Official Report 248KB pdf
The third item on the agenda is the continuation of the committee's inquiry into the promotion of Scotland. As members and observers know, the inquiry has been under way for the best part of nine months. Today, we will hear from a panel of witnesses from the arts and cultural sectors of Scotland.
I welcome the opportunity to address the committee. I believe that the arts and culture can play a hugely important part in presenting a positive image of Scotland abroad. I represent the Scottish Arts Council, which is the national body for the promotion of the arts in Scotland. We distribute funds and advocate for the arts. We cover all the art forms and support a range of core-funded organisations throughout Scotland and across all arts activity. We also support individual artists with, for example, bursaries and assistance with travel. Much of the arts activity that we support results in artists going abroad and in our receiving artists from abroad, because the arts are an international language.
Hi. I am one of the artistic directors of Dundee Rep Theatre. We are one of Scotland's leading producing theatres and home to the Dundee Rep Ensemble, which is a permanent company of actors. We tour nationally and, to a small extent, internationally. We want to do more of the latter. We are also the home of the Scottish Dance Theatre, which is Scotland's principal contemporary dance company. It is predominantly a touring company, which tours six months of the year in Scotland and has a few dates every year in Europe, usually.
I am chief executive of the Robert Burns World Federation, which was established in 1885. It is the umbrella organisation for clubs and individuals throughout the world who wish to honour the works and philosophies of Robert Burns. We have approximately 350 clubs, 70 per cent of which are in the United Kingdom. We also have 45 clubs in the United States of America and Canada, and clubs in South Africa, Fiji, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Dubai, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Hungary. We also have approximately 400 individual members throughout the world.
Hello. I am Maureen Sprott and I am head of marketing for Scottish Screen, which has a wide remit in supporting all aspects of the screen industries in Scotland, from production development, in which we let people get involved in film at the basic levels, right through to making feature films. In that respect, we are a distributor of national lottery funding. We are also involved in training in the industry, company development and education. We work in schools to try to embed an interest in and an understanding of the culture of the moving image.
I represent the Scottish Publishers Association, which consists of the 80-plus publishers who work in Scotland today. We exist to provide a wide range of services to them, including training, advice and general marketing possibilities. We also exist to develop not only creative writing in the industry, but other literary work, educational material and culturally significant studies.
I thank all the panellists for their brief introductions. We have heard a range of views about the role that individual organisations perform within the arts and cultural sectors; however, the common theme is that every one of you has an involvement that extends your work beyond Scotland into the international community. I would like a brief answer from each of the panellists. Do you feel that, in the work that you undertake, you are part of a cohesive, Scotland-wide effort to promote Scotland, or are you operating individually within your own silos—for want of a better word—and not really being cross-supported by a range of organisations or others?
We are somewhere between the two extremes that you mention. We are not working in isolation, but nor do I feel that there is total cohesion about what people are trying to achieve in Scotland. As I mentioned in my opening statement, we work collaboratively with a range of organisations. We work closely with the British Council in Scotland, and we recently appointed a joint officer who will work with us in developing our international policy, which we hope will be the same as that of the British Council in Scotland. We also work closely with VisitScotland and EventScotland, and we are members of the Scottish international forum. The forum, which will meet next week, brings together not only all the cultural organisations, but many other representative bodies in Scotland. Gradually things are becoming a bit more cohesive, but I do not think that we are there yet.
In your written submission, there is an issue about whether the Executive's priorities are those of the British Council. Will you say a bit more about whether there is any cohesion?
The British Council is a UK organisation that takes its lead largely from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so it has a slightly different steer. The Scottish office of the British Council, although not autonomous, has been given a little bit more freedom to operate in Scotland. That is why, over the past year or two, we have been able to work with it closely to develop some common initiatives. The Scottish Executive is building up a slightly different approach to where it feels the priorities should be. My aim is to work jointly with the British Council in a way that will influence the Scottish Executive and others in deciding what cohesive policy is needed to move forward in the arts. Your inquiry will obviously take other issues into account.
Do other members of the panel have any response to my question about whether they operate individually or collectively?
