Official Report 862KB pdf
Welcome to the second meeting in 2026 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Today, we are taking evidence on the economic impact of Scotland’s five national performing companies in round-table format. Our witnesses are Alistair Mackie, chief executive at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Alex Reedijk, general director at Scottish Opera; Gavin Reid, chief executive at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Steven Roth, executive director at Scottish Ballet; and Liam Sinclair, executive director and co-chief executive at the National Theatre of Scotland. I warmly welcome you all and thank you for providing a joint economic and wellbeing impact assessment, which is very helpful in informing our questions.
I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for the session. I will explain the process. I will start by asking the first question, which is for Alistair Mackie. If anyone else wants to come in, just let me know by putting up your hand or nodding or by indicating to the clerk. If you decide to tickle your nose at any point, you will be brought in.
Our approach is to enable everyone to contribute to the degree that they wish to and to make it more relaxed, instead of holding a session in which the same question is put to all and we end up with five people giving the same answer. This format allows you to come in when you feel that you wish to.
Alistair, we are considering the costs and benefits of our performing companies. We have a paper that says that
“every £1 received from the Scottish Government generates £2.62”
in gross value added,
“along with £1.75 in wellbeing benefits.”
However, figures for the RSNO alone suggest that you generate £4.10 in GVA and £2.80 in wellbeing benefits. Why is support for the RSNO so much more valuable than for the other performing companies?
Economic benefit is one metric that we are focusing on today—you are the Finance and Public Administration Committee after all. However, the charitable objectives of each company are their primary purpose—that is why we are here. For the RSNO and others, there is a careful balancing act between chasing income and commercial returns, and sometimes that is—[Interruption.] Is that your mobile, Michelle?
Need you ask? [Laughter.]
Yes. My apologies.
Sometimes economic gain is in direct contradiction to charitable objectives. For example, we want to raise our ticket sales and our income, but we also want our work to be accessible and to give away tickets to young people. Although there is little economic benefit in our going to the regions of Scotland, it is imperative that we do so. Sometimes, economic return on that activity looks poor, but I would argue that it is incredibly important that we do it. It is a balancing act.
The RSNO has been very fortunate in that an opportunity presented itself to develop a studio, which has allowed us to earn quite significant commercial income. We have done very well in exploiting that unique opportunity, but it is specific to the RSNO.
The numbers are really interesting. As you probably know, I am very keen that culture talks about economic value as well as social artistic community value. I do not think that we do that enough. It is not the only thing that we should be talking about, but it is crucial that we reference it.
No one has asked to come in as yet, so I will ask a couple more questions. [Interruption.] Your name was not down to come in here.
I know—sorry. You did not—
Telepathy does not work particularly well with me, I have to say. I will continue.
First, I should say how much I am looking forward to your Viennese gala at the Beacon arts centre in Greenock on Saturday.
Thank you. I will be there.
You did yourself down a wee bit there because you said that there is no real economic benefit, but the report that you submitted shows there to be significant benefit. For example, one of the things that the RSNO has said is that an additional £3 million of funding would provide some £13.9 million pounds of economic impact. Some of that would percolate to other communities. When one actually looks at the impacts on community wellbeing and does the sums, performing in the community is 2.8 times more valuable than performing in some of our larger urban theatres.
Like everyone who is around this table, we are really committed to getting out into smaller communities, which is so valuable. That aspect is really stretched by current finances, and taking an orchestra and its players and having feet on the ground in the regions is incredibly expensive—there is no way around that—but I absolutely consider that the social and economic community returns of doing so are even more valuable.
We will probably come to Scottish Opera, which, as it highlights is extremely successful around Scotland. Although we might be talking about four singers and a piano player in the production, support staff will accompany them, too.
One part of your submission that I found interesting dealt with the funding scenario for RSNO. It talked about the ratio of economic impact and wellbeing impact and there was a suggestion that a £3 million increase in your funding, should that transpire, would—relatively speaking, although not in total—actually provide greater returns than a £5 million addition. Why is that the case?
Biggar Economics used some pretty complex economic metrics for that and I am not sure that I can give you a really specific answer, but I do think that the additional work that we could do would have real value. Our ambitions are limited by our funding. For example, I would love to have a larger workforce of musicians so that a portion of them could dedicate at least half their time to being out playing in communities as well as in the RSNO. Trying to service our core work in the concert halls of Scotland and beyond at the same time as trying to be in the recording studio and trying to be out in communities is really difficult. The additionality that we would get from that £3 million would give even more of an economic return than we have at the moment and I would argue that it would have even more community and social value.
Our primary purpose is to keep a world-class symphony orchestra performing great concerts on stage in Scotland and, once we have those great musicians and artists resident in Scotland, it is a shame not to use them and to get them out and about.
We talk a lot about the ecosystem here. What would the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland or its staff be without the national companies and the workforce that service the conservatoire? On the train journey over here today, we talked about concert halls. Our costs have gone up considerably because of concert hall rentals and restoration funds, but what would those concert halls in Scotland be like if we did not have the national companies using them week in, week out? The festivals are a wonderful thing and we know the benefits that they bring to Edinburgh, but how could those festivals exist here if we did not have the national companies and others in the concert halls, paying the rentals and keeping them going in the other 11 months of the year? I would argue that concert hall costs have risen by way more than inflation because of pressure on local government funding, so there is more of an onus on the people who perform in those halls to fund them. That is one reason why our costs have gone up so significantly. It is crucial to make the point that Scotland’s cultural infrastructure is highly dependent on the national companies, and others, that are funded through Creative Scotland.
I feel as if that question has, in some respects, taken us straight in with our heavy brogues on. Before I move on, I will take it up a level to get your reflections on the fact that that you are in front of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. One of you may wish to answer first, but I would like to get a sense from all of you of how important you think financial sustainability is. I may come to you first, Alistair, because the RSNO report came out before the wider report into all the national performing companies. In your role as chief executive of the RSNO, how much importance do you give to financial sustainability, how much is that supported by the board and how much is it encouraged by Government? In other words, what was the trigger for your producing that report?
Financial sustainability is crucial. If you cannot balance your budget, you do not exist, so it is fundamental. Our board is absolutely committed to fiscal responsibility. I have said here previously that our salaries are too low, but we keep them low in order to be fiscally responsible.
At the same time, we have managed to significantly grow our income, which was £12.9 million last year, compared to £8.5 million a year before the pandemic. We look for income growth opportunities and take that seriously. We also take diversity of income seriously and are trying to make money from ticket sales at the same time as doing commercial recordings and trying to maximise tax credits from Westminster. The board talks a lot about financial resilience and we do not depend on only one source of income. It is easy to come here and say that the Scottish Government should give us more money—and I think that it should—but no stone is left unturned in looking for income generation and for cost controls. We had to make two staff redundant last year. They were film makers who were doing great work, so I was very sad about that, but we simply could not justify paying them week in, week out instead of using freelancers, because our finances are just too tight. We talk a lot about finance.
However, again, I will make the point—perhaps I am labouring this—that we are here for a charitable purpose. I talk a lot internally about eradicating careless loss. If you want to take singers around the regions, as Alex Reedijk does, it costs a lot of money and you lose a lot of money, but that is good loss—you have to lose that money, and that is why we get a grant.
