Creative Scotland
Item 3 is an evidence session on Creative Scotland. It is approximately one year since the last time Creative Scotland gave evidence to the committee and two years since its creation. This will be the committee’s final one-off evidence session on cultural issues prior to the Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs giving evidence to the committee on 23 October.
I welcome to the committee Matt Baker, who is a public artist; Andrew Dixon, the chief executive of Creative Scotland; Gwilym Gibbons, the director of the Shetland Arts Development Agency; and Francis McKee, the director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts.
Before we begin, I note that we have received a correction to the evidence that was given at last week’s committee meeting by Francis Cummings, the director of music at the Sistema Scotland big noise project at Raploch. He has confirmed that big noise has indeed received public funding, including from Creative Scotland. He wanted that correction made to the evidence that he gave last week.
Welcome, gentlemen, and thank you for coming. Clare Adamson will begin our questions.
Over the years, I have observed that funding of the arts is not normally without controversy of some kind, not least during times of change. How many applied for what was previously called flexible funding and did not receive it under the old system? Were any anomalies thrown up in who received that funding and who did not? Given the cabinet secretary’s July letter to Creative Scotland, and Creative Scotland’s response, which was to extend flexible funding for a further six months, what concerns about the new funding models are still to be addressed?
Andrew Dixon (Creative Scotland)
First, I will put flexible funding into context. Creative Scotland is now two years old and we have carried out a major programme of change. The current focus is on the moving of 60 flexibly funded organisations into new territory in which some will be funded from grant in aid and some from the lottery.
Of course, Creative Scotland was set up to do different things. When you look at the range of different things that we have done in the past 12 months—establishing a television production fund, running the Luminate creative ageing arts festival, increasing our showcasing, running the London 2012 cultural programme, funding creative futures residencies with 70 artist residency hosts, and working in partnership with Young Scot—you can see that we have moved into lots of new territory. To do all that, we had to free up some of our grant-in-aid budget in a pressurised environment in which the core funding that we received from the Government was understandably reduced, although the Government’s overall support has increased. That is the context.
Creative Scotland inherited commitments to 60 flexibly funded organisations; the decisions on those were taken two weeks before the organisation came into being. All 60 of those organisations were doing really good work. They were high-quality cultural organisations such as festivals, theatre producers and galleries. However, they were 60 out of 120 to 130 organisations that had applied, and many others—Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the Wee Stories Theatre for Children, the Byre Theatre and the other controversies of two years ago—did not get flexible funding, which was a two-year project commitment.
Creative Scotland has been trying to make funding more sustainable and to stabilise it by reviewing all our organisations. We have increased the number of foundation organisations and we have made a few, such as Cumbernauld Theatre, the Highland Print Studio, and Edinburgh Printmakers, into foundations. We have given 22 organisations what we call annual funding, but it will be in our budget for three years. They include organisations such as St Magnus festival and some of our networking bodies such as the Federation of Scottish Theatres.
We will invite 49 organisations to bid for lottery funding, which will give them more opportunity to realise their artistic and creative ambitions. For the moment, we are giving them slightly preferential treatment, in that they are being invited to bid into a lottery programme. We hope that we will be able to support programmes of work for the next two years. I say “slightly preferential treatment”, because there are organisations such as Wee Stories Theatre for Children, the Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Byre Theatre that we also want to find ways of supporting.
We are trying to get to a level playing field in two years’ time and a situation in which we can free up, in difficult economic times, some of our Government grant in aid to do new things to cover the geography of Scotland and deliver strategically in places where there is no cultural infrastructure, while allowing creative organisations to realise their ambitions through—we hope—lottery funding.
I will not encourage all the witnesses to answer every question—in fact, I would prefer it if everyone did not answer every question, or we will be here all week. However, if anyone else wishes to answer Clare Adamson’s question, I am happy for them to do so.
Francis McKee’s organisation is one of the organisations that are affected, so—
I have opened the door, Francis.
Francis McKee (Centre for Contemporary Arts)
That is probably why I am here.
Obviously, it is a fraught process, because it involves change. Although we are a small organisation, we are quite a large enterprise. There have been problems along the way, and those problems are still the subject of negotiation and are evolving as we go.
Initially, the problem was that what was being offered seemed to be project funding. We do 18 exhibitions a year and put on 440 events. We have 12 cultural tenants and three businesses that rent from us. With such an enterprise, it is not really possible to operate on a project-by-project basis. We are talking about a long-term business that needs to plan ahead. It is necessary to have three or five-year plans, to be able to talk to other people and to take two years to plan an exhibition. That was worrying for us at first.
As Andrew Dixon said, that has changed. We can now plan for and apply for funding for a two-year programme of projects. There has been a constant evolution of the parameters of the new bid, and that is helping us as we go. The fact that those positive changes are happening has perhaps gone a little under the radar, but they are changes that we needed to see happen because, otherwise, we would have been destabilised. It looked unfeasible for us to be funded project by project immediately. Those are the kind of discussions that we have had.
The extension of flexible funding was very necessary, given what is happening. For example, we have to respond to the Commonwealth games, on which the City of Glasgow Council and Creative Scotland will announce what they intend to do only from October through till Christmas. If we had had to put in our initial bid by September, we would have had to have already planned what we would do for 2014. As we are a major venue and a major contributor to Glasgow during the Commonwealth games, that would not have been much use to Glasgow or ourselves. It is possible to respond only when we know what others plan to do. Those plans are evolving and emerging. We need to find out what is happening so that we can respond to them better.
It is the same with strategic commissioning. We might like to bid for that but, with it not being announced until after September, we would not have known what the strategic commissioning was, whether we wanted to bid for it, whether we would be successful, whether we would leave gaps in our programme and what would have happened if we did not get it and we had left gaps in our programme.
These things are now following a much more logical sequence that makes more sense to us from the point of view of taking decisions about what we might want to bid for and what we might be in line usefully to do. The initial timeline was reversed, and that did not work for us. We were guessing in the dark about what we might try to do. With the extension, we can look at what is coming up, what we can work towards, what we can usefully do, what we can bid for, what we should not do and where we fit in, if we are successful. Those things all become slightly more logical and we have slightly more chance of being successful and of being useful as an organisation with the chronology as it now is.
The fact that it has been an extremely positive process for us does not get much mention in the media. Creative Scotland has good staff—they really know what we do. That is good, because we have quite a strange, new economic model. It is positive that it has been accepted and supported. However, the chronology and working out how we will do things have been worrying.
The other thing I should say, maybe on behalf of all the flexibly funded organisations, is that there is concern about the relationship to the lottery. Lottery funding looks as if it is project funding—it looks as if those are the parameters of the funding. However, we are now talking about much more sustainable funding through the lottery, which obviously we would all welcome. We just want to know that the lottery agrees.