We certainly feel as though we are operating individually. However, as Graham Berry says, there have been some slight changes. The difficulty for us is in finding the mechanism for getting our work seen abroad and letting people abroad know what is going on at Dundee Rep. At the moment, the only mechanism for that seems to be the British Council. When we took a show to Iran last year, it was because the British Council organised it; that was the sole channel in which that worked. I think that things will change following the appointment of the international development officer whom Graham mentioned, but at the moment we feel pretty isolated.
Because of our broad database, we can facilitate a number of initiatives to take the message overseas. However—although I do not want to harp on about this—it all comes down to having support and core funding. We would be more than delighted to offer our database to any organisation that wants to make contact. That happens all the time: people come to us and ask whether there is a Burns club in whatever town, we tell them and then they make contact. For example, the person who was dealing with the Kofi Annan lecture came to the federation to ask for contacts in New York and we were able to provide them. We are a facilitator for many organisations.
I would echo what Graham Berry said. I used to work at VisitScotland and we were involved in international marketing with other organisations. Things have improved dramatically in terms of companies and organisations working together, but there is quite a way to go in finding objectives that everyone can share. International marketing is expensive, especially for a small organisation such as ours. There is no commercial output; we are simply promoting our culture in a way that will benefit organisations that may have something to sell on the back of it. The question that arises is whether we should be funding ourselves when we do that sort of work.
I agree that the situation is better than it was a number of years ago. It is now possible to link up with many different people in the arts sector. However, there can be problems if we are not part of a network. For example, we might want to consider something from a books point of view, but VisitScotland—which Maureen Sprott mentioned—might have a particular agenda and might want to go along particular promotional lines. Therefore, we need to link up across different spheres. We need to join up the thinking and have a forum that looks at abroad as a totality. We should recognise that different parts of what we all do can contribute to the view of Scotland that people abroad have. That view should not be formed simply from the images that one or two organisations choose.
Does anyone want to pursue that particular point?
In response to Ms Fannin, I would say that I find it amazing that there is a Bollywood map of Scotland but not, as far as I know, a literary map promoted by VisitScotland to anything like the same extent.
I have noticed a huge difference. The difference is that the British Council office in Scotland seems to be able to operate more on its own account than might have been the case in earlier years. It is extremely supportive of the work that we do, and vice versa.
You say that the difference is huge, but can you give us concrete examples?
Two years ago, we took three visual artists—Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling—to the Venice Biennale. That was a great success and it would not have been possible without the co-operation of the British Council, because of its contacts in Italy and, of course, because of the sheer amount of resource that it could put in—in people, time and money.
Has Mr Hill noticed a difference? For example, his visit to Tehran was through the British Council.
It was, but it was through the British Council in London; it had very little to do with the British Council in Edinburgh.
Have you seen hide or hair of the British Council in Edinburgh? Have they come out to see you in remote Dundee?
Michael Bird came to a production a year ago. That was the last time that we saw him. We have not had much contact with them.
I begin by welcoming John Swinney to the committee. I look forward to working with him constructively.
We support a range of Gaelic language activities. We have a Gaelic policy, which was developed before the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Bill was introduced, so we were quite well ahead of the game on that one.
The question is more to do with Gaelic's international impact and how you are able to use it as another mechanism in your work.
I was going to come to the point that to achieve any kind of impact abroad, it is necessary to have a sound foundation to work from. Unless there is something positive and well resourced in this country, we cannot take anything abroad. That is probably more important for the Gaelic activities than it is for anything else. Dominic Hill has already mentioned going to Tehran, which was specifically facilitated by the British Council. However, if the core grant from the Scottish Arts Council was not available to Dundee Rep to allow it to perform work of a particularly high standard, it would not be invited abroad. The same goes for the Gaelic activities—they, as well as all the other activities that we support, need to be brought on and nurtured.
We are involved in Gaelic publishing in so far as we deal with the Gaelic Books Council. Next week we will go to the Frankfurt book fair, at which we will have a display and catalogues from the Gaelic Books Council, because in Germany there is a great deal of interest in the Gaelic language. There is a member of the SPA's staff whose first language is Gaelic, who can consider issues to do with Gaelic publishing and can offer assistance. Therefore, a lot of attention is given to Gaelic as well as to emerging imprints in Scots, which at the moment are more for Scotland.
