Chamber and committees

The other change with multiyear funding relates to the fact that the original application would have been based on a certain level of other funding support—from local authorities, say—and there is concern that, over the period of the three-year award, local authority funding might be reduced. Are you working proactively with local authorities to encourage them to maintain their initial level of investment?

There are two areas that I would like some more information on. The first is multiyear funding. I should declare that I was previously a director of Dundee Contemporary Arts, and I am also a friend of DCA. I lived through the trauma of the application process for the three-year multiyear funding that we very successfully achieved. I am glad to hear that you are thinking of a rolling programme, given the sheer logistical wave in having a cliff edge for hundreds of organisations every three years.

I want to get a sense of how actively you are monitoring the impact of those three-year-funded, or multiyear-funded, projects and how proactively you are advising them on their progress so that they have some idea of how likely they are to be reconsidered. Martin McGoldrick said that a lighter touch would be taken, but you can take a lighter touch only if you are acutely involved in how well they are doing at the moment. So, that is my first area of inquiry.

I am sure that the V&A will appreciate your warm words.

We spoke to witnesses from Creative Scotland earlier this morning, and I asked them about how they are evaluating the ongoing performance of multiyear-funded organisations and about how proactively Creative Scotland was obtaining information and giving feedback to them on whether they were achieving their aims. Would you consider multiyear funding for the directly funded organisations, and could you engage with them more proactively on how well you think they are doing in relation to their ambitions and impacts?

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests. I am a serving councillor on Dundee City Council.

My questions are around the direct funding that the Scottish Government provides to the performing companies and to the V&A, in particular. As a Dundee councillor, I very much appreciate the support for what is a very ambitious and impactful museum of design, with 2.6 million visitors and £300 million income generated. I would like to hear your views on the Scottish Government continuing to provide direct funding to the performing companies—I think that Sistema is on the list—and the V&A. Will you maintain that independent position?

My follow-up question is about evaluation of impact. We have discussed how Creative Scotland is trying to find new ways to reach all the different communities across Scotland and how it is evaluating the impact of that. I would like to hear a bit more about how you evaluate the impact of the funding that you are providing directly.

COSLA has talked about protecting funding for culture, but we do not have any powers in that respect at the moment. Given the incredible pressure that local authorities are under, ensuring a sort of partnership agreement for future funding is probably the best route.

My other area of questioning relates to your strategy, which is being renewed. It talks about hoping that

“More people from all parts of society access, participate in and value a range of artistic and creative activities”

and that

“Art and creativity are recognised by people at home and abroad as a central part of our nation.”

I know that you have just gone out to tender for research on frameworks of impact, but how do you discover and evaluate who is participating in artistic activity? How are you asking the multiyear-funded organisations to track their audiences? I know that it is a very difficult thing to do, but what steps are you taking to ensure that you are making progress and having an impact on widening access and ensuring that art and culture reach every bit of our community?

Alastair Evans: I will go into some detail on that, but not too much, I hope. We are absolutely committed to our spending delivering public value for all. We understand that different mechanisms will deliver different configurations of that, which is why we work with open funding, multiyear funding and targeted funding and with our partnerships. We track audiences and try to understand more about where they are coming from and their demographics.

Your question goes to the heart of one of the difficulties. It is not too difficult for us to know the numbers, but in order to understand the demographics, we have to ask for surveying, and we ask many organisations for that. Those organisations might be asked for different information by different funders, trusts, foundations and local authorities, so there is a potential burden that we need to balance. However, we need to understand whether our funding is reaching everyone in society.

Postcode data is used for that work, and comparisons can be made based on the Scottish index of multiple deprivation. At some of the lower levels, it can be quite a stubborn problem to reach some households and provide access to culture. We are also aware that not everyone accesses culture in their local arts centre. People also participate at home or through grass-roots or individual pursuits, so we have surveys that try to pick up that element of creativity.

There are a range of ways in which we gather that information, which also helps to shape our targeted work so that we understand where those areas are. We try not to call them cold spots because, as I said, there are potentially very rich cultural lives in those areas. It might just be that they are not showing up in the statistics.

That work also helps us to understand where we might work through Culture Collective or similar programmes with local communities. We fund organisations such as Creative Lives and networks such as Culture, Heritage and Arts Assembly Argyll and the Isles. That kind of information is a bedrock in targeting our work.

Do we need to do more on training GPs? Do we need to spend more to incentivise particular interventions? We used to make payments to GPs to ask specific questions. What mechanisms would make that more proactive?

I assume that you have all seen the Scottish Parliament information centre paper. The graph that kept me up at night is on page 6. It is figure 3, which is health care costs per person. It basically shows that we have put in a lot at the beginning, as you say, through our investment in early years and then there is an incredibly steep curve when people get to 60. The biggest spending is, obviously, at the end of life. In some ways, we are the victims of our own success, because people are living longer.

All prevention is good and some prevention is more effective than other prevention. On what age group do we need to focus the preventative actions? Looking at the graph, I wondered whether it was 50 to 60-year-olds. Should we increase activity on some kind of health MOT or capture people in that age group before they go into decline? We have unhealthy life expectancy starting at 47 in Scotland. If you were going to put extra money in, what age group would you put it into? I know that it all counts.

It is great to hear this evidence. So many plates are spinning at the same time, but I think that there is complete agreement that this is the right direction of travel. What we are trying to do—to move towards prevention—is completely sound. There is a big implementation gap, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that a lot of the spend that helps with prevention is done at local authority level and we do not have enough evidence to inform what we are doing.

The Government’s prevention unit has done a lot of work on a methodology, on tagging and on trying to make sense of what the Scottish budget is doing. I presume that it is incredibly important that that methodology is carried through to local government level, so that we are all talking about the same numbers, data and indicators. Do you agree? Is that happening? How quickly are local authorities evaluating their spending? How soon can we expect to hear from them about their analysis? I know that that is a complicated question.

Professor Bauld, you mentioned in your written submission a health and social care reform preventative investment advisory group. That sounds like an important group, and I think that we should hear from it. I want to find out a bit more about what you know about that group and what it is looking at. Part of the stress is that the budget is coming at us immediately, and we are trying to assess it in terms of prevention. We are asking you to help us to work out how we evaluate that over the next four years. We want to know, for example, if we move a certain amount in year 2 and a certain amount in year 3, where we will spend it.

The first question was about methodology, indicators and the work at local government level. I would also like to hear a bit more about that advisory group.

We have focused a lot on the structure of health boards. What we have heard about the national performance framework is helpful, and we need to look into that in more detail. I have asked whether we can have a study day on the report “Learning from 25 years of Preventative Interventions in Scotland.”

However, I want to ask about the role of general practitioners, because they are the primary contacts. I know that GPs already focus on preventative measures, but what could we do to support them to focus even more on those?

May I ask make specific comment on that, convener?