings, in some ways, of a process of understanding how public service reform works in the culture space. Officials have been engaged in what we call a culture cluster, which is a coming together of bodies in the culture sector to discuss how we achieve public sector reform, while we remember that this is principally about improved outcomes, as well as more efficient operating and other things.

As you can imagine, that could amount to a range of things. We are looking at backroom functions, including legal and human resources functions. I have had a good discussion with some stakeholders about the extent to which our collections are dealing independently with the challenge of cybersecurity and whether we might have strength in numbers if we were to reform that and do it singularly. We are also discussing straightforward things such as the approach to storing collections.

What this will not be about is cuts to the culture budget, because, although we might save money through some of that PSR, the commitment to increasing culture funding by £100 million in the coming years and then by an additional £50 million stands squarely alongside PSR.