The promotion of Scottish culture abroad can be done by Scottish artists touring overseas. Do you agree that it can also be done by attracting international audiences to events here in Scotland? Does the Scottish Arts Council, or any other body, have figures for the number of overseas visitors who come to Scotland both for big cultural events, such as the Edinburgh festival or, to a lesser extent, Celtic Connections, and for other cultural events that might not attract huge audiences but which are important collectively and make a big contribution to the promotion of Scottish culture and the Scottish economy?
Audience figures are not terribly good on those sorts of things, but certainly data are collected on where the Edinburgh festival audience comes from. Celtic Connections might well also do that, so I am sure that we can estimate the benefit of tourists coming to experience Scotland's arts. VisitScotland also has some data that would be useful in that regard.
Would the celebration of St Andrew's day as Scotland's national holiday at home and abroad create an opportunity to promote Scotland and an appreciation of Scottish culture on the international stage?
Any kind of event or celebration such as that could be used. For us, it would be about finding the appropriate piece or work to pin on that particular day. However, if that could be found, it could work very well.
My only caveat is that quite a bit of work has already been done to build up the concept of tartan day in New York. We need to think very carefully about the amount of resources that is available. Would there be enough resources to build internationally on two days or would we just go for one of them? As a small organisation, it would be difficult for us to put on something at that level on two different days of the year and in more than one country. It would be a good idea, but I would like it to be properly resourced and marketed.
I get the impression that whenever anything like this is mentioned, people say that because we have tartan day, which happens on one particular day of the year in the United States, that is it; that is all that we need to do. I do not think that that gets to the nub of much of the evidence that I have read in the inquiry so far. We should not allow ourselves to be diverted by the thought that we have tartan day in the States—it lasts for a day. There is a sense that we get a big parade through New York so we can tick the box and move on. Is that a sense that you recognise?
I certainly recognise that. It is also right that we cannot split our resources across too many places. The problem is that there is not a day in Scotland that is celebrated as widely as it ought to be. We cannot export something that does not exist domestically. If we decide that we want to promote Scotland abroad on a particular day or concentrate on a particular day, we cannot do just the one day; it would have to be the pinnacle of a range of activities that are going on. There needs to be a base from which to work. If Scots themselves celebrated St Andrew's day in grand fashion, as I am sure we could, given the opportunity, we could then begin to export that form of celebration. We cannot create something abroad that does not exist here.
St Andrew's day is well celebrated overseas and many events happen throughout the year, not just on Burns night. Burns is a man for all seasons; he should not just be celebrated in January. I am talking about not just the Burns supper. In fact, I wish that people would take the Burns supper out of Burns. I find that people concentrate on the Burns supper; they think that that is all that Burns is about, but it is not. There is the whole ethos of Burns—what he was about and his Scottishness. I get really annoyed when all I hear about is January and Burns suppers. Last year, I was over in Houston, Texas, speaking at a Burns supper with 750 people in attendance. That would be an ideal opportunity for the Scottish Executive to reach those people. I got the First Minister to produce a videotape, which was sent to our club in South Africa and broadcast to 600 people at a Burns event. We must use such events to get the message across that this is the place to be.
You cited an example in which you enlisted the First Minister to appear in a video clip for an event. I am sure that that was welcome, but is such work done in a cohesive and proactive way or—to return to the point that I raised earlier—is it that different organisations decide what they want to do and try to gather together support? Am I correct to say that that work is not part of a cohesive strategy for promoting Scotland overseas?
That is correct. There is no joined-up thinking, and that is where we have a problem. We need to seize opportunities. For example, the Caledonian Club of San Francisco runs a Scottish gathering that attracts 30,000 people—that is just one example. There should be a presence at all such events; many events happen overseas throughout the year but we do not take the opportunity to have a presence at them.
That is an important point. I have been at a couple of those events in the United States; one gets a feeling of the enormity of what is going on, but there is a disconnection with input from Scotland.
I am not sure that 30 November or Burns night in January are necessarily the best times to hold street parties in Scotland because of the weather, although they might work in the southern hemisphere. Seriously, to return to Mrs Bell's point about Burns, this is an area in which we have a head start because there is an international awareness, as well as a national awareness, of the importance and significance of Robert Burns. In your introductory statement you raised questions about the lack of support from the Executive—you might want to return to that. Unfortunately, you have not given the committee a written submission. If there is something specific in which you would like us to take an interest, please take this opportunity to expand on it, or perhaps give us a paper later.