There are a few issues like that, where I suspect people know the answers but there might need to be better communication of those answers. There needs to be more visible dialogue with the arts community on things like that. A lot of good things are happening but they are not being reported—they are not as visible as they could be. That is what is worrying the arts community.
Andrew Dixon mentioned level playing fields. As I come from the south of Scotland, that is a good place for me to start. Andrew inherited a situation in which there was not a single flexibly funded or foundation organisation south of Lanark. We were not too bothered about the changes in flexible funding; we were looking forward to the fact that we would be able to work on a more level playing field. Having said that, I have huge respect for the flexibly funded organisations.
I guess that I am here representing the foundation-funded organisations of the future. We represent the artist-led groups that are coming up from grass-roots level in response to some of the cuts. We are already committed to a kind of social enterprise model in the way in which we operate. We are not expecting core funding. What we are expecting from Creative Scotland is advocacy and assistance in partnership working to break down the barriers that prevent artists from working directly with local authorities and education, tourism, environment and health departments. That is the playing field that we want to work on—we want to use the arts as a tool for wider social good and to look at what the arts are for. That is the kind of new development model that we were looking for, and we are hearing quite good noises about that.
Gwilym Gibbons (Shetland Arts Development Agency)
We moved from being a foundation organisation to being an annual client, so we went through that process of change. It was a bit scary and nerve-wracking but, on reflection, we feel that the whole process was robust. It was incredibly useful for us as an organisation to stop and take stock about who we were and where we were going. We spent focused time in face-to-face conversations with officers in Creative Scotland to think about our model.
Being an annual client is a positive place for us to be. It is much more suited to the nature of our organisation—we want to be more responsive and dynamic and to look for a more entrepreneurial way forward. Although change is difficult, it has been a positive process for us.
One of the aims at the start was to make the whole process more transparent. Do you feel that that has been achieved?
Yes. I felt that the process was very transparent. I may say more later about how the whole organisation feels a lot more transparent now, particularly given that we are in a location where we do not get the opportunity to network in the way that others might do in the central belt. I welcome the transparency.
I disagree with that whole-heartedly. One of the problems to date with Creative Scotland is the perception that there are five people in a room in Edinburgh making decisions about the country. In some rural areas, we are really lacking representation. We do not understand what portfolio managers are or how we can contact them. We feel that we are coming from the outside.
I would probably agree with Matt Baker. There is good dialogue face to face, but there is not enough getting out there to the public or public dialogue with the community—core dialogue about the arts, so that people can feel that their questions are being answered. People need more answers and more dialogue to build trust. Trust is being lost at the moment, which is dangerous. Good things are happening, but knowledge of those things is not getting out. There is a communication gap that needs to be bridged, as much as anything else. A lot of good people are doing a lot of good things, and that needs to communicated if trust is to be built up. That is what people want.
11:15
The first thing to say is that I am committed to transparency. Everyone on my team knows that that is the way I have worked in the past and that is what I want to deliver in Creative Scotland. However, I do not think that we have got it right in terms of being clear and transparent. We are doing a brilliant number of things, and if we had eight hours, I could tell you about all of them.
We do not have eight hours.
Although we have got the information about the change out to the organisations that we deal with, we have not been good enough at getting it out to the people around the edges who have been commenting in the press and elsewhere. We put our hands up and say that we need to do more to communicate that information and to listen to people’s concerns.
Matt Baker made a point about geography. People know that I am committed totally to Creative Scotland delivering across the geography of Scotland. In the past, I worked with 54 local authorities, and I am working with another 32. I am at date 28 of a 32-date tour of meetings with every local authority chief executive, which is taking place on top of a lot of other touring.
Our model involves portfolio managers who look after an art form or set of festivals and also a geography. They are starting to take more responsibility for parts of Scotland and places in Scotland. We have done a number of things to get into the areas of Scotland that do not have that core infrastructure, and I am pleased that Matt Baker referred to that. The Lanarkshires, the Ayrshires, Dumfries and Galloway, the Borders, Angus, Moray and so on are places where we do not have resident professional cultural infrastructure. Through our strategic commissioning, we need to get to that geography and provide the level of opportunities, participation and engagement that people enjoy in Edinburgh and, actually, places such as Shetland.
Mr Dixon, you mentioned lottery funding twice when you spoke earlier. I understand that, when the National Lottery was set up, guarantees were set in legislation that money that was provided by it would be additional to public funding and would not replace public funding. How is the use of lottery funding that you describe in accordance with that?
Without going into too much complexity, I can say that what the National Lottery cannot do is replace Government funding. In this case, people have asked how the flexibly funded organisations can bid for lottery funding, because that seems to be replacing what the Scottish Government gave them. However, that is not what the funding is doing, because the Government only had a two-year commitment to a programme of work, which covered the past two years. We are inviting bids—people must bid; the process is competitive—for a different model and a different programme. That means that we are not breaching any additionality rules.
Lottery funding can be used for revenue. Some of the lottery funding distributors do that. For example, the Big Lottery Fund has been funding individual elite athletes. That is perhaps happening to a greater extent than it has in the past, and we want to explore that further. Last week, the board agreed that we are going to conduct a survey to find out what all the lottery distributors are doing. That will cover the arts lottery distributors—many of which I know, as I designed the lottery programmes in England—the heritage lottery distributors and the sports lottery distributors.
There are different models. In southern Ireland, the lottery and Treasury money comes as one lump, with no differentiation, while, in Northern Ireland, the Arts Council will fund core costs for cultural organisations up to a ceiling of £70,000 for—I think—two or three years.
We have the ability to be quite flexible with lottery funding. We are trying to transition to a situation in which we can keep as much of that work happening as possible, because the cultural organisations that we are talking about are, as Francis McKee said, central to things such as the national cultural programme for 2014, and we want them to be thriving.
On that last point, arts stakeholders in my constituency—which is Edinburgh Central, so there are one or two—have expressed concerns about the uncertainty over the balance between the commissioning role and the responding role. I know that that has had quite a bit of salience in the media recently, not least with Fiona Hyslop’s remarks in August. Could you explain how you see that balance functioning, particularly with regard to the creation of the strategic commissioning fund?
First, Creative Scotland’s primary role is to support artists and cultural producers, and the majority of our funds—the foundations and the flexible funding—are open access programmes that respond to the ideas of artists and creative individuals.