09:45It is about having a balance of income generation, cost control and making sure that your charitable activity—what you are there to do—is done as best as you can do it. It is a live conversation and I have felt for a long while that culture has been too slow to big up our economic value.
When I was looking at the income growth that the RSNO had and the diversity of income that we were beginning to achieve, of course I wanted to promote that. It is important that we promote it here at the Parliament, but also to our donors. It is incredibly important that, if you give a pound to the RSNO, you know that that pound is really well spent. It is hard to fundraise and it is hard to justify your existence without a strong financial strategy.
I could see nods of agreement around the table, but I want to pick up on a comment that the convener made about the simple maths—I realise that it does not particularly work like that—of looking at the joint NPC figures minus the RSNO figures. The wellbeing-adjusted life years—the WELLBY measures—are valued at £40.5 million for all the NPCs. If you take out the RSNO figures and spread the remainder roughly across the other four companies, the WELLBY figure looks far less, and likewise with GVA. I appreciate that we do not have the exact figures.
I will come to you first, Alex, just because you are on my right-hand side. Have the other national performing companies given this the same focus? If you say, “Absolutely, yes we have,” why was there not that level of detail from all the NPCs, while allowing the RSNO to lead? What has been going on with that focus on financial sustainability in all the other companies? Do not worry, Alex will be asked about this first, but I will come to the others as well.
There are probably two parts to cover in answer to that. The first part is that, like all the national companies, there is a relentless focus on financial stability. I will just amplify that a tad. Like the other companies, Scottish Opera is a charity. It is one’s duty as a trustee of a charity, and indeed a duty of the board, to make sure that the charity is financially stable. It is also our duty of care to all of our stakeholders, including our audiences. However, some of the colleagues around the room who have been around as long as I have will recall that there was a time when Scottish Opera was not quite as responsible, and that led to some difficulties. Therefore, one of my mantras when starting at the company was to turn us around from a culture of entitlement to a culture of taking responsibility for ourselves. That has permeated through the life of Scottish Opera in the past 20-odd years.
Also, I know that there is a popular cliché of artists starving in a garret and all those sorts of criteria. My view is that that simply does not allow the best possible work to be made. So, again, financial stability and creative curation and all of those aspects have to be in place for a modern performing arts company. On the back of the awards that we have been winning and in terms of our audience numbers, I would say that we have managed to achieve that.
In answer to your second question, speaking on behalf of the four national companies, I think that probably, although we observe much the same criteria that the RSNO does, we have just not been as timeous in our approach to the actual economic studies. The paper that we have presented today is a collective of the five of us, but the intention is that it is phase one of a bigger piece of work.
Does that mean that whatever version of this finance committee exists in the next parliamentary session can look forward to this kind of report on a regular basis, if not an annual basis, because I appreciate that there is a cost to preparing such reports?
Yes, is the short answer.
Okay. Just to get this in the same thread, I want to bring in—
This is a round-table session; it is not a panel session, when we all just ask a barrage of questions. I am keen to get as many people in as possible, given that we have only got another hour and 10 minutes, so we will move to Liz Smith now, but I will come back to you.
Okay.
First, it is very welcome that you are all here, and I compliment you on the work that you do. My question is about young people, who will form the future audiences that you all have to inspire. From a financial angle, how easy—or probably how difficult—is it for you to ensure that enough money is going into increasing the engagement of young people and their ability to participate in the arts? Do you want to have a go at that from the point of view of theatre, Liam?
I am happy to pick that up. I know that I speak for my colleagues when I say that we are entirely focused on the benefit to young people because of what you said—they are the future.
The National Theatre of Scotland is 20 years old this year, and for 10 years, we have had a strategic partnership with Imaginate, which runs the Edinburgh international children’s festival. The partnership is called Theatre in Schools Scotland and the premise is simple—it is to take the best of Scottish theatre to schools across the nation. However, the delivery of that is increasingly under the economic pressures that Alistair Mackie and Alex Reedijk were talking about because of touring costs and because of the pressures that schools are under in terms of discretionary budget spend.
This year, as a birthday offer, we are making TISS performances free at the point of delivery to try to engage as many young people as possible. That is where wellbeing indicators become really important, because you do not get an immediate financial return and economic benefit from that delivery in schools, but I think that we would all agree that we are inspiring the next generation of Scotland’s citizens to be engaged in the arts and to feel that the arts are for them.
I was at a performance at James Gillespie’s primary school back in November that was just for primary 2s, and it was fantastic watching how, in their school hall, every child could engage in a way that was right for them. There were clearly some young people in the room who had additional support needs, but it was absolutely fine that some of them paraded around the outskirts of the gym hall; they could keep moving while they watched. There are lots of developments in our performance venues across the country to offer relaxed performances and so on, but those experiences are not always the most comfortable thing for some children and young people.
Are you finding that there is an increasing uplift from schools in engaging with you and that there are more children involved to be inspired in relation to something extracurricular? We often get told that we are lacking in music teachers, for example, and some of the tuition that you might find for acting or whatever is not readily available—it is certainly a bit of a postcode lottery. Are we going in the right direction or have we got far more to do to inspire our younger people?
I would say that there is far more to be done to ensure universal access to music provision in schools across Scotland. There is evidence that there is good work going on and that progress has been made. I think that all the national companies feel a great responsibility to be part of that activity and part of that programme. Certainly, speaking for the SCO—I know that the others will say something similar—we take those responsibilities extremely seriously, but such work is expensive. I could give you a list of all the various projects that we are involved in with children, from the very youngest age, with our big ears, little ears project, to those in primary and secondary schools and in the further and higher education sectors.
I am looking at our new annual review, which has just been printed. On the first page, there is a quote from a school in Craigmillar that says, “Every time they have attended an SCO performance, they have come back invigorated. It is a pleasure to see.” We could all say something similar. We will all have some sort of evidence.
The reality is that for us to be able to undertake the volume of work across the country that we currently do, it requires, as Alistair Mackie said, a number of different funding sources. Core Scottish Government funding allows us to have the conversations, but it does not allow us to do very much of the activity. The activity comes from other funding sources, such as trusts, foundations and individual donors.
Much of our philanthropy is unrestricted, but increasingly quite a lot of it is saying, “These are the areas that we’re looking for,” and it is inevitably to do with young people and public health and wellbeing. I concur with everything that colleagues have said so far—I do not need to go back over all of that—but this is a time of opportunity. To take a different tack, if I may, with public health and wellbeing and preventative healthcare, those of us working in the arts have known for a very long time the benefits of the arts to health and wellbeing. You just have to look at our subscriber base and at why people come back every week.
Since Covid, something really exciting has happened, which is that policy makers the world over are now talking about this seriously. That is fantastic. We are being encouraged—it does not take much encouragement, because we want to do it—to get into new areas of young people, community, placemaking and health and wellbeing. That is the right thing for us to do, but, at the moment, our core funding is being stretched thinly to deliver it.
