Chamber and committees

We are going to have a referendum, are we not?

I am not saying that there is no reason to worry. I care passionately about our heritage—as do all the members of the committee, I suspect. Our built heritage, much of which is very old, is facing environmental degradation. That leads to instability and dangers, which lead to the requirement to maintain and support castles and other old buildings and all the rest of Scotland’s built heritage. That was going to be a challenge with or without a resource spending review, and would have been a challenge if we were sitting here discussing the budget line, which we are not.

I acknowledge that there is a major challenge for Historic Environment Scotland in general, because of the nature of the estate and the nature of the decline in the built infrastructure, so we will have to work very closely together to work out how we can maximise the resources that HES has, from us and from elsewhere, to make sure that we can protect our historic sites around the country. To stress a point that Kate Forbes and I have made already, I say that those issues are at the heart of discussions with cultural organisations, trade unions, trustees and so on. Those conversations are happening because of information that we now have from the resource spending review.

It behoves all of us to be as imaginative as possible in working out what we can do to protect the built heritage in Scotland, with the resources that we have in constrained circumstances. I am the first to acknowledge that it will not be a simple task; it will not be easy not just in a financial sense, but in relation to all other considerations, given the size of the estate for which HES is responsible. We could probably spend the whole evidence session just on HES and the nature of the challenge that it is facing. It is absolutely at the top of my inbox and is an area in which we in the Government need to work with our agencies and arm’s-length external organisations to ensure that they can do what they are supposed to do.

Yes. I am sorry to take issue with you, Mr Cameron, but I am not sure that it is a vexed question. We can differ honourably—as we do—on how we would vote in such a referendum but I hope that, as democrats, all of us believe in having democratic votes. When a Government is returned in an election on a platform for a vote to be held, as democrats, we should all agree that that is what should happen.

There is a cost associated with a referendum, and there are costs associated with Scottish Parliament elections and UK Parliament elections. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having Scottish Parliament elections is a vexed question? I hope not. Is somebody reasonably suggesting that having UK Parliament elections is a vexed question? Of course they are not. Those are democratic votes and, as a democrat, I respect the results of the Scottish Parliament elections last year, in which a majority of the parliamentarians who were elected believed that there should be a vote. The people voted for that.

The Government has set out its timetable. I gently suggest to Mr Cameron that it would be helpful if his UK Government colleagues were not just as amenable but as respectful of democratic election outcomes in Scotland as the former Prime Minister David Cameron was. That would be helpful, because it is not a vexed question. The decision has been made. The electorate has asked for a referendum, and that is what should happen.

You have raised a question before about the Scottish Government playing a significant role in funding that from a public sector point of view. I would need to write to Mr Ruskell about where we are with UK Government funding in relation to that.

I would say, in general terms, that a great deal of work is going into the world cycling championships. The committee will be aware of this, but people watching the proceedings might not be: the event is the first example of a world cycling championship bringing together all the different cycling disciplines—I think that there are 13; please do not ask me to name them all—and it will take place at venues throughout Scotland. It is unprecedented in scale—I think that I am right in saying that it is of the order of the Commonwealth games. It is a huge event. A major part of the considerations around it involve how it is organised and how it is funded in these constrained times. However, an awful lot of thought is also going into what the societal benefits of such an event should be and what the event will do to make more of us use our bikes and change our attitudes to health and wellbeing. There are cash questions—absolutely—and I will write to you with the latest statistics on them. However—and this goes to the heart of the points that we have been making—there are health and wellbeing considerations that cannot be enumerated in cash terms.

I will add to that. Maurice Golden has thrown a pebble in the pond. When I talked before about the visitor numbers for the national museum of Scotland being at 1.5 million rather than 3 million, a light went on for me—I do not know whether it did for anyone else. Given that we have not seen the full return of international visitors, it seems that we are seeing that domestic visitors have more confidence. We may call it a staycation, or it may just be people not travelling very far to go to different cultural institutions.

That gives us hope that part of the small-c cultural change that there has been because of the Covid pandemic is that people are more open to exploring what is on their doorstep. Perhaps there is an opportunity in that for us all in realising that that phenomenon is happening, and that it brings societal advantages if absolutely everybody is able to make use of cultural institutions. I thank Maurice Golden for asking the question in the way that he did, because it has made me want to understand that situation a bit better. It should not just be a passing fad; there is a way of keeping that change while also attracting people to come back. We are all beginning to see more international visitors on our streets, and they are very welcome. The question is what we can do to ensure that people who have previously not visited cultural organisations and institutions close to home are indeed doing that.

Incidentally, people were queuing outside the national museum of Scotland yesterday before it opened, which I thought was a tremendous straw in the wind. Walking past, I could hear that there were international visitors, but also a lot of families and people who were clearly from here or not far from here and wanted to wait in the rain on Chambers Street to go to the museum. That is a good sign. There is something in Mr Golden’s question that is definitely worth better understanding.

Forgive me: I should probably have mentioned health boards in my reply to Sarah Boyack about the partners that are part of the process. I go back to my telescope metaphor. Regardless of which way you look through the telescope, you are going to work back from the individual, to who thinks that an individual needs intervention or support in a form that has not conventionally been prescribed. That will involve a number of organisations—national Government, local government, health boards, the culture sector and individual general practices. There are probably other links in the chain that I have not mentioned. Everybody will need to play a part. Sarah Boyack’s point on strategy was well made. For me, it is important to have confidence that all the links in the chain will play their part.