Through commissioning, we try to deliver something specific to an objective, either to reach some of the geography of Scotland and address a gap, or to build on a strength. For example, we have a huge strength in children’s theatre in Scotland, but we do not have enough of it. If we want to do something about that, we must commission more children’s theatre and ensure that there is the opportunity for it to tour across the Borders and Ayrshire where not as much children’s theatre happens. Our reviews of the various art forms lead us to conclusions, in dialogue with the theatre and dance sectors, about strategic commissioning.
Secondly, Creative Scotland has a role in commissioning major national events, such as the London 2012 cultural programme, which included the speed of light, which took place on Arthur’s seat; Michael Clark’s “The Barrowlands Project”; and the torch relay that went around 31 of the 32 local authorities with the summer of song. We will also have responsibility with Glasgow Life for commissioning projects for 2014.
The Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs wrote to my chairman just last week to clarify that, although she absolutely supports the central plank in Creative Scotland’s strategic commissioning plan, she wants to ensure that there is a balance. In reality, we invest 80 per cent in cultural organisations and artists on their own terms, and the remaining 20 per cent will be used to address the gaps and to build on our strengths. That is the balance.
Speaking from the south-west’s point of view, strategic commissioning is one of the issues that we have with what is going on, as we need investment to build up infrastructure. Large cultural producers—commissioned by Creative Scotland—are being parachuted into our areas and swallowing significant amounts of our budgets to put on other projects. For example, the project that took place most recently in our neck of the woods was out of the box, and it has left a lot of discord and been destructive to local infrastructure. That is an example of how important that strategic commissioning dialogue is, and one of our problems is that we do not have a route into the discussions.
I would like to hear Mr Dixon answer the point that Matt Baker has just made about big companies coming in from outside to deliver projects that take away from the local arts infrastructure. We also need to look at the stinging criticisms that have been made about the changes in how Creative Scotland funds projects. In particular, the allegation that bureaucrats are managing the agenda of some of our most accomplished artists needs to be answered. That will not change—although Creative Scotland might have extended the situation and have a bit of stability until 2013, after that it is going back to project-based funding that people feel interferes with their artistic freedom.
I will respond on the point that was raised about the event in Dumfries and Galloway. I am assuming that you are referencing the community street theatre events that have happened—is that right?
Yes. I was referring to the UZ Arts event.
UZ Arts is an organisation that has been based in Glasgow from many years. It used to run the big street outdoor festival in Falkirk. UZ Arts is part of the year of creative Scotland, and it made a bid to us for lottery funds to carry out a major programme of public art across the country. It certainly has not been parachuted in; it is a Scottish company. It wanted to develop its projects in areas across the country, so it has worked in Shetland, Argyll and Bute, and Dumfries and Galloway. We were pleased about its work in the latter area because it has not had as much independent cultural production. I am therefore concerned to hear that that work has in some way destabilised local activity but, for us, that was an artistic decision made by a cultural organisation based in Scotland deciding on where it wanted to work.
On Joan McAlpine’s second point, the people in Creative Scotland are not bureaucrats—I have artists and people with vast cultural experience involved in taking decisions on cultural activity—but nor are we artistic directors. We do not take artistic decisions; we back the ideas and creativity of individual artists and cultural organisations. If anything, we have been trying to devolve more of our money to cultural organisations to take those decisions themselves.
When I arrived in Scotland, there was a lot of criticism that the same artists got the same funding from the same budgets every year, and I have seen evidence of that. We have devolved more of our money to artist-led organisations, and I want to do more of that. For example, we devolve money to the likes of Playwrights’ Studio for playwrights and, now, film writers; the Scottish Book Trust, for novelists and writers; and Awards for All, which does local community projects. In our creative futures programme of artist residencies, we have 70 residency hosts and 370 residencies and placements have been supported in the past 18 months. That means that 70 cultural organisations and other organisations such as colleges are taking decisions about which artist to employ. For me, that is a much more pluralistic way of taking cultural decisions.
I will defend my team: we are not bureaucrats or administrators; we are people who are skilled at taking creative decisions and who are trying to make the best of our limited resources to benefit the whole of Scotland.
Yes, but by funding one project at a time, you basically make an artistic judgment on each project.
When people apply to us for a single project, we decide whether it is a good-quality project, whether it reaches audiences and whether it has a strategic fit with the programme, whether that is an education or festivals programme. That has always been the case, and that is what arts councils and cultural agencies do.
With FXO funding, we do not just fund projects; we fund programmes of work and the organisations’ core operating costs. Other people have introduced phrases such as “cherry picking”, but we are not about cherry picking. We are about deciding which organisations’ proposals we can afford to back, and we then let them fly and do things on their terms. We would never decide that a theatre company could not do “Macbeth” because there had been three other productions of it that year. It is up to the cultural organisation to decide on its programme. We might take a decision on whether we can afford the scale of ambition that is being asked of us, which is right and proper in a situation in which we can only ever support probably 50 per cent of the bids that come to us.
As you say, it is important that we raise some of the serious criticisms that have been made of Creative Scotland. Joyce McMillan, the theatre critic for The Scotsman, has said that your new approach is imposing a kind of “sado-competition” on artists through the suggestion that, by making artists more insecure, they will become sharper and more creative, when in fact artists thrive on co-operation and synergy.
In 2000, I ran the year of the artist, which involved 1,000 artists in 1,000 places. That was absolutely about giving bottles to the artists to take to the party, and that is the way in which Creative Scotland wants to operate. We do not try to control individual artists. One message that we perhaps have not got across is that, now that we have devolved a lot of money to other organisations, the money for individual artists is out there but artists can still come to Creative Scotland with their ideas and plans for professional development. We have supported many artists, writers, dancers and choreographers. An example is the recent unlimited programme, in which four disabled choreographers from Scotland produced work as part of the London 2012 programme—they were Claire Cunningham, Caroline Bowditch, Ramesh Meyyappan and Mark Drew. We support fantastic individual artists absolutely on their terms.
I recently had a conversation with Joyce McMillan. She and I do not disagree on many things. I agree with the line that everybody takes that we need more sustainability in our cultural organisations. I would love to be able to offer five-year revenue funding to all the organisations in Scotland, but we have a limited budget and we have to work with that limited budget in a difficult economic time.
If you have developed such a close working relationship with artists, why did the cabinet secretary feel that she had to write a pointed letter to you telling you to work more closely with artists and creators? Are you not slightly concerned that the cabinet secretary has to tell you, as the head of our cultural agency, to improve your relationship with artists and creators?
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It is appropriate for the cabinet secretary to reflect views that the public and our constituency have expressed. We recognised that we needed to listen more to artists and not only work through the intermediary agencies that we fund to support artists, so we are putting in place measures to do that.