My final remark on that is that one of the good things that are happening is that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education in Scotland is starting to look at the extracurricular dimension as part of the quality provision in schools. That is a huge benefit, because, as you say, that is the wellbeing aspect and the quality side of it. The Education (Scotland) Act 2025, which went through the Parliament four or five months ago, asks inspectors to look at that extra dimension, to which you all contribute so effectively. In previous times, that was not really measured and we did not get much feedback on it, so that change is a very good thing.
I will quickly answer, if Alistair Mackie does not mind. One tangible piece of evidence about our community work and schools work comes from the SCO’s involvement for the past five years in a pretty wide-ranging community and education project in Craigmillar, here in Edinburgh. A lot of that work has been based at Castlebrae high school, which did not have instrumental music service provision. Just before Christmas, we were informed by the school that a factor—I am sure that there were many factors at play, and I will not pretend that we take all the credit—in the local authority’s decision to introduce regular instrumental tuition was evidence of the benefits of the school’s work with the SCO over the past five years.
Good.
You referenced our work as extracurricular, yet one of the great opportunities of our age is that we can be in the classroom helping teachers to deliver their curriculum requirements. It has been a primary focus of the RSNO to get teacher panels together and to develop digital content. That is not about kids sitting in front of a screen; it is about how we get teachers to lead music lessons in the classroom. We now have the infrastructure to get into classrooms and, for us, as professional performing companies, it is incredibly important to find solutions for not just presenting extracurricular activity but supporting classroom teaching.
Alex Reedijk is keen to come in.
I went to see a performance of “The Tale o’ Tam o’ Shanter” at St Mary’s primary school in Largs last year, which was supported by Scottish Opera. Not only did about 80 children participate but all the parents and grandparents turned out to see it. It was a joyous occasion.
In part answer to Liz Smith’s question, I observe that Scottish Opera has been performing in primary schools for the best part of 35 years, I would say, although I am happy to be corrected. I happily bump into people who say, “I was there 35 years ago, then my kids went and now my grandkids are going.” There is something about that continuity that is really important.
On Alistair Mackie and Gavin Reid’s points, there are a goodly number of young people who would otherwise never have an opportunity to express themselves or use such performance opportunities to suddenly flourish. It is interesting that we see a trend and increasing evidence that teachers no longer have the skills to deliver elements of the creative part of the curriculum—we spoke a little about that at the music education forum with the First Minister in December. There is something to watch in all of that.
Again, on Alistair Mackie and Gavin Reid’s points, we have a partnership with Disney on the Disney musicals in schools project. At first, when that opportunity presented itself, we thought, “Really?” However, after a moment or two, once we got to know Disney better, we realised that it was an extraordinary opportunity to partner with a whole array of schools that we otherwise would not have had the chance to be in front of.
If we progress up through the ages, another thing that we are doing a lot more work on now is Developing the Young Workforce. In that, we are particularly taking responsibility to encourage the artisan skills, which we rely on heavily, to have an opportunity to flourish. We are in close partnership with the City of Glasgow College, as well as with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, with which we have just launched a new diploma. There are multiple strands to how we can intersect through education.
Following on from Liz Smith, who asked about young people being involved, I wonder about your reach across society—are you reaching into poorer areas and are people from those areas attending performances? I was at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow recently. None of you was involved in the show that I saw; it was Dundee Rep doing “The Glass Menagerie”. It was very good. However, it struck me that the audience was pretty middle class and educated. The Citizens is meant to be the theatre in Glasgow that attracts a wide range of people.
Mr Roth, your area is perhaps seen as quite niche. Do you get a wide range of audiences?
10:00
I would not say that it is niche at all. We reach across all of Scotland. We take a holistic approach to community engagement. We reach young kids in schools, people at the end of their life and people who have significant health issues such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or dementia.
We have multiple programmes running every week and month of the year across Scotland, as far as the islands. We think that young people need to be engaged and inspired. In some cases, they are troubled, so we run very intense programmes for schools.
There is a programme called safe to be me, which is about mental health and wellbeing. It brings kids together to talk about how they can navigate the world as it is. We have a special programme called the close, as part of which we work with schools that have taken children out of mainstream schools to educate them. We spend a year with those young people doing that programme.
As I mentioned, we also have our MS, Parkinson’s and dementia programmes across Scotland. We ran a very successful programme up in Orkney. I do not know whether members are aware that Orkney has the highest rate of MS per capita in the whole of the United Kingdom. We worked with the national health service on that.
That work involves you going out to reach people, but what about your main performances? Are you more relaxed if the audiences for your main performances are not so diverse?
The audiences for our main performances are very diverse, as are the activities that we do across the country.
We have another programme called the wee nutcracker, which is specifically for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as the general public. Albert Bartlett, a company that sells potatoes and things, sponsored that so that we could bring young people from schools in disadvantaged areas around Glasgow into those performances free of charge, and it paid for the bus for them to get there.
We are working with Intercultural Youth Scotland, refugees and other people who might have come here quite recently and who have not experienced the arts—particularly our art form. We bring them into performances for free.
When I stand in the foyer before or after shows and look at the audience, I see that it is incredibly diverse. It goes from very young people to older people—every part of society is represented. That is perhaps with the exception of Inverness, which has a particular demographic. However, in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, the audiences are completely diverse.
The National Theatre of Scotland has a link with Easterhouse in Glasgow. Has that worked? Do you have a diverse audience?
Absolutely. I will build on what Steven Roth said, which is that this is about taking a diverse approach to audience development. I will illustrate that by telling you about the commitment to a three-year project that we are bringing to fruition this year, in which we are working with people in Scotland’s care-experienced community to engage them in making a show or performance event that is about them. That will come to fruition at an event that is taking place here in the Parliament as part of the festival of politics this year.
That is part of our commitment to develop audiences and engage citizens, which is our responsibility as national organisations. We have to go to where the audiences are and break down the barriers and the perception that certain parts of cultural delivery are not for certain people.
I know that I speak for my colleagues when I say that our work is for everybody. However, we do not take achieving that for granted. The caring Scotland project was about building on Scotland’s commitment, through the Promise, to listen to the stories of people who are care experienced over generations. That is an important part of Scotland’s overall national story, and we value it.
The follow-up is about how to sustain such work and keep people coming back once we have engaged them, so part of our overall engagement strategy year on year is to build on those targeted interventions and to develop them further.
Thank you for the question, which I will answer slightly differently. One long-standing part of Scottish Opera’s DNA has been our commitment to the full map of Scotland, which has about 40 per cent of the landmass of the UK and around 5 million people. We are committed to visiting at least 35 communities a year around the whole of Scotland, out of a pool of about 110. What is fascinating is that, in many of the communities that we visit, the hall might be only half the size of this room and might hold only 100 or 150 people, but it is exactly the right size for the community in which it sits and will, typically, be full. That is much less to do with community demographics and much more to do with the enthusiasm in many communities for live performance. It is our duty to bring opera to those communities.
We can never take those audiences for granted, because there is always someone in every audience for whom opera has been their life’s work, so we have to be clear about our own knowledge.