I am happy to give you a paper. I spoke with Mr Morrison and Allan Wilson three years ago and I brought to their attention the dire straits that we are in. We are a voluntary organisation with two paid employees. We service all the clubs and do our best to promote Scotland with absolutely no core funding. Despite going to various arts associations and the Scottish Arts Council, we just do not get the core funding support that we need.
All right, but we are talking about different things. The Executive will understandably be worried about setting precedents by giving core funding to various types of voluntary organisations, although I know that it does so sometimes. We are talking about the promotion of Scotland abroad. If there are opportunities to take initiatives in other parts of the world and the Executive and the Parliament could support and take part in those initiatives, we want to explore them further.
I would be more than delighted to meet anyone who wishes to promote Scotland overseas, which is something that we have been doing for many years. Just last week, I had a phone call from someone who is putting together a paper to put to the Scottish Executive. The paper is about how to attract people to Scotland and they asked whether they could use our name and whether we would give them information. That happens all the time. I am on the steering committee of the Burns an' a' that festival—it gets the money, while we give the information. That happens constantly, which is why I am extremely frustrated about the disbursement of funds. We have shown that we are more than happy to help and we have more than proved what we can do overseas. We are willing to help in any way.
What proportion of your activity is Scottish and what proportion is overseas?
Some 70 per cent of our clubs are in the UK and 30 per cent are overseas. One third of our revenue comes from subscriptions—we cannot keep putting them up—and the other two-thirds comes from sales of goods and some sponsorship. We are running around like headless chickens trying to get sponsorship for the schools competition, from which I am sure that some people here today received certificates in the past. It is very much a core activity. The children who learn about Burns at school are the same people who, when they go overseas, start up Burns clubs and St Andrew's societies. We have to acknowledge what is—and what is not—being done on our own doorstep.
I will come back to Mrs Bell in a moment or two. However, I want to point out that we are discussing the promotion of Scotland. I wonder where Mr Berry's priorities lie in that respect. I am not making a veiled criticism, but do you think that advancing arts and involving people is more of a priority for you than promoting Scotland through the arts?
I think that we do both. Our key responsibility is to support and develop the arts; however, a range of other benefits flow from supporting a healthy arts sector. One benefit is the creation of a confident and cultured society that can act as a strong example for people abroad and allows artists to travel to other countries or to come back to Scotland from overseas. It is quite difficult to separate out those matters, but our core function is to support the arts. Without that and the creative spark that individual artists bring to life, none of those other instrumental benefits will occur.
What is Burns's position in Scottish arts and in promoting Scotland abroad? Compared with other Scottish artistic factions, is he not an easy product to sell abroad?
Burns is extremely easy to sell abroad. As we have said, he is one of Scotland's global icons. "Auld Lang Syne" is known by everyone and sung everywhere, and we ignore such traditional aspects of Scottish arts at our peril. However, the key work of the Scottish Arts Council relates to contemporary arts and how they are presented and interpreted. I should say that we also support the presentation of the Burns an' a' that festival and other festivals in Ayr that use Burns as a basis for developing and interpreting arts.
That support is very welcome. However, Mrs Bell seems to have highlighted an area that the Scottish Arts Council should take into account when promoting Scotland in future.
He has a certain amount. For example, a couple of years ago, we encouraged a Slovenian publisher to bring out an edition of Burns and provided the network for that to happen.
I think that publishers have a major role to play as far as Burns is concerned. People in other countries have a natural interest in him that attracts them to Scotland. What impact does Burns's birthplace have these days on the Burns scene worldwide? Is it an icon? Is it a place that federation members worldwide want to visit? If so, what do you feel about the current situation in Alloway, where it seems that the Burns Trust is in some difficulty with respect to the buildings in its care?
I do not want to detract in any way from the importance of Robert Burns's iconic status, but we are not conducting a Robert Burns inquiry here. I will allow a brief response, if that is possible, to the final point that Mr Gallie made.