We had a good dialogue over the theatre review. Many people engaged in that consultation and are now engaged in the dialogue about how we will spend money. We will do exactly the same with dance, the visual arts and crafts.
We are committed to talking to artists. It would be good if, sometimes, the artists came and talked to us and we could listen to them directly. A lot of the commentary has been happening in the press and on Twitter rather than through artists engaging directly with Creative Scotland.
I will ask about governance, management and clarity of decision making—the same theme, to a certain extent.
There has been a huge reduction in staff from the old days of the Scottish Arts Council. Will you talk a little about the changes in decision making? In the past, there were committees for each art form and, usually, the chair of the committee would be on the board of the arts council and would report back on the work of that committee and the decisions that it had taken. There was a kind of information flow.
I am not saying that everybody was happy with that. The structure of the Scottish Arts Council was considered to be cumbersome, not to be working and not to be light enough on its feet. I accept that, but where are we now? Perhaps there are people who knew that old system and need to know how it has changed. Part of that is knowing who makes the decisions and how they are made. Do people know that?
A point was made about a street theatre company going to the Borders and there being, somehow, a mismatch. What references would such a company need? Was the company in question funded through a competitive process that you announced? Was money to be available for the Borders and did that company apply for it? Did it then have local partnerships with local people who wanted it to come, even if Matt Baker did not know about that?
Jean, can I stop you there? That is probably enough questions to be getting on with. We will come back to you.
First of all, I will address budgets. The Scottish Arts Council did some really good things. I was one of the first people to say that the organisation was not broken. It was doing really good investment programmes, such as its inspiring communities programme, which supported brilliant projects such as Matthew Bourne’s “Lord of the Flies” production with young people in West Dumbarton or the prisons project with Motherwell College. There were lots of really good programmes, but the majority of the SAC’s budgets were tiny budgets that were locked away in art form cupboards with quite big decision-making processes around them, a bigger staff—as you say—and a big advisory structure with committees, steering groups and other bodies around it.
Creative Scotland has saved, and continues to save, £1.5 million a year in its operating costs. We have reduced from 155 staff to just under 100 and have gone down from having 108 separate budgets to having 15 investment programmes, which will, in time, become clearer.
With the exception of film, our investment programmes are cross-art form. We invest in artists and talent; audience and access; and festivals and events. Those are broader programmes. The decisions are taken by teams within the organisation. Typically, they are led by a portfolio manager with a team of development officers and a range of people assessing them.
There is now a greater plurality of decision making within the organisation. The perception is that the decisions are all made by my senior management team, but I can tell you that I do not go anywhere near the financial decisions. Other than the large-scale investments, financial decisions are devolved down within the organisation. I accept that we need to get better at communicating that and showing visually where decisions are made.
The new approach has allowed us to be much more flexible. If we have had a high demand for literature festivals, for example, we have been able to increase resources into our quality arts production fund and support festivals at a higher level. The Wigtown book festival and the Melrose and the Borders book festival have had better resourcing from the new programme; in the past they would have had a cap and been told that the maximum amount for a literature festival is £20,000 because that is what the literature budget allows.
We have been much more flexible and we have increased success rates in our investment programmes. We continue to monitor that. You might say that not enough people are applying, and that might be the case. However, in general we have moved to a much more flexible way of resourcing.
On the second question, yes, there was a competitive process and UZ Arts, a Scotland-based company with a good reputation, bid. In each case I think that there were local partners—the company worked in Shetland and I would be interested to hear from Gwilym Gibbons whether that was successful. There was certainly good media coverage of the work in different parts of Scotland.
I am not sure what happened in Dumfries and Galloway. Our experience in Shetland with the roofless project, working with UZ Arts, was one of collaboration and co-production, so it did not feel as if the company had parachuted in. Maybe that is a reflection of the strong culture infrastructure in Shetland. We were able to work with UZ Arts, which worked with local artists and performers.
The project was extraordinary—we took a large mechanical bird round agricultural shows and reached an audience that was in excess of a third of the Shetland population. It was an audience that such an art project would not normally reach. A fantastic series of events ran this summer.
I will bring Matt Baker back in, given that he raised the issue about UZ.
The geography is part of the problem. Andrew Dixon said that UZ did not parachute in but, to be frank, in south-west Scotland we consider things from Glasgow to be parachuted in. That is the geography that we live with.
Creative Scotland is doing phenomenal stuff. I do not want to be the critic here, because I am not a critic of Creative Scotland. The creative places scheme is phenomenal. For members who do not know about the scheme, smaller places around the country bid—cities are not allowed to bid—and three places get an award every year. The problem is that that should be the rule rather than the exception; it happens only once a year and it is a relatively tiny amount of money.
Creative Scotland also runs the place partnership programme. Dumfries and Galloway is a place partnership. Our experience was that some high heid yins from Creative Scotland visited a couple of times and then suddenly a great structure appeared for what we could do as a place partnership, which put sums of money against particular bids. In the meantime, Dumfries and Galloway had completely reinvented its arts infrastructure, through positive partnership working with the local council, and invented something called the chamber of the arts, which is a sector-led commissioning organisation. It is revolutionary, and regional arts hubs all round the region are feeding into it. However, we are still stuck with having to work to the pots of money that are attached to the place partnership. We cannot do what we want, which is to get someone from Creative Scotland to come and help us to build the chamber of the arts model into something of a national scale.
It is not just about a particular project. Things go wrong in the arts for all sorts of reasons and it is great to hear that roofless worked in Shetland. I was not having a pop at a particular project.
There is maybe a Glasgow bias. There is a fragile but vibrant infrastructure—an ecology of different organisations that produce things from the grass roots up to international level and have achieved international success. There is a fear that if we pull out the wrong things everything might collapse, and people worry about how well that is understood.
The portfolio managers in Creative Scotland have a large part to play in relation to decision making. They have an in-depth knowledge of the different art forms, and it is important that they are involved enough in each of the art forms at different times to make those decisions. There is concern in the community about how much they are involved in each of the decisions.
Accepting what Andrew Dixon says, is it the portfolio managers who make the decisions at the moment?
It is hard to know at the moment. I do not know—that is the honest answer.
We need clarity about that.
We would want the portfolio managers to visit more. We have had a portfolio manager assigned to us who knows us very well, and that has been very reassuring. I would like to see more of that for other people, as we have benefited from it.
I have a final question. The Scott-Moncrieff audit was critical of the governance structure and stated:
“There is a risk that the board is given insufficient information to scrutinise the performance of the organisation.”
Do you accept that criticism?