We can have as many strategies as we like, but social prescribing is relatively new, in terms of adoption of successful models that have made it happen. We are trying to introduce it as quickly as possible. However, making it work will involve a lot of organisations, institutions and—at the end of the day—individuals.

In the evidence session with Humza Yousaf, we talked about GPs in the Western Isles, for example, taking out their little contact books to tell patients the organisations that are available that they could make use of in social prescribing. We have to make sure that social prescribing is available everywhere and not just in some places. I acknowledge that a lot of links are needed in the chain to make it work and that there is a broad geographical spread. We need to make sure that it is available to all, because healthcare should be there for everybody, everywhere, at the point of need.

The point is well made that this is something that we need to get on with. However, there is also awareness that if it were simple it would have been done already. A mixture of pull and push will be required to make sure that it happens. To go back to the conversations that I was having yesterday, I note that people are very aware of that and are turning their attention to how they can play their part.

Of course, Mr Cameron left out the other option: that the UK Government respects the result of the Scottish Parliament election and the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, acts in exactly the same way that his predecessor, David Cameron, did. As the Mr Cameron who is on this committee knows, Scottish politics is full of UK Governments saying no, no, no, yes. I invite him to work with me to persuade the UK Government to live up to its democratic undertakings. After all, the UK Government is particularly keen on going around the world saying that the UK is a democratic country that upholds the highest standards of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It would be really nice if it did that in this case as well.

My colleague Neil Gray has been dealing with that matter, and internal communication is circulating on that. It would probably make more sense for me to write to the committee, because I am sure that Mr Golden is not the only member of the committee to want to understand the background to all that.

However, I make the general point that, over the coming years, funding constraints will impact organisations that do good work. Would I wish it to be so? No; I would far rather that we did not have the constrained circumstances that we have. I underline this point as we come towards the end of the evidence session, because it is important: we as the Government have to live within our means, because this Government does not have the normal levers at its disposal that other Governments do, such as the ability to borrow. Would I wish for us to be able to maintain our spending commitments as had been envisaged in less constrained times? Absolutely. Will issues come along where people, quite rightly, want to know whether the appropriate decision is being made? Yes; that is a perfectly legitimate approach to take, but I acknowledge the fact that difficult decisions will have to be made.

One of the challenges, which are also opportunities, on which we will have to be as good as we can be in Government is, if there is a traditional funding line that has supported a good organisation—Maurice Golden has highlighted one—how we ensure that there are other, parallel funding streams that might be able to bridge the gap. I am not necessarily saying that that is the case in the instance to which Maurice Golden referred, but we need to ensure that we get maximum value out of the resources that we have in order to maintain and support the organisations that are operating. However, I commit to writing back to the convener on the specific case so that Maurice Golden and colleagues can have better insight into it.

That relates to the questions on Historic Environment Scotland that Sarah Boyack asked. It is much easier to retrofit a relatively recent building to reduce its carbon emissions. It is more and more difficult to do that the older a building gets. There is a sliding scale of challenge in that.

On whether different allowances should be given for that reality, I would want to be better advised about how we are doing that in the first place. I observe that—I had this conversation yesterday—many organisations that have begun to go down the path of making the changes that we will all have to make have started with the lowest-hanging fruit. There is a general understanding that the closer we get to the more testing targets that we have, the more difficult will be the decisions that we have to make as we go along.

That fits in part with the appeal that Kate Forbes made for us to try to protect a space to have a mature debate about how we do that. If all we do is retreat into our ideological trenches and not allow ourselves to think in new ways in all directions, we will probably not be able to answer some of those really big questions.

I am not sure that I have to hand the answer for the question that Maurice Golden asked but I acknowledge that some buildings, specifically older buildings, will be next to impossible to upgrade to the latest environmental standards whereas most that are being, or have recently been, built are at it. I am content to consider how one accounts for that difference.

There is the view through the other end of the telescope, which is of cultural organisations and institutions coming forward and saying that they have something to offer in this space. That can and, I hope, will come out of the exercise. We are having to rethink how we can deliver priorities across Government, which will be done by working in partnership with organisations. Sarah Boyack is absolutely right to highlight how important local government is in that, but it is also about what cultural organisations do.

I go back to my example of the meeting at National Museums Scotland yesterday and asking its trustees what they are thinking about. Our museums—they are not all in Edinburgh; they are in various parts of the country—lend themselves very well to providing services that social prescribing can offer. There are other institutions across Scotland that can do it, as well. That means that institutions will have to think about how they can make services accessible and understandable to practitioners who would prescribe them. Committee members will remember my evidence session with Humza Yousaf, at which we began to explore what we will need to do next to ensure that people who are likely to want to use social prescribing know what facilities are available to them.

That is why we have exercises such as the review. It is not an unforeseen consequence—it is actually at the heart of the matter and makes everybody ask where we need to be more innovative. It is not necessarily about cash or constraints; it is about asking what we can do differently to ensure that we use the resources of our museums, galleries and so on to fulfil that purpose.