I am concerned about the Alloway situation and about Burns's house in Dumfries. If we want to encourage people from overseas to see those national memorials, we have to get them in shape, but we are not doing that. We have to give the visitor a pleasant experience, and we are not good at doing that.
In the course of that last exchange the clear line coming out was that we have to be certain about what it is we are promoting about Scotland. There is some divergence of opinion about whether it is Burns or modern icons or whatever. To what extent do all the organisations in the arts and cultural sector that have an interest in promoting Scotland overseas share a concept of a clear product offering—to use the marketing term—from Scotland? Could you put your hands on a piece of paper that encapsulates the sense of what such organisations are trying to do to promote Scotland?
That is the real difficulty and it is where the work needs to be done to get some co-operation. I have had experience of two organisations that market abroad, and the target audience for one aspect of marketing Scotland can be very different from another—there can be no common ground between them. Therefore, although there can be overriding objectives, when it comes to getting the involvement of different organisations it can be difficult for those organisations to see what they will get out of a particular promotion if it is not aimed at their target audience and does not promote their message about Scotland. There are a number of different messages that we can give.
Are the processes in place that would allow us to get to that message?
Some work is being done towards that with the international forum, but we are not there yet.
How far along the road are we? Five per cent? Fifty per cent? Seventy per cent?
I would hope that we would get there by this time next year. It is difficult. I have taken the approach that I will try to get for my organisation any benefit I can from anything that is being done internationally by the Scottish Executive and/or other organisations. I have to think carefully about the resource issue. How much is that work worth, vis-à-vis what I get back from it? I quite often feel that the film side is the facilitator for other organisations—that they can use film to pique interest in Scotland. From that point of view, although it fills my cultural remit to promote Scottish film culture abroad, that audience will not give me inward investment in film or the chance to have the film picked up by the industry rather than the public.
How many of you are involved in the Scottish international forum? I know that the Scottish Arts Council is.
Yes.
We are just about to join it.
Is it a gathering of agencies?
Yes, effectively. It is a good idea to bring together all the agencies and organisations that have any overseas links, but it is probably too large to be immediately effective. It is a good start, but it needs to have a clearer, more defined purpose and beneath that there are possibly different forms of forum that need to be created. I hate to suggest the creation of more organisations and bodies, but the single forum is too large. From our point of view, the end product of supporting and developing the arts is to demonstrate that we have a confident, creative, cultured and open society in Scotland. In turn, that will deliver all the various instrumental benefits. If that was the overall message that was being delivered, you could begin to break it down and ask how we can achieve that goal, what it actually means and who will deliver which part. However, there needs to be an overarching body to examine it, within which other sections can deliver specific parts.
I agree with Graham Berry that there has to be an overarching body. We are setting down policy ideals, which we must do, but when we drill down we have to ensure that the systems are in place so that everyone can deal with them in the way they need to. For example—and this stretches into other people's areas—people visit VisitScotland tourist information centres and Historic Scotland locations. We have a lot of books that people abroad read to tell them about places in Scotland, but we cannot get them into those places because VisitScotland's and Historic Scotland's systems and policies say that we have to have a different product offering, which often does not give a terrific view.
The book festival that recently concluded in Edinburgh was a fabulous advert for Scottish literature. I would have thought that it would be an outstanding event in terms of iconic marketing potential, but is it in there? Is the book festival being actively promoted as a device to lure people to Scotland?
The book festival can formulate its own policy. Scottish literature within the book festival probably outsold a lot of other areas.
I am sure that it did.
There was fantastic co-operation. We work with the book festival closely. Other bodies and, indeed, Executive non-departmental public bodies work in a lumbering, elephantine way and cannot think like that. I am sorry to sound critical. I am sure that no particular NDPB is at fault, but the message needs to come down and translate into actions that work on the ground, rather than stay up in the air.
Canongate Books had a Booker prize victory. It is important to have companies that are publishing at the cutting edge and supporting contemporary writing, and not necessarily just Scottish writing. They should be up there at the cutting edge, publishing material of the highest quality. Do you agree? We can get stuck in the past, which worries me greatly.