Creative Scotland has had more clean audits than an organisation would normally have had in two years. Last year, we had two separate audits because it was not a full year. We had one for the lottery and one for the Treasury up to June and then another audit for the second half of the year. We have just had another two audits. All six of the audits have been unqualified and clean audits.
Inevitably, within an internal audit process, we look for areas of improvement. One of those areas is our reporting of information to our board. We are only at first base on performance measurement at the moment. We are developing a framework for performance measurement that links to the Government outcomes but uses the information that we get from cultural organisations to give an indicator of health. We measure some things on a long-term basis, such as economic impact and the Scottish household survey, which came out positively for the first year of creative Scotland. We measure other things on a monthly basis to see the health of the cultural sector, and that is the area that the auditors have aligned on. The information technology systems that we inherited were not adequate to do that, so we have just procured a new IT system that will be in place in April and which will enable us to report more to the board on that performance.
I do not know whether Gwilym Gibbons has personal experience of that. You were on the board—are you still on the board?
I was on the board. During that period, I was not aware of not having enough information to make the decisions that board members needed to make or of having to send officers back to get more information for us. The structure felt robust. I was there for the first two years, which was a period of focus on the new structure and developing the corporate plan for how we would go forward. Creative Scotland is a young organisation and now is the time to look at the data that has been generated in those first years of activity.
Time is moving on and I must allow other members to ask brief questions.
Andrew Dixon has mounted a fairly staunch defence of his team. It has clearly been a challenging time, with a reduction in the number of staff from 155 to just below 100. Are you content that you have the skills mix within that new complement to cover all the bases? In particular, I note the concern that only one board member out of the 11 is a practising artist. Are you comfortable with the make-up of the board? Might you want to address that over time as a way of improving communications across the various art forms?
I will deal with the board matter first. It is the Scottish Government and the cabinet secretary who appoint our board—I have no input other than through recruiting some additional board members and suggesting some areas of expertise that we might like the Government to look for in the board. We have just recruited four new board members: one has particular expertise in animation; one has education and visual arts expertise; another is involved in Gaelic singing; and the fourth has TV production experience. There is more than one artist on our board, but they may not have “artist” as their main title.
11:45
We have an increasingly strong and engaged board and, indeed, it would be good if artists felt more able to come through Government board recruitment processes. Today might not be the time to scrutinise the matter, but when I have recruited board members in the past we have been able to specify that the board should contain a certain number of artists.
We recognise that the board is good, if still new, but we need to find other ways of talking to artists and getting in cultural expertise. For example, I would love to have more conversations with Matt Baker and to get him to feed into my board. We are looking at that issue and trying to find ways of dealing with it.
As for expertise and skill sets in the organisation, we have a terrific team, which has gone from 155 staff to under 100. Actually, we went down to 85 and then recruited 15 back. There are still one or two areas such as resource development—in other words, levering in new funds—and television production experience where we want to build our expertise. We are also having to deal with the pressures of taking on an awful lot of extra tasks with reduced staffing. In short, Creative Scotland is doing a lot more than its predecessors with a third fewer staff—but, I should note, with an increased budget. As you will see from the material that we have provided, our lottery income is going up. Processing that finance—we are dealing with £20 million more than we were two years ago—creates demands on and volumes of work in the organisation, and two years on we are going to look at the organisation’s capacity and skills base and find out what we need in order to be fit for purpose in future.
With regard to the connections that you say you plan to make with artists, Matt Baker suggests in his written evidence that you could appoint regional officers to work directly with artists instead of having them go through middlemen all the time. Would you consider such a proposal?
I am totally committed to the principle of having people who think about geography and place. However, we have also been committed to delivering for the Government a savings target, which we have delivered, and it is simply not tenable to put 30 more people into our structure. Instead, we have to empower our specialists in other areas to take a geographical interest in Dumfries, Shetland or elsewhere and to spend more time in those places, and we have established the basis for that.
I have to say that I was concerned by Matt Baker’s comments about the Dumfries and Galloway place partnership. The partnerships very much work on what local authorities want to deliver and offer an opportunity to spend an intensive time talking to a local authority and understanding what works best for its area. I have initiated a number of those partnerships; indeed, having visited Argyll and Bute last week, I think that we have the basis for a really valuable conversation there. We have had a brilliant place partnership in Fife and have developed our work in Perth and Kinross. The next phase, which will go into North Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire, will address some different issues.
But where the approach is not working—and Dumfries and Galloway artists have said as much—are you going to revisit it and find a way of making it work?
I am certainly going to talk to Matt Baker after this meeting, find out the details of his concerns and take a look at the matter. The reports that we are getting about the Dumfries and Galloway place partnership suggest that it is still early days. The infrastructure was fragile—Dumfries and Galloway Arts, an ex-FXO under the Scottish Arts Council, was lost—and the local council made cuts, so we had to start with a fresh base. However, some terrific things have happened in Dumfries and Galloway, including creative place awards for Wigtown and Creetown, new events such as the big Burns weekend and some really exciting capital projects. I think that Dumfries and Galloway is about to experience particularly exciting growth in infrastructure.
We parachuted one project into Dumfries and Galloway—I will tell you the story about it.
Only if it is a brief one.
We asked a children’s theatre company, Wee Stories, to look at the lack of touring infrastructure in Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders. It developed its own show, went on tour and opened up a potential 55 venues in those areas. However, it told us that the long-term solution was not to get theatre companies to tour but to build an infrastructure for children’s theatre in Dumfries and Galloway, which is exactly the point that Matt Baker has made.
I completely understand that you cannot take on any more staff but is there any reason why some of your staff cannot be devolved to other areas of the country, say, two or three days a week and hosted by local authorities? I presume that that would not add massively to costs—after all, we have all got the internet and so on.
We encourage quite mobile working. We have a member of staff based in Inverness; one of our development officers lives in Dumfries and Galloway; and other staff live in Dundee, St Andrews and West Kilbride. I have got people all over Scotland.
I am sure that you are not deliberately using the example, but I note that living in Dumfries and Galloway is not the same as working in Dumfries and Galloway.
I am not saying that with the staff that we have we can afford to be like Scottish Natural Heritage and have satellite offices across the whole of Scotland. Our staff structure is pretty tight and we are trying to use staff to get greater ownership of certain parts of Scotland with, of course, the absolute commitment that we want to understand and work with every single local authority area.
I take your point about costs and the fact that we live in difficult times. However, you have commissioned a lot of outside consultants to do work for you; for example, all your sector reviews have been undertaken by consultancies. Indeed, in his submission, Mr Baker highlights the amount of money and the number of projects that have been given to consultancies. Can you tell us how much you are spending on external consultants?