Is there more of a challenge in the cities? It is one thing to go to a place such as Kirkwall, where there is a mixed community to start with, but do you get a lot of people from the east end when you perform in Glasgow?
I do not know the individual demographics of where people come from but, as Steven Roth does, I stand in the foyer before and after every performance and see a huge array of human beings passing through our theatre. One of our commitments is to hold what we call our net net ticket price—in other words, the price after all the charges, VAT and other dramas come off it—at something like £35 or £38. I am happy to be fact checked, but I am pretty sure that it is around that price point, so that the price does not create a reason why people cannot come to the opera. We also deliberately keep that price substantially lower than the price of going to the football.
That is still about five times the price of going to the cinema.
It is about twice the price.
You have not been to the cinema for a while, John. I think it is double what you are suggesting.
Mr Mackie wants to come in.
I have a few more people who want to come in. Do you want to come in on the same point, Alistair?
Just quickly.
We will hear from you and Gavin Reid, and then Craig Hoy, Michelle Thomson and Michael Marra are all keen to come in.
We all have initiatives to break down any barriers, and I can tell you what the RSNO does. Every week, 1,200 singers come on our programmes, mostly in community choruses. In addition, we have partnerships with Sistema Scotland and Refugee Festival Scotland. We have done all that.
I will make one point. It is incredibly important that people from every part of society in Scotland see themselves represented on the stage, but there is a massive obstacle to that. Unless we have secure, well-paid jobs, we will become a middle-class profession and will have middle-class audiences. If someone has to accumulate a hundred grand of debt to train as an orchestral musician but then goes into a job where the most that they can earn is £35,000 and even that is insecure, we will not get diversity. We must talk honestly and openly about what we pay our cultural workforce, how we pay them and the security of their employment, because that will fundamentally underpin future diversity.
You have touched on a point that I want to go into later about the ratio of permanent to freelance employees, because that is clearly an issue.
I have many other people who are keen to come in, so we will hear from Gavin Reid and then from Craig Hoy, who has been very patient.
I do not want to waste, or spend, time rehearsing the same conversations as all my colleagues, other than to say that the SCO has been touring communities outside the central belt of Scotland for 45 years. One idea that I wish was mine but which came from one of my predecessors is that we spend six weeks of the summer in island and border communities of all shapes and sizes.
John Mason asked specifically about our concerts and performances in the main halls in Glasgow, although, throughout the year, we are in Edinburgh as many times as we are in Glasgow. Something quite significant happened after Covid, and it probably came from the loss that we felt in not being able to go to concerts or performances or to enjoy that experience in the same shared space as others. Others will have their own stories, but certainly as far as the SCO is concerned, in many of the places that we go to regularly—Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen—audience numbers have increased significantly, as has the diversity.
I also walk the floor front of house before and after shows, and Glasgow is very interesting. I have never seen many of the people who come to our weekly concerts in Glasgow before. We have a different programme every Friday night throughout the winter, and we do 23 shows. The trick is to make people realise that they are meant to come every week and get them to come back. More people want the shared artistic experience that you can only get at a live show.
We use digital and social media, which are great ways of reaching new people. The benefits are not only that we reach those who are unable to get to a concert hall but that we are able to give people a taste of what they will see. That gets them to make the leap to come and experience it. The feedback from all of us will be exactly the same—variations on talking about life-changing, transformational experiences.
I firmly believe that we have a generational opportunity through the arts and what they can do for health and wellbeing. Yes, it is marvellous when we put on a version of a Beethoven symphony that is better than any other and is a great interpretation—those of us that have grown up with music since the year dot get terribly excited about that—but this is actually about the impact for everybody of the sheer transformational power. We are seeing that.
We have just had a run of our Viennese concerts at the Usher hall, where 2,000 people came. In Inverness, 90 per cent of tickets were sold, and in Perth, the show was a sell-out, despite the snow. People really needed that—it was not simply a want but a need.
On specific initiatives, one is social prescribing. We are actively working with a great network of general practitioners in Glasgow on a structured programme of prescription to refer people to come to our concerts. We are also developing a partnership with Public Health Scotland and with its chief officer Manira Ahmad in particular, who is a brilliant lady. One of the things that she runs is a social walking group of ladies from multi-generations and backgrounds, and she brought about 15 of them to the City halls for an SCO Friday night concert. I think that it is fair to say that none of them would have come under their own steam, but a number of them have come back.
I can develop a dodgy knee if you can get one of those GPs to prescribe me a couple of tickets. [Laughter.]
I have some follow-up questions, so I will jump around a little. Gavin Reid, on the subject of social prescribing, I recently visited Borders general hospital and talked to the allied health professionals there. The hospital has a full-time music therapist. How much more could be done through social and health wellbeing to embed something like music therapy in the NHS, and is the Scottish Government receptive to that at a senior level? Could what is happening in Borders general hospital be replicated by other health boards?
The conversations that I have been part of suggest that colleagues across Government are receptive to that. However, the reality on the ground is that there are a lot of different provisions. I will give two examples, briefly. In Glasgow, there is one network that covers a significant number of GP practices, which allows us to talk to one person and develop a programme. In Edinburgh, the picture is fragmented, so we have to talk to multiple people, which is labour intensive and makes it far harder to make an impact in a community.
The short answer is that we need a joined-up-network approach that allows us to speak to the right people. I come back to the fact that such activity is additional to core funding, which means that more people have to take on roles in addition to their normal job; so, if it is to be sustainable, it has to be funded.
I will build on what Gavin Reid said. One of the key moves that the Scottish Government could make to enable that would be to move from the conceptual understanding of what cross-portfolio budgeting for culture could look like to actually incorporating it into budgeting. Not only would that provide a really clear mandate with regard to resource; it would hold the culture sector’s feet to the fire in delivering across justice, health and education, and it would enable some funding to flow not just from the culture and external affairs portfolio, but, explicitly, from other Cabinet portfolios.
10:15
That takes me neatly to my next question. One of the recommendations in your report is for more regular meetings with ministers. Do you feel that, although you have access to, say, the culture minister, in all those other areas where you could be having a positive economic or social impact you are not necessarily enjoying the same access to public policy makers and decision makers?
There is, absolutely, an understanding that cabinet secretaries and ministers have an extraordinarily full workload, but I think that there is room for such an opportunity there. Colleagues have talked about the opportunities ahead and, indeed, a potential opportunity gap if we are not careful. I think that that area needs to be looked at.
The range of challenges that the next Government will face following the election is significant. We do not need to re-rehearse them now—
We will be doing so this afternoon. [Laughter.]
I will leave that to you in the first instance.
We are really clear that a nation’s cultural health absolutely contributes towards the health of a nation’s social fabric and how it faces the challenges over the next five years and the next parliamentary session.
I would say, as a very quick PS to that, that evaluation is very important in this area. We can talk passionately all day long about this, but you need to see the evaluative evidence, and one thing that we, in the SCO, are ready to press go on is the creation of a new evaluation post in the company. I have to say that it is all rather dependent on what happens this afternoon, but it is in our strategy and we want to do it, because we know how important it is.
I will ask a lot more about that, if it is not touched on. After all, it is the nitty-gritty of what the finance committee does.