I totally agree. We go to Frankfurt next week, where we will have a large stand. We have support from the Scottish Arts Council for a lot of the work that we do. Thank goodness that we do, because we can take a huge Scottish presence, such as Canongate Books and many writers. We have sponsorship from a whisky company, and we run a reception with the Robert Burns whisky that it brings along. Between 250 and 300 people from 50 or 60 countries look at the books. That is a phenomenal advert for what is going on in Scotland. Those people do not just publish; they visit, they tell people and they take back the work. It is very much about contemporary Scotland and the exciting place that it is, because people want that as well.
Mr Berry, you address funding in the paragraph at the top of page 5 of our papers. Funding worries me greatly. You have £500,000 of dedicated funding for international initiatives, but it is being lopped in half this year. You refer to the various things that you have supported. You did not support the Scotland in Catalunya week, but you are going to support the Scotland in the Netherlands event. You have been to the Smithsonian, and there was something else as well. What sort of sum would comparator organisations, such as those in the Irish Republic, have to work with?
Believe it or not, we are probably quite far ahead of the game. In the past couple of years, we have made a major effort to spend more money on international activity. More important, we try to encourage the organisations that we support, such as Dundee Rep Theatre and the Scottish Publishers Association, to engage in overseas activity.
But your budget has been cut in half, because of the loss of lottery funding. It is going down from £500,000 to £300,000. That is a huge cut.
Of course, but we have no control over lottery funding.
Sure, but how will that affect your activity?
It has affected our activity in that we have taken out a small fund that the lottery fund supported, but it has not affected our broader work of helping organisations to go abroad. We are trying to increase that work through the appointment of an officer who will generate funding from other sources and ideas, which are often more important than just the money.
I think that Mr Raffan's point is that, if we are much more enthusiastically interested in promoting Scotland overseas, to cut by £200,000 the budget of one of the key organisations involved in that area—an organisation that probably has more money to spend on such activity than any other—does not send out a healthy signal.
Yes, but as I said, that affects just a minor part of the funding. That money went to a very small fund that supported pretty minor initiatives, which were mainly to do with organisations such as overseas touring companies that came into Scotland. The cut will not have a significant impact on our broader thrust of trying to get more artists abroad.
Can you let us have a breakdown of the amounts that you are spending on sending companies abroad and so on? You say that the cut affects a relatively small fund. Perhaps you could give us some figures in writing.
We could certainly give you a more detailed breakdown.
Keith Raffan asked about how the budget of the Scottish Arts Council compared with that of its Irish counterpart. In relation to the film industry, how does the budget of Scottish Screen compare with that of its Irish counterpart?
We have pretty comparable budgets when it comes to the cultural side of things and marketing, but when it comes to industry incentives such as tax breaks and location incentive funds, our position is not as good as that of Ireland or of other parts of the British Isles, such as the Isle of Man. From the overseas marketing point of view, if we make a very good short film or a very good feature, that is an advertisement for Scotland in itself, but because places such as Ireland and the Isle of Man are able to attract more business, they can perhaps make more films than we can.
I want to follow up on that point. I am aware that Ayrshire Film Focus has been tremendously successful. Although it gets some grant funding, it generates significant revenues for local communities in Scotland. I think that it has attracted more than 29 or 30 film productions into Ayrshire alone. Do you have comparable national figures?
The location work that Scottish Screen performs is important to Scotland culturally, because if people come here, make a film and use our scenery wisely, that film goes back as an advert for Scotland, even if it was not made by Scottish artists and film makers. That is known as the "Braveheart" effect. Last year was a very good year: the number of inquiries went up, the conversion rate was 70 per cent and the value to Scotland was £24 million. It is difficult to bring consideration of our location work into inquiries such as that which the committee is conducting, because it is an inward investment issue. Films that are located here can promote Scotland. We would very much like to have more opportunities to promote inward investment through film locations, but we operate on quite tight budgets.
It is important to put that on record because I think that you said earlier that there is no commercial output from what you did. Clearly, however, there is a wider—
What I meant was that when we go to events such as the Association of Film Commissioners International locations trade fair in Santa Monica and meet producers and location managers from all over the world—mainly the United States of America—in order to get them to put Scotland on their shopping list, that is a specific promotion of something to do with Scotland. However, the audience that we reach through tartan day is made up not of film makers but of the wider American public, who might be interested in buying a book of a film or coming to visit Scotland. Although it is not directly related to our remit, we see the importance of getting involved in that work.