We can certainly provide written evidence on the consultancies that we have commissioned in the past two years. I suspect, though, that Creative Scotland spends significantly less on consultancies than its predecessors; I far favour our doing things for ourselves.
For the theatre review, we commissioned an external consultant because at the time we did not have a portfolio manager for theatre and felt that the issue needed an objective outside view, and Christine Hamilton Consulting has delivered a fantastic piece of work that has involved a lot of consultation. For the music review, we commissioned a Glasgow-based company called EKOS for capacity reasons and to get an objective view. However, I point out that the dance, crafts and visual arts reviews are being done in-house. We make relatively little use of consultants.
It would be helpful if you could write to us with the detail.
Clare Adamson has a very brief question.
I beg the convener’s indulgence—I hope that the answer will be brief.
I want to get to the nub of the infrastructure issue. Obviously, there is a variance in cultural infrastructure across Scotland. Historically, has capacity been built up by local authorities and cultural trusts, of which Glasgow Life is an example? Is it really Creative Scotland’s role to build that capacity in future or should local authorities, cultural trusts, arts organisations and so on continue to do that?
I do not think that that is Creative Scotland’s responsibility. Instead, Creative Scotland is responsible for creating a better playing field for us, for encouraging and being the advocate in partnerships and for breaking down certain barriers. One really practical issue faced by artists is that of having to cope with local authority procurement procedures, which we are just not set up to deal with, and Creative Scotland could help to take down some of those bureaucratic hurdles so that we can work with health, tourism and so on in ways in which we cannot at the moment. In the current culture, artists are viewed as odd, special creatures that normal people cannot deal with, and we need to break all of that down. That is what I meant when I referred to consultants and middlemen; in the culture that has built up, the view is that artists can be dealt with only through a middle layer.
What Creative Scotland is doing so brilliantly is breaking down barriers between art forms, looking at a wider role for the arts and trying to encourage the idea of self-sustainability. However, we need that stuff to be targeted.
I am going to disagree slightly. In Glasgow, for example, you need Glasgow Life and other organisations, including Creative Scotland, probably VisitScotland and whatever else. You are building on something that has grown over 40 years. Quite often, it starts with artists who have done something that looks crazy in a derelict building that then gets made into something more official, and then becomes even bigger. Artists still come up from the grass roots. Glasgow Life needs to support that, and it has been very good at consciously supporting that as a regeneration policy and a new economy. Creative Scotland is also part of this new economy in Scotland, in which arts play a large role. If you are going to do that, everyone has to be involved.
In one sense it is art; in the other sense it is an economy and an industry. You need to be able to take things from the grass roots through to the international level, and you need to have artists and artists’ organisations in there, who can tell you when something is working and when something is slightly wooden and duff. Creative Scotland and Glasgow Life are sometimes more likely to kill something by supporting it, so you need artists in there to say, “That is terrible, but this is good”. Glasgow Life would happily recognise that.
You need those organisations to step back sometimes and to come in at other times, and you need them to trust artists and artists’ organisations, because we know the industry. We have built it up well enough—that has been proven—and we do not want to lose it. It has taken 40 years to build, but it could be lost overnight. You have to trust all those things—they can all work really well together.
I want to concentrate on geographic coverage, which I think is a key issue. I have heard what has been said about different areas of Scotland. I am a member for West Scotland so I am mainly concerned about that area. I went through the list of flexibly funded organisations in 2010-11 and 2012-13 and looked at how many of those were in local authority areas in West Scotland. In East Dunbartonshire there were zero, in East Renfrewshire there were zero, in Inverclyde there were zero, in North Ayrshire there were zero, in Renfrewshire there were zero, and in West Dunbartonshire there were zero. Given the wide variety of areas in West Scotland, surely there are some companies or projects that are worthy of investment. If there are not, what is Creative Scotland doing to stimulate artistic and creative activity in West Scotland?
You are quoting figures that we presented in our corporate plan. I wanted to be absolutely transparent about what we had taken on, historically, and where our foundation and flexibly funded organisations were based. Our whole strategy of strategic commissioning and all the concerns about the change arose because we are trying to reach into the Renfrewshires and the Ayrshires, and we are trying to spread resources. We do not want to take away from Glasgow and Edinburgh—we need to be proud of Edinburgh as a festival city and Glasgow as a production base and a great centre for music and visual arts—but we need to find the cultural strengths of Inverclyde, West Dunbartonshire, East Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire. Things such as the year of creative Scotland, Glasgow 2014 and festivals and events in our place partnerships are enabling us to have really useful conversations with local authorities and other local partners.
Some very interesting things are about to happen in Neil Bibby’s part of Scotland. The new Beacon arts centre in Inverclyde will probably be one of the best theatre spaces in the country and will have an influence well beyond its own district. Obviously, in Inverclyde, there is “Waterloo Road”, and Shed Media are moving in—a kind of creative industries growth is happening there. Across the water, Dunoon burgh hall is being developed in Argyll and Bute. In Clydebank, Clydebank town hall is being developed by West Dunbartonshire Council. In Renfrewshire, the two local authorities are getting together to celebrate 100 years as part of the year of creative Scotland.
We are finding something to talk about and support in every one of those areas. You are seeing the start of an infrastructure change and I hope that if I am invited back to give evidence in five years’ time, you will see the end of the journey.
12:00
According to the figures that Creative Scotland provided for 2010-11, 14 of the 32 local authorities received no funding. In 2012-13, under the foundation programme, 21 out of the 32 received no funding, and in the flexibly funded programme, 20 out of the 32 received no funding. Under the “other supported organisations” heading, 28 out of the 32 local authorities received no funding in 2012-13. I hear what Andrew Dixon is saying about good things happening, and I do not doubt that for a second, but Creative Scotland has a huge challenge. When are we likely to see those figures change for the better?
That is just the funding of those organisations. Some of those organisations are based in a single local authority area, but they might be delivering across the whole of Scotland. Mull Theatre—or Comar, as it is now called—is based on Mull but delivers theatre to the whole of the north of Scotland. The figures are not quite sophisticated enough, but they show that the core infrastructure is concentrated in certain areas.
When I talk to East Lothian Council or Midlothian Council, I typically look at a range of things that we support in those areas, such as youth music initiative activity, festivals and individual artists. I find that the infrastructure has a correlation with the overall level of investment. Active festivals, active artists such as Matt Baker and public art initiatives generate the activity. East Lothian is quite interesting at the moment, because it is really flying with its festivals—I was at the Lammermuir festival at Tantallon castle last night. We are seeing a real maturing of that local authority, which is supporting independent organisations and helping festivals to happen. As a result, more resources are coming from Creative Scotland to East Lothian. The same is the case in Fife, which has really started to build a body of cultural projects. Perhaps two years ago—when we were getting all the criticism for the Byre Theatre decision—it was not as strong.