My question goes back to the opening thread. We are the finance committee, so I want to ask you all about your hopes and expectations with regard to today’s budget. Moreover—and this leans into a lot of the talk about multiyear funding and the commitments made in that respect—can you tell us, with an honest reflection that we are not living in a perfect world, what perfection would actually look like?
I do not know who wants to come in on that.
Thank you for the question. I will approach it on the basis of the conversation that we have just been having about health and wellbeing.
Scottish Ballet has been incredibly successful in raising funds for our national centre for dance health, for instance, where we run programmes for those with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and dementia, as well as for young people’s mental health and wellbeing. We have increased donations—particularly from trusts and foundations—sevenfold, and we are now generating more than £2 million a year. When I started with the company, we were raising about £230,000 each year.
That money is specifically ring fenced for those programmes, and it enables us to run them. However, they are growing like mad and we cannot keep up with the demand. Every community in Scotland wants one of these programmes, because it has people with dementia or MS, troubled kids and whatever.
We could keep growing and growing that approach, but, in a way, it masks the underlying problem, which is to do with financial sustainability. We need a really strong core business that is financially sustainable, so that we can do all of that enrichment activity, which is, essentially, an add-on. It is not a bolt-on in the sense that we are doing it just because we want to; as all of my colleagues have been saying, we think that it is fundamentally important that it is holistic. We are great arts companies that are performing on stages at the highest possible level and, in doing so, are representing Scotland, but we are also doing this incredible enrichment work around the country, whether it be with young people or people at the end of their lives.
So, we need to be in a financially sustainable position. Scottish Ballet’s current grant is £100,000 less than it was in 2010. In other words, we have lost roughly 36 per cent of the value of our grant, which is roughly £2.4 million, and we have had to raise that money through philanthropic grants, trusts, sponsorship and so on, as well as through audience income by bumping up ticket prices.
There is a fine balance to be struck there, because if you push ticket prices up too much, you end up in a position in which you cannot have a diverse audience, because you cannot offer performances to everyone, unless they can afford it. Therefore, the ideal scenario would be to go back to the situation that existed in 2010, to have some kind of restorative funding uplift, in the same way as Creative Scotland has benefited from the £100 million in the past 12 months or so, and to look at how we can keep ahead of inflation, because the cost of running our core business is through the roof.
I have said this before, and I said it in the paper as well. We are spending more than £200,000 a year on accommodation in Edinburgh, and I am not talking about five-star hotels. That is the cost of taking the full company from Glasgow to Edinburgh to perform in the Festival theatre three or four times a year. That costs more than £200,000 in accommodation alone, and the Government has just given local councils the authority to charge a 5 per cent bed tax, which means that, from this year, we will be paying £200,000 plus an extra 5 per cent. That is not sustainable.
How can we deal with those ever-increasing costs? The theatre is putting extra costs on us. We have to take all our equipment to every theatre that we go to, because the theatres are struggling to keep up with the best technology and the best equipment. We are subsidising a lot of the cultural ecosystem of Scotland.
If we are to do the very best that we can on stage and provide role models for young people, as well as hope, aspiration and so on, we need to be robust and financially sustainable, because, if we are not, the whole house of cards will come down. In the most recent financial year, we made a very small surplus. In the two years before that, we ran deficits of upwards of £1 million. It is really tough to keep the core business strong and sustainable so that we can do the wide range of activity that we do.
Alistair Mackie wants to come in.
So does Alex Reedijk.
Sorry, Alex. This question might be for either one of you. In fact, it is a gentle challenge for all of you.
Alistair said that the RSNO has managed to increase its income by something in the order of 30 per cent since 2009, but the fact is that all the national performing companies have managed to increase their income in the face of diminishing grants. Therefore, I would argue, for the sake of discussion, that you should have been doing more.
The Government might think, “Well, you’ve managed.” When Alistair appeared in front of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, he talked about setting up an endowment fund. Although I am not disagreeing with any of you—I am a very strong supporter of the arts—I can see why the Government might say, “Look at what you’ve managed to do with a real-terms cut.” Hence my challenge about whether you have been doing enough.
I want to pick up on the multiyear funding element and ask whether that is flowing through. I can see that Liam Sinclair wants to come in as well.
We will let Alex Reedijk come in.
I want to briefly respond to your first question, which was about where we sit from an aspirational point of view.
It is fair to say that, over the course of the summer, there were conversations with the Scottish Government in which it was intimated that it had done a very good thing for Creative Scotland through the uplift in funding for culture and its 250-odd regularly funded organisations. The festivals also benefited from an uplift because of their contribution to “brand Scotland”. As a result, we were travelling, perhaps naively, with a collective sense not of expectation—that is not the right word—but of hope that there would be a recognition that it was “our turn”, because of the lag over the past 15 years and the diminution of our core funding. As we sit here today, the reality is that that aspiration is unlikely to be met—it could possibly be dashed—which will create a whole series of challenges for us.
In relation to your second point, among the many issues that we face is a problem with staff retention—that relates to Alistair’s point about salary levels—and a diminution of activity. In addition, I do not think that we should be naive about the impact of theatre tax relief and orchestra tax relief through Westminster, which has flowed through all our organisations and has spared blushes. Without that theatre tax relief, we would not be viable entities.
I am going to let Liam Sinclair and Gavin Reid in. Three members—Michael Marra, Patrick Harvie and Liz Smith—have not come in at all, so we will have to move on after Liam and Gavin have spoken.
I will pick up on the real need for multiyear funding. The national portfolio of companies is lacking a long-term planning horizon at the moment. On your ambition point, we have absolutely grown our income. I will illustrate that with an example of why those things go together. In National Theatre of Scotland, we have, over the past few years, been consistently exploiting the commercial opportunity of the product that we make. We have been working with a number of London-based commercial producers in a strategic partnership. “The Fifth Step”, which was initially a partnership with Edinburgh International Festival—Jack Lowden starred in it, and it played to huge success in 2024—has just completed a west end run with two commercial producers. In a partnership with National Theatre of Great Britain, we have just had the second-highest-selling title on the National Theatre live platform, and we are talking about potential Broadway transfer and broadcast partnership.
That all needs a long-term horizon, but, on your point about how we have grown revenues, there is revenue benefit to that. The more of a stake that we can put into our national drivers, the more we can get back out of that, but we can feel confident with such a commercial strategy only if we are underpinned by long-term planning horizons from the Government. The real winner in all of this is brand Scotland. For a Scottish-made title to be the second-highest-selling title on an international streaming platform for theatre is an extraordinary thing, but it is underpinned by a multiyear commitment from the Government and the correctional point that Steven Roth was talking about.
It has been the story of the performing arts for a very long time that ambition and resource are a bit like the bite points in a car. You want your ambition to be slightly ahead of resource, so that resource is catching up. That has been stretched, and we are on thin ice at the moment, to be honest. It is a matter of choices.
