Chamber and committees

I would like to touch on multiyear funding, which we have heard a lot of positive evidence on. Looking at my notes, I see that the programme now provides £74 million to 262 organisations, compared with 119 previously. That is certainly welcome, but the programme is due to end in March 2028. Could you speak about the timeline for making funding decisions after that cut-off point?

Alastair Evans: The committee will be aware that we went public last week with an invitation to submit expressions of interest in joining the multiyear fund. We have noted the difficulty that a three-year cliff edge presents for the sector; it involves significant jeopardy, and work is required to apply to us every three years. However, that is how we have worked and it is how cultural agencies and arts councils around the world tend to work.

We want to move to more of a rolling programme, which we are working to design. To do that, we want to understand the demand. The expression of interest is both for organisations that are not currently multiyear funded, to give us a sense of their interest in joining that cohort, and for current multiyear-funded organisations, to give us a sense of their interest in rolling funding—which we expect to be considerable—and to give us some quantum around that, rather than programme plans.

To give some sense of that, we would expect the £74 million that you mentioned to go up by 10 per cent by the end of the parliamentary session, which is purely inflation, so it is already looking like another £7 million will be required just to keep that group at the same level of funding.

We expect to elicit a significant ask. There will be significant interest. The approach gives organisations stability and strong planning horizons, and it helps them to develop partnerships, because they can point to money the following year and the year after.

By way of comparison, the same exercise for regularly funded organisations involved 119 of them, and we had interest from 360 organisations. From the 119, there was an indicative request for a 90 per cent uplift. That type of exercise tends to surface the ambition of the sector, and we are very conscious of that, but we need to do that for planning horizons. Next year, we will start to move in earnest on plans for the next iteration of multiyear funding.

Rolling funding would certainly be music to the ears of many of the organisations that we have taken evidence from, so that is certainly welcome progress.

Before I circle back to the point about inflation, I note that the review states that

“Multi-Year funding was cited as having pulled staff from their ongoing roles to support the assessment of applications”,

which is quite a significant aspect of your capacity. What are the implications of that for budgetary considerations?

09:45

Thanks for putting that on the record. I appreciate it.

That was really helpful. The flat £500,000 fund was certainly a key element that we reflected on as a committee. You illustrate the different starts that authorities might come from. There should probably be recognition that some local authorities have a higher percentage of deprived communities. In the part of the world that I represent—the far north of the Highlands—there are challenges in delivering culture spend across a rural area, with the additional expense that sits within that. From your experience, is the proposed approach sensible?

Alastair Evans: Working intensively at the local level and in communities is absolutely a strong approach, and that is what we do at the moment, in working with partners. What is proposed is a different take on that or uses a different lens.

We do not tend to work with blanket funding at a set level, because of the different situations. Whether it is a matter of dispersal, rurality or travel costs, every local authority area and every region has a different landscape and different challenges. What is proposed is not how we tend to work.

To respond to Jenny Young’s point, there are also areas where less funding is arriving from central Government. The challenge is there for us.

With PSR more broadly, proposals for local government reform are incredibly important for the wider cultural brief. The Government has not put a figure on what those reforms might cost, but the think tank Common Weal estimates that the reorganisation might exceed £2 billion.

I highlight that because the Government is introducing significant plans in the cultural sphere. I recognise the PSR culture cluster. We had a discussion earlier with Creative Scotland, which has yet to see the full detail of the proposals that the Government may bring forward with regard to PSR and the culture brief. Can you give us any flavour of what those proposals might look like and what the budget considerations might be? We know that reform is incredibly costly.

11:15

The report has come up with a model based on the 32 local authorities. Is the Government confident that it will be able to take any of that forward, given that there is uncertainty about what local government will look like in the next few years?

I appreciate the evidence that we have heard this morning. A number of issues have been covered, not least the “Local Culture Scotland” report. It is good to see that there is collaboration in that area. I echo what Pauline Stafford said about preventative spend and how we can ensure that there is cross-portfolio spend and that we eke out what we can in the culture brief. Unpacking where we are in terms of the impact of reduced culture spend, I recognise Councillor Chalmers’ point that it is not only culture that is affected; health and wellbeing are also affected. Tain, in my constituency, is losing a swimming pool, which will have a devastating impact on the local community.

There are some real challenges here. My opening question is this: how well equipped are local authorities to set budgets, not least given all the implications of public sector reform that Jenny Young mentioned, when it comes to recognising the importance of the cultural brief?

I appreciate that. I have a short follow-up question. We are all perhaps in the same boat. Do you think that we have sufficient time to consult, and get a clearer picture, by the end of the year? That is the time limit that the Government has given us.

That would probably be needed.

That is helpful, and it certainly reflects my engagement with Highland Council. Nonetheless, it is probably fair to say that budgets have been constrained across all portfolios, and particularly on culture. If I reflect on what my constituents are saying to me and the pressures on local councillors, I think that filling out potholes is probably far more important to them than the aspects of culture spend. I suggest that there is a bit of work to do to push back on that and get that level playing field.

I want to go back to public service reform. With the previous witnesses, we discussed the rather small proposed community authorities—there are to be 120 to 160 of them—which will have responsibility for the provision and maintenance of local leisure, sport and culture facilities. We have talked at great length about how strategically important those things are for preventive spend and wellbeing. I know that you are going through the consultation process right now, but can you suggest to us and to Government what would be too small to be strategic?