The situation is more sophisticated than the figures for those organisations show. We remain open to having a debate about where our resources go and making sure that we spread benefits across the whole of Scotland.
I totally get what Matt Baker said about the danger of a production or event being imposed on a community. The cultural differences between Dumfries and Glasgow will be huge. In my own area, the cultural differences between a mining village in West Lothian and Edinburgh are massive. There is a danger that something might be brought in and done to people, rather than having something that people engage in. We have to be careful about that.
In terms of the geographical spread, are we likely to see more money going into grass-roots community theatre, events and art? If we build on those areas, that could permeate through to the international level—as Francis McKee said—and all the rest of it. That is where it begins.
A number of our programmes are absolutely about trying to get into grass-roots activity. For example, some of our work on cashback for communities is very much targeted on grass-roots activity. Our support of Sistema Scotland in Raploch and its potential roll-out to other places such as Govan is absolutely about supporting the grass roots. In our work with Awards for All and the Big Lottery—and we are working with the other lottery distributors to develop a possible programme for 2014—we will try to reach communities across the whole of Scotland.
There has to be a mixture of both things. We want our national companies to be performing all over Scotland. It is fantastic when the National Theatre of Scotland or the Royal Scottish National Orchestra arrives in Shetland; equally, we want Shetland to have its own grass-roots activity. It is a balancing act to ensure that both things are happening.
I will change the theme a little bit. How easy is it for you to assess the impacts of cultural exports? It is a very interesting time—as Mr McKee mentioned—as we are building up to the Commonwealth games, which will be a very important part of our process over the next two years. How do you think that is going? Is it improving our cultural image abroad?
Scotland’s international exports are another untold story. Creative Scotland did an audit with the Government and the British Council on the extent of international collaboration. Far more of our cultural organisations are exporting their work abroad than people might realise. Visible Fictions theatre company will do a 150-date tour in the United States of America this year: it is doing as many performances in the USA as it is doing in Scotland. Our made in Scotland programme during the fringe festival, which was supported through the Government’s expo fund, was hugely successful in taking Scottish theatre and dance to export. If you look at the curriculum vitae of some of our best-known artists, such as Martin Creed, they have an international ambassadorial role.
We need to do more to co-ordinate that. Last week, Creative Scotland’s board agreed on some geographical priorities that we will work to in order to develop more in-depth relationships with countries, while letting artists work where they want to work.
We can also do more to showcase visual arts. We showcase art with Scotland and Venice, we showcase film in Cannes and we showcase music at South by Southwest. We need to find other important places to showcase the best of Scottish work. During the Olympics we worked with other agencies at Scotland in London, which enabled us to showcase Scottish fashion, music, film and festivals to people in London. You will see more of that sort of activity coming out of our organisation.
What do you mean by greater geographical co-ordination?
The world is a big place and the Scottish Government has geographical priorities—countries with which it works. There are economic priorities and there are natural social partners. We will be working with 71 countries in the Commonwealth in 2014. During the Edinburgh festival, 150 delegates from 25 countries came through the international delegate centre, which was hosted at Creative Scotland. Those delegations informed the way we want to work. Festivals Edinburgh has been successful at inviting nations to showcase in Edinburgh. Equally, we want those nations to take our work out. We want to develop our export potential and our collaborations in India, Brazil and other places.
However, we cannot work everywhere, so we have been trying to focus on and prioritise working with the British Council and the Scottish Government in a number of places where we can make a real difference. Those are likely to include India, Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa. We are already working with the USA on a number of fronts.
Has that meant quite a big shift of resources? You talk about ambassadors, so obviously it is not just money that counts.
We have not made a huge shift of resources into the international area, but we have uplifted our international budget to try to make a difference. In many cases, we are looking for international partners to buy work. However, it is also about building capacity. Many cultural organisations have the potential to work internationally, but do not have the expertise or experience. One of the benefits of the FXO review was that we identified 11 organisations that we think have greater international potential. We will work with them to build their capacity so that they can start to experience working abroad, either in an export capacity or by collaborating on or developing projects with other nations.
You referred to promotional trips to Cannes and Venice. In the current financial times, eyebrows are raised about any such project that does not have clearly defined outputs. How do you monitor the impact of such trips? How can you ensure that we are all confident that there is value for money?
I will give you two examples. The first is Venice. I do not know whether he is still here, but Phil Miller was in Venice. In fact, he was also in Cannes.
Phil is doing very well. [Laughter.]
His journalist colleagues will be jealous.
He asked me absolutely the right question, which was how we justify spending so much money taking one artist—Karla Black—to Venice. I answered by saying that people come to the Edinburgh international festival because it is the best place in the world to showcase theatre, music and dance, and people go to Venice because it is the best place to showcase the visual arts. Do we want Scotland to showcase in Venice? Yes. Do we want to take our best up and coming artist there? Yes. Do we want to promote the four art colleges in Scotland as places to learn? Yes. Do we want to take students from those colleges to learn about and experience curating a major show? Yes. Do we want to sell the work of Scottish artists internationally? Yes. That is why we went to Venice with one artist—although next year we will go with three. It was not just to showcase one artist, but to showcase a lot of things in Scotland. We measure that.
It is not an easy trip going to the Cannes film festival. We showcase film producers to international buyers and film locations in Scotland to film-makers. We showcase films from Scotland to international festivals and we try to broker deals for Scottish artists and film-makers. Cannes is a heavy industry event and our investment in it is relatively small compared to that of nations such as Denmark or Ireland. We have limited film budgets to make a difference, but we punch above our weight.
Is the Cannes promotion going to be a fixture?
If a nation wants to be taken seriously as a film location and film producer, it has to be at Cannes, Toronto and Berlin, which are the three important trade fairs. We are selling products from Scotland. If we can attract one film, such as “World War Z” or “The Railway Man” with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, the benefits to the Scottish economy far outweigh the relatively modest investment that we make in visiting Cannes.
I see that Phil Miller enjoyed that answer.
We have been talking about outputs and measurements, exports and internationalisation, investment and returns. Earlier in the proceedings, we heard references to a criticism about sado-competition. Gwilym Gibbons referred to a social entrepreneurial model. On a couple of occasions, Francis McKee referred to a new economy or a new economic model. Is that language clearly understood? Are the concepts agreed by the stakeholders? It sounded like the language that traditionally has been more likely to come from Scottish Enterprise than from Creative Scotland.