You ask a good, pertinent question. Government will say, “You’re doing okay. You’ve done this, that and the other.” My orchestra is freelance. None of the musicians are on a permanent contract. They are all on salary, so a major part of the job for me and my colleagues is to create the work that will attract the players and, crucially, retain them. We are asking them to come and live here. We are, regrettably, used to presenting deficit budgets to our board and then spending the year trying to make good. So far, we have just about done that, but it is getting harder and harder every year. On staff resource, it is fair to say that we have just about enough people to deliver the work that we set out to do, but it is not comfortable. There is no fat—I was going to say that there is very little fat, but there is no fat.
On increasing income, when I started in this job, in 2016, we were raising just £600,000 a year in philanthropic income. We now have a target of £1.5 million, and this is a company with a turnover of just under £6 million. For us, philanthropic income is where a lot of the additional income is coming from.
Alistair Mackie, did you want to come in on that point?
You asked what our hope was for this afternoon. It is amazing that the Government has put £70 million more into the culture sector: £50 million has already been delivered, and £20 million has been committed to Creative Scotland in the second year of the funding agreement. Creative Scotland organisations got a reset. Given what this group of companies does for the cultural ecosystem, as well as the value of the work that we do and the support that we give to the education sector, I would find it extraordinary if that £100 million was spent and this group of performing companies did not get a significant reset. We have done well, we have found efficiency and we have grown income, but the truth is that we pay too little. Our extra rates are the lowest in the UK. I am really sorry to say this, but RSNO salaries are way lower than those of, for example, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which is on the other side of Glasgow. We have all been entrepreneurial and creative, but the truth is that we are having to pay less in order to balance our budgets. I do not think that that results in diversity, and, ultimately, it does not give Scotland what it needs from its culture sector.
10:30
I would like to explore the issue of the ecosystem, which has been touched on in different ways. For the national companies, we are talking about the national funding in the budget—the direct funding—but that has a relationship, as some of you have touched on, with local government funding and the sustainability of other parts of the ecosystem.
John Mason kindly referenced “The Glass Menagerie” that was put on by Dundee Rep theatre, but the front page of The Courier in Dundee this morning talks about a threat to the Rep’s funding from Dundee City Council. How fragile is the ecosystem, given the other pressures on local government that are coming through? I will come to Liam Sinclair first on that example.
I am happy to answer—thanks for the question. The national cultural ecosystem infrastructure is vital to us all, and we cannot do our job without it. The correctional adjustment through Creative Scotland has been welcomed by the ecosystem, but there are significant pressures coming through local authority budgets, which is exactly the challenge that Dundee Rep and the other cultural institutions in the city face at the moment.
In the National Theatre of Scotland programme, two of the most substantial pieces that we are making in the current 12-month period are both in co-production with Dundee Rep. “Make It Happen” was one of the key highlights at the Edinburgh international festival last summer, and we are about to present and tour around the country “The High Life” as part of our anniversary season. We need strong partners across the nation to either co-produce or present with. Therefore, the health of those organisations is really important.
Even with the correctional adjustment to the Creative Scotland budget, and its ability to pass that on, the ecosystem is still fragile. All the pressures that are affecting us that we have touched on are affecting our partners across the nation, including pressures in relation to retaining audiences, pressures on salary bills, costs of energy and so on. It is really important that we take an holistic view so that we can achieve the national cultural strategy objectives, have a strong culture offer for everyone in Scotland and ensure the international reach of Scotland’s culture.
That must be critical to talent as well. Steven Roth, the Scottish Dance Theatre is also based at Dundee Rep. When it comes to making sure that you have a group of people working in the performing arts, including in dance, who can cycle through different productions in different ways, have you seen a local vulnerability?
We have a programme, which we call our associate programme, through which we draw young people from across Scotland and Northern Ireland. Like a sports team does, we go out there and pick the best talent available. We have more than 500 applications to the programme. We take around 220 kids and we give them intense training throughout the year in order to give them the skills and the confidence to then, say, apply to the Royal Conservatoire to do a more professional dance course.
Some of those kids will go into ballet and end up with our company or other ballet companies around the world. Some of them will do contemporary dance and end up in, for instance, Dundee.
Our company is all full-time professional dancers. We rarely use freelancers because we have a core group. Occasionally, we partner with the Royal Conservatoire—for instance, right now, we have a group of dancers from the Royal Conservatoire performing in “The Snow Queen” around the country.
There are young people doing dance in almost every community across Great Britain because young people love to dance. If we get them early enough, train them and give them those pathways and opportunities, we will have a really healthy ecosystem all the way through to the profession, including people who perhaps do not want a professional dance life but want to teach in schools or run community groups. We have also talked about health and wellbeing. The additional benefit of having strong national companies is that they can meet those objectives and produce role models for aspirational young people wherever they are.
Thank you.
We have partly touched on the pressures on local government budgets flowing through to the cost of space. Is that something that various organisations are experiencing?
I will make two specific points on that. The RSNO and the SCO have worked in partnership with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for the past 30 years to present a programme of work in Perth.
For both of us, that means holding two concerts a year. Perth concert hall is part of that partnership and adds some other concerts, so it has a good package to offer audiences. Once we develop our community and schools programmes, we present them in and aim them at the Perth and Kinross area.
There used to be a contribution from the Perth and Kinross common good fund, which match funded the third party funding that we received, and that funding paid for the hall hire. However, that funding went by the by some time ago, so we now have to pick up that bill.
The whole project is funded through money from third party trusts and foundations. We have worked with the Gannochy Trust, which has been an amazing partner, on a three-year cycle for 30 years. We meet the trust every three years, but we simply cannot rely on it, because it has other calls on its time. That is one example of a significant part of our performance, schools and community work that is under threat because of a lack of local authority funding.
Another example relates to Inverness. Not so long ago, Eden Court theatre in Inverness was one of the few fee-paying promoters in Scotland, and there was an orchestral series of about 10 concerts. That funding has been eroded. Frankly, getting ourselves to Inverness once a year is about as much as we can do, because of the cost.
We all work, in one way or another, with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I make a personal declaration that I used to be a governor and am now a trustee of its endowment trusts. I know that there have been many conversations about whether the conservatoire should be funded primarily through education funding or culture funding—it provides cultural provision, but it is an education provider. I am also a trustee of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which includes the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music. The funding model in England is entirely different from the funding model in Scotland, and the conservatoire, to its detriment, falls between the two stools.
On local councils, I took the time last night to look at our 2009 accounts. We received £4.3 million from the Scottish Government, which is more than we got this year, for our core grant. We also received £565,000 in grants from local councils, whereas that figure will be less than £10,000 next year. However, that does not tell the real story. Local councils used to pay higher fees to orchestras and other people to go and perform. Now, we have to take the risk. We hire their halls and try to sell tickets. In 2009, various towns and cities in Scotland supported the RSNO and our other national companies through direct grants and hires, but that position has now turned around completely. We are hiring their halls, taking the risk and losing money to go and perform there. There has been a seismic change in the relationship between local councils and the performing companies.
Good morning. I have a two-part question—I will roll it together to save time. It is about the principle that you cannot change something without measuring it.