I suppose that both aspects could be seen as future investment opportunities, in a way.
It would be interesting if we were able to do something on a Scotland-wide level that was also able to target my commercial clients. Tartan day does not do that because it takes place on the other side of America from the clients I want to reach. That means that I approach tartan day as something that supports Scottish culture generally. You never know how such things affect people. It might be that the dad of a child who saw a film in central park this year happens to be a film maker, but that is not the sort of thing that I can track.
We have identified a number of problems, difficulties and initiatives and have had a wide discussion about funding, which is particularly relevant to Graham Berry and Shirley Bell. However, leaving funding aside, what would assist your organisations to promote Scotland better? For example, there could be a network, organisational assistance, more involvement of ministers in the work that you do, more involvement of the Parliament and so on.
I was recently talking to some people from Holland who told me that they have an international development officer whose job was to get people together, bring people from abroad to see the theatrical work that was being done, set up networks and so on. That might be happening here, through the new post that Graham Berry was talking about, but an important step is having in place the infrastructure that would enable such links to be made and would allow people to see the work that we are producing and understand that that is work that is made in Scotland by Scottish artists.
Do you think that that might link into the Scottish international forum?
It certainly could.
As I said, I think that the network should be expanded to include VisitScotland and all the other people who are working to promote Scotland. I would quite like to have somewhere that was not a huge international forum but which would allow people to sit down and set out what they want to do and determine where it crosses over with what other people want to do with a view to finding out what they can add to one another's projects. That would be a simple forum for co-operative work. It might need funding at some point but, at the beginning, it just needs some talking. We need to be brought together in a way that enables people to feel that everyone can contribute, that no one is there in a begging capacity or as a supplicant and that we can all work together.
I agree. There is a willingness for co-operation between various organisations but because we have different targets and objectives we are often too busy focusing on what we do to focus on anything outside our box. It might be that some funding should be supplied to employ a networker who has an understanding of all our organisations and could take a lead in networking the organisations rather than our having to try to make the time to meet and find areas for co-operative working.
Is that a suitable role for the Scottish Arts Council to perform? I should have thought that it falls within the council's sphere.
In the cultural sector, we would be delighted to examine issues broadly and to try to co-ordinate the long-term strategy that is needed. Much of the time we are driven by short-term issues—anniversaries, visits from various countries and so on—and asked to respond to those. We need to have a long-term view and to be aware that the returns on any international initiative are long term. We should not expect immediate results, which would be unrealistic. There should be a long-term strategy, with a few milestones along the way. I echo Dominic Hill's point about the showcasing that is needed to allow overseas promoters and others to come to Scotland to see what is on offer. We support some of that work during the Edinburgh festival, but there are other occasions when overseas promoters could come to see the easily exportable activities that are available in Scotland.
I was going to ask where the post would be located, but Graham Berry has answered that question.
The discussion has revealed that no one disagrees with the proposition that it is important to promote Scotland overseas, but we need to examine the mechanisms for doing that. The issues that seem to require further exploration are the messages that we are putting out and how they are drawn together. Those issues will be touched on in other parts of the inquiry and, I am sure, in the rest of this evidence-taking session.
I return to the point that Lorraine Fannin and Graham Berry made. I hear that the Scottish international forum is largely a talking shop and that it is too big, but a lot of work can be done through bilaterals—a ghastly word—or one-on-ones. For example, if a representative of the Scottish Arts Council or Dominic Hill is visiting Tehran, they may link in with VisitScotland.
We try to co-operate as much as we can with anyone. If an initiative is happening abroad, we will see whether we can become involved in it. Ultimately, however, it comes down to resources.
Even promoting malt whiskies at the opening of the exhibition would be a start.
Indeed. As long as 12 or even 15 years ago, Scottish Ballet went on a tour of Japan supported by a whisky company. Sales of the brand increased by an extraordinary amount—something like 90 per cent. There are huge benefits to be gained in this area from a business point of view.
I thank our panel of witnesses for coming to give us the benefit of their knowledge and advice. As I said at the outset, the committee is taking some time over this inquiry. The points that you have made today will help us to formulate our conclusions.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
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