It is incredibly boring language. It really is. There are the people like me who have to master it and then there are the artists who should not have to touch it with a bargepole, because it is incredibly deadening and a real passion killer at the best of times. However, we are talking about an economy and industry. We run a business as well as an arts centre—the two go hand in hand. I am in the middle. That is my role, but my role is also to keep artists away from that so that they can get on with creating. Obviously, they know how to do business—sometimes much better than we do—but they have to put that language to one side and think about creating and doing daft things and staring at a wall for three hours.
That language has its place, certainly in a country where there is less funding and a recession. We have to acknowledge that and we have to try to give value for money and ensure that we get the most out of our centres or organisations, but we must also draw a line and let people be creative. They have to stop at a certain point. There is a place for bureaucrats, although they must do what they do well.
It is undeniable that there is a relationship between tourism and the arts, but that is not why anyone sits down to write a poem or why anyone forms a band. Artists are not necessarily interested in that, and there is no good reason why they should be. If they are, they are probably not very good. We have to keep a distance from the artists and we have to protect them. They need a creative space and an infrastructure that makes that space work and protects it. There is a schizophrenic attitude.
Is that done through intermediaries? Does Creative Scotland provide support to artists or artist-led bodies?
I am going to take my turn to disagree with Francis McKee. The issue that he mentions relates to the problem of transparency. If we have a culture in which we try to protect artists from understanding what those things are and from that type of language, we end up with a situation in which artists say, “We don’t get what is going on, and we think that something is being hidden behind that language”.
I agree that we should not get hung up on having to write in that way, but it is important that there is no process of mystification. We do not want to be wrapped in cotton wool.
12:15
I do not think that anyone wants that, but I do not want to spend a whole day talking to an artist about VAT either.
That is a fair point.
There is a balance. Artists have their dealers and organisations, and they know business too.
It should be said that Scottish Enterprise rejoices in the name “passion killer”. It is a badge of honour.
One thing about the model that the Government has created in Creative Scotland has not been fully understood. We invest in individual artists and organisations, and in social enterprises and charities. We also invest in businesses, and sometimes in commercial businesses, because we work in partnership with Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise around the creative industries. We are investing in innovation, technology, applications and TV production. That is commercial activity, but it is about the economic basis.
Some of our decisions are made on economic grounds, some on artistic grounds and some on social grounds. We have to create balance across all those areas.
This is not a criticism, but is it not part of the problem that your responsibility is so broad that it is quite difficult to understand?
Creative Scotland might seem on the face of it to be a relatively simple organisation, but it is very complex. We have an £80 million budget and we deal with a very wide range of portfolios—wider than any other cultural agency of the type in Europe.
Other countries are watching our model, and a number of them have come to talk to Creative Scotland about the model of putting film, the creative industries and culture together. If we add to that our promotional and advocacy roles, it is a powerful and interesting model.
However, the model is complex, and it is difficult to get the messages across about why we invest in a TV production or in the intellectual property for a new technology for the international educational promotion of piping. The Scottish Arts Council as was might not have been involved in those things, but we are.
Is the very complexity that you have just described part of the reason why there has been such vehement criticism of the organisation?
The criticism is about change and the pace of change, and about our need to communicate a bit better how we are changing things beyond just the organisation. We must hold our hands up and say that there are areas in which we could have done things better and in which we should not have done things as quickly as we have.
However, we feel very confident in where we are heading in dealing with that complexity, and in trying to deliver something special. Culture is an enormous strength of Scotland. As Jean Urquhart, who heard me speaking at an event in Inverness on Friday evening, will know, when you start to describe the cultural strengths of Scotland, you just cannot stop. One of our difficulties is getting that message across. I always say that we will succeed by celebrating success.
Do you believe that we are over the worst—or rather, over the hump? Is progress now being made? More importantly, can people in the artistic community see that progress? Can they see through the difficulties and challenges that are currently being faced to what is on the other side?
I hope so. It serves the interests of nobody—Creative Scotland, artists or the Government—for there to be public rows going on. We want to listen more and engage people through our sector reviews. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and when we finish the flexible funding review and start to invest using lottery funding and other organisations, I think that people will understand our strategy and where we are heading. We already have bids from 15 organisations; we are currently assessing those bids and will be taking decisions in the next month.
Marco Biagi has a final question.
Yes—it follows on quite nicely from Mr Dixon’s point about the breadth of Creative Scotland’s work. I recently submitted a couple of parliamentary questions asking the Government for its opinion on a report that was co-authored for Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, which dealt with the size of various sectors in Scotland. It raised eyebrows in the computer games industry, which was found to have zero employees and less than £10 million in gross value added. That was down to the methodology that was used, which conflated games developers with software development in general.
I asked the Government—I am awaiting the written response to my PQ—to restate its support for the computer games industry, largely because it is a major employer in my constituency. I am thinking in particular of Rockstar North, which is based in Edinburgh Central; we won it from Dundee some years ago.
Can you state how you view computer games in the artistic life of Scotland, and their importance economically, so that there is no doubt whatever that they are viewed as an important part of the cultural economy?
Yes. First, I will explain the economic contribution element of the report. Creative Scotland worked with the Government, Scottish Enterprise and HIE as partners, and we used consultants. The computer games industry is a very specialist area. We were trying to get the first overall picture of the economic contribution of the cultural sector in Scotland.
We got very good economic impact studies of the Edinburgh festivals, which contributed £271 million—more than golf—and of Glasgow as a city, but we did not get that information for the whole of Scotland. The report involved geographical benchmarking, and we were trying to understand the sectors.
We based the work on primary data, so the work is as good as the data that we had. The report threw up some anomalies, particularly around gaming and the computer industry. I have a briefing note on that, but rather than go through the technicals now I will happily share the note with the committee—I am sure that it is wending its way towards the answer to Marco Biagi’s parliamentary question.
Creative Scotland is not primarily responsible for investing in the gaming industry—that is one of Scottish Enterprise’s priorities, on which it will make decisions. However, we are responsible for helping to promote the creative industries, and we take that side of things very seriously. The interface between the gaming industry and our ambitions to have creativity reach into every home and to engage young people in digital activity is really important.
As we have discovered in consulting on our national youth arts strategy, people are interested in things that are not core art forms—for example, new technology, gaming and the interface of digital activity and new media. We need to embrace some of that creativity and apply it in some other areas of our work.
I thank all our witnesses for coming in this morning and giving evidence; the meeting has been very useful.
Before I close the meeting, members may have noticed that a motion has been lodged to make a slight change to the committee and it will come before Parliament this evening. Assuming that the motion is agreed to at decision time, I thank Jean Urquhart and Marco Biagi for their contribution to the committee since May 2011 and wish them well on their new committees.
Meeting closed at 12:23.