First, my experience—albeit that it was on a much smaller scale than yours—when I was on the board of a small arts festival, was that funders increasingly did not want to know about the quality or relevance of the work that we were commissioning or programming; they wanted to know how many hotel beds would be filled as a result of the festival. That sometimes created pressure to move towards work that might be relied on to be a bit crowd pleasing and to move away from work that we thought was more relevant and that was high quality but could be challenging or perhaps provocative. Do the national performing companies feel under similar pressure as a result of the requirement to report on their economic impact?
Secondly, in relation to how you report your economic impact, the research report that we have in front of us is all about the headline figures. Are you able to distinguish between the types of economic impact that you generate? For example, a—dare I say it?—crowd-pleasing performance of a very well-known or familiar piece of work in a prestigious venue might generate a large amount of economic activity that mostly goes through internationally owned hotel chains, whereas other types of work might generate a lower overall scale of economic activity but might be more likely to benefit locally owned businesses or demographic groups and geographical areas for which that economic activity would be more meaningful. Can you distinguish between the types of economic activity or benefit that you are generating, as opposed to just the scale of it?
Alex, do you want to come in on that question?
I am happy to attempt to answer it.
I would probably spin it back and, reflecting on my own organisation, say that we have to be not only fiscally prudent, stable et cetera but artistically prudent, stable and interesting. We hold all of those things in equal tension. There is a tension between, say, doing “La Bohème” as we did last autumn—which was, referencing other people’s comments, an extraordinary success at the box office—
Excuse my interrupting, but Michael Marra said that it was magnificent.
That is brilliant—thank you. We will take that.
I guess that my point is that the audience numbers were the best that we had had since before Covid; we had a real sense of audiences returning to us. However, in the same way that no one goes to a restaurant and has the same meal every time, we think that, artistically speaking, we have to nourish not only our audiences but the creative teams who make the work and the venues in which we present them.
Therefore, we are holding that repertoire-versus-money aspect in tension and balance at all times. Sometimes, we will do “La Bohème” and expect to play to full houses, and at other times, we will do other things; for example, our new world premiere of “The Great Wave”, which we are putting on in partnership with the Japanese Government, is coming up. We are planning on having full houses, but we will not be doing nearly as many performances. It is partly about yield, which brings us back to the point about efficiency, but it is also about making sure that we offer our audiences a good array of, in our case, opera.
Does that sort of answer your question?
It does, in terms of the programming element. I am not sure whether, as you move forward, you are looking to change how you do economic reporting so that you can distinguish between some large economic impact that can be demonstrated and some economic impact that will perhaps be more meaningful and make a bigger difference in certain parts of our economy.
Again, it comes back to the tension between economic benefit and artistic benefit. We would always look to be as financially efficient as possible and to deliver as many jobs as possible, but that cannot always be equal to box office outcomes or, indeed, the work that we are doing.
Does anyone else have a view on this?
Now that we are in the second phase of our survey, that is a really good challenge to us to try to differentiate between those things. I do not like the idea of putting money into international hotel chains; I love the idea of putting it into small communities around Scotland. It is a really important challenge to us to get the numbers for that.
There are things that might be easy at the box office—say, the film and video game concerts that we put on and which sell out—but those are really important, because I want to be in front of people who are not living in the classical music bubble. I want to be relevant to broader communities. The film scores that we do for Hollywood have real economic value, but I think that more people in Scotland who watch films will have a sense of ownership of their national orchestra if they can hear the scores for those films.
It is an interesting conversation to have. We used to put our film concerts at the back of our brochures as a kind of add-on; it was as if we were saying, “The proper stuff’s at the front, and if you don’t like that, there’s film stuff at the end.” I think that that insults our audiences. If you love video game or film music, you should be able to hear it at the highest quality, played by the national orchestra.
I think that more evolved economic analysis would be of value, and I take that as a challenge. I do not think that we have enough of it.
I thank Patrick Harvie for the question, because it highlights the broader challenge of articulating the impact and benefits of Scotland’s national cultural strategy. We are all really proud of the fact that we exist in a nation that has a culture strategy; however, although it describes broad benefits and contributions, it is perhaps less strong when it comes to really punchy impact measurements across the full portfolio of strategic intentions.
This links with my earlier point about cross-portfolio budgeting. Despite people’s best intentions, culture is still seen as a kind of slightly nice-to-have sensibility in light of all the health, justice and other pressures that we are facing. If it could be woven in in a more fiscal way through the next parliamentary session in terms of how the Parliament views such things, the impact measurements that your question relates to would be sharpened up. Indeed, those sorts of measurements would have to flow through, because there would be a fiscal requirement to understand the impact and contribution of this bit of the justice budget, say, or that bit of the education budget.
Thank you.
10:45
To be fair to the performing companies, the impact assessment report goes some way towards doing that, because it emphasises the proportional importance of community engagement, for example, as I mentioned earlier, relative to the big performances in the cities. There is a proportionally greater benefit to going out to smaller places and engaging with schools and so on.
I want to move on, because we are running out of time—we have only about 15 minutes left and I want you all to have a minute or two to round up.
Despite all the talk of reduced funding, the Scottish Government still provides 46 per cent of the overall funding, so the public sector and other sources account for about 60 per cent of funding. Around £8.8 million comes from ticket sales. That makes the sector vulnerable.
The assessment says that although only one in seven tickets is sold to people who live outside Scotland, of which around half are from England and around half are from the rest of the world, those sales brings in about a quarter of the GVA. Are the companies considering placing more emphasis on attracting people from other parts of the world—even if it benefits big hotel chains—to come to Scotland and to enjoy the arts while they are here?
For example, when the committee visited Vilnius, I went to the ballet. We saw that they have built a new opera house and they are building yet another massive concert hall in the middle of Vilnius. They also have a facility for their orchestra. They are going big on the arts, so to speak. That must be to attract people from overseas, because I would not think that they would have a core audience in the city to sustain that.
What your views are on that? Although the public sector will always be critical to your long-term survival and sustainability, what else can be done to boost that, other than the Scottish Government, local authorities and so on providing additional funding?
Who wants to kick off with any of those issues?
I will have a go at that. Your question brings to mind the Dunard centre for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. You will all know where we are with the building of that. The genesis of the conversations around what we now know as the Dunard centre was to create a new home in Edinburgh for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The earliest discussions on how to fund it and whether public funding would be attracted to such a project was a direct approach some 10 or 11 years ago to the Scottish Government to inquire about seed funding.
We now have funding, as you will know, through the Edinburgh and south-east Scotland city region deal, of £25 million, plus the extremely welcome additional £20 million that was announced before Christmas from the Scottish Government to enable the construction contract. This is all in the public domain. That £45 million pounds of public funding is supporting the construction contract of around £160 million. I can rehearse all the GVA figures for that particular hall—I have them here. However, the point is not simply to create a lovely new concert hall for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to play in for part of the year but to amplify the power of the arts, attract new audience locally, nationally, UK-wide and—absolutely—internationally, and to invest big time in Scotland’s cultural infrastructure. You will have heard many people say—it is pretty much in every press release—that it is the first concert hall in Edinburgh in more than 100 years. It is the first one to be built since the Usher hall.
We also have the prospect of the national centre for music, which will complement what the concert hall will do and provide multiple opportunities for participation at grass-roots, professional, school, and further and higher education levels.
That is an example of significant public investment matched with, I have to say, very significant private investment and philanthropy on both sites, enabling a truly once-in-a-generation transformational opportunity, which will inevitably attract international attention.
Your question goes to the heart of what the strategy is, for us as a collection of five organisations, and for the Government. That is two-pronged. We are all businesses, as well as national cultural assets. Healthy businesses diversify their income and resilience to face the economic landscape. We are all committed to that. That sits side by side with a simple and important question for the nation, which is whether it wants a collection of nationally recognised performing organisations. If it does, there needs to be an underpinning of grant funding matching that ambition.
It is right that we are all challenged to diversify our business and resilience, but it is also right that that is met with a commitment to the Scottish Government’s culture budget, and to the £100 million commitment being pushed and increased in line with that.
I will let Liz in. We have only about 10 minutes—
It is just a—
Hold on. Before you say that, I want to let folk know what is happening.
We will have about 10 minutes following Liz Smith’s comments, so I ask our guests to think about what they would like to say in winding up. I will give you all an opportunity to make a final contribution. Our next evidence session is with witnesses from the Office for Budget Responsibility, and I can see that they are staring at us from the public gallery, so we do not want to keep them waiting too long.
Have a think about what you want to say to wind up. We never got on to freelancers, so somebody might want to talk about that, because there is an issue about the ratio of permanent employees to freelancers.
I have a quick question for Alex Reedijk. You mentioned the capacity of teachers in schools and said that you feel that we do not have the musical skill base that you would like. Is that a teacher training problem?
The short answer is yes.
Who wants to go first in winding up? You will all be brought in. Alistair Mackie can go last, because he started, so I will give him the final word, which is only fair.
I am happy to pick up on a couple of things. Thank you for introducing freelancers to the conversation. I want to respond to Patrick Harvie on economic benefit. Benefit in general is not always as obvious as is set out in a report such as that by Biggar Economics. Biggar Economics has a template and formula for casting the net across our organisations, getting all the numbers and pulling them into a format. That is one thing, but there are a lot of hidden benefits that sometimes outweigh all that.
I will use freelancers as an example. As a group of national companies, we all employ freelancers, particularly for touring, and for production, lighting and sound. Those freelancers need enough work to maintain their residence in Scotland and to be able to live and work here. We also need to attract the best people here and give them enough work. There is a spin-off in our all having strong companies that employ freelancers, but the hidden part is that those freelancers often work in the film industry—that is the internationality part.
Scotland is punching well above its weight in producing films and having international players here, with Alistair Mackie’s orchestra often playing the scores for the films. The freelancers who are working for us are also picking up work with those international film companies. That means that they can live, work and survive in Scotland, and that brings its own economic benefit. We are attracting talent into Scotland, and those people are determining to live here because there is enough work for them. If you take out one piece of that ecology—whether that is because a national company goes or the film industry collapses or whatever—those people will not be able to sustain themselves over a year. Therefore, they will leave and there will be no economic benefit.
There are always a lot of intangibles that are not necessarily factored into a report such as that by Biggar Economics. We have to remember that the situation is very interconnected. We are all here to do two things: to deliver value back to Scotland and to deliver value back to the people of Scotland, artistically and culturally, and in relation to health and in every other way we possibly can.
I will take us back a little. If this evidence session was happening 25 years ago, you would have four national performance companies in front of you, because the National Theatre of Scotland did not exist. It is 20 years old this year. It exists because there was a campaign by the entire theatre community in Scotland—predominantly that freelance workforce—to say that the situation was not right and that, as a nation, we needed a national theatre.
We have been reflecting on that in relation to the storytelling around who we are as an organisation. To pick up on Steven’s point, we needed a national theatre because you cannot make theatre without the freelance workforce—70 per cent of theatre in the UK is made by freelancers. That is just a fact. The more precarious being a freelancer becomes, the more at risk we all are of not being able to make the quality output that Scotland is known for. It is vital that stability and regular employment opportunities are provided for freelancers.
I could say exactly the same as Liam about freelancers. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a freelance orchestra and there is absolutely no guarantee year to year about the level of work that people will get and therefore what they will earn. We have gone into that in some detail.
This speaks to how, as arts organisations, we measure success and the balance of a social impact report and a thorough economic impact report helps to tell those stories. One of the most profound and meaningful experiences that I have had in this job was in a community hall in Yell, in the north of Shetland, where half of the orchestra—because we could only fit half of them into the community hall—played to about 75 people who had never seen an orchestra up there before in living memory. It was one of the most extraordinary opportunities and we will all have similar stories. Last summer, we were at the proms in front of 5,000 people and on television and the radio. Whatever scale we are working at, however, there is no difference in the quality of the social impact.
I will leave you with the thought that this is a remarkable once-in-a-generation time. Of course finances are tight, but it is a time of enormous opportunity when we are all understanding—not simply realising—the significant health and wellbeing benefits of the arts across the board. With a nod to Alistair’s point about the £100 million, I absolutely believe that this is a time to invest.
I have a slightly different reflection, which is that the fact that we are here today is an example of the close relationship between the five largest performing arts companies and the Scottish Government and, therefore, the people of Scotland. That is a fantastic thing. That direct relationship between the companies and the Government is held up across the rest of the UK as an exemplar of very best practice. It is also true, despite our having been a bit gloomy today, that our working models are fundamentally held up as exemplars of good modern practice. I would take some heart from that.
I note that the vast majority of freelancers are freelance through choice; it is their choice to have a portfolio career. It is certainly our duty to nourish that sector as much as possible, but nevertheless, people do it happily and choose to be freelancers.
There is something in recognising that the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament take culture incredibly seriously. Thank you for having us here today.
Alistair, we started with you and we will finish with you.
I have two very quick points to make. We must recognise how money flows through the national companies into communities and the wider arts ecosystem, and we must recognise how the skills that are brought to Scotland because of the national companies are put at the service of our education sector and the wider ecosystem. We are essential to the Scottish cultural ecosystem. That is the first thing.
The second thing, which Liam talked about, is cross-portfolio work. I think that it is often seen as us coming after someone else’s budget—a health budget or an education budget. NHS England had 1,000 link workers to connect arts organisations with healthcare initiatives. They did an economic analysis and then increased the number of link workers to 4,500. That was not a charitable act, but economic sense and it is great to be here so that we can talk about economic benefit. If we are integrated into education, we provide tremendous value and we can turbocharge cultural education in Scotland. We can also turbocharge wellbeing initiatives. That has a positive economic return; it is not a negative. We are not here to beg for money; we are here to offer something that genuinely contributes economic and community social benefit to Scotland. We are essential, and it would be incredibly important and sad if we did not get a significant part of the £100 million uplift.
Thank you very much. I think that that has certainly been taken on board by me and my colleagues.
We have 25 seconds left of the evidence session. It behoves me to thank the representatives of Scotland’s five national performance companies for coming along today. Thank you for your excellent contributions and a really interesting discussion. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.
I call a five-minute break to allow for a changeover of witnesses and a short break for members.
11:00 Meeting suspended.Previous
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