Chamber and committees

Thank you—that is helpful.

My other questions relate to public service reform and Screen Scotland, convener, so you might want to bring other members in.

Will you just answer my first question, please? Where do you have officers?

That was going to be my next question. You have said that there are specific local areas where there might have been issues and that you have worked to improve the acceptance—or, I should say, success—rate in them. Have you done that through working with the local authority? With whom have you worked to do that? Could you answer that specific question?

That is perhaps something for us, as a committee, to probe with the Government. Thank you.

I will make an observation. Creative Scotland was established in 2010 under the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, during a previous wave of public service reform. That act dissolved Scottish Screen and took its remit into Creative Scotland. Then, in 2018, Screen Scotland was established within Creative Scotland, and we are now putting it out on its own.

At the same time, we have this overarching narrative from the Government about the need to reduce public sector bodies or, at least, to rationalise them. I speak to people who have worked in the national health service for years, and they tell me that they have observed a similar pattern of the same ideas coming back around. It seems that, if you work in a service long enough, you end up back where you started. Do you think that it feels as if we are going around in circles?

I want to touch on regional funding. The review referenced that there had been cuts to regional and lead officers. The feedback from stakeholders was that that had made the organisation seem more distant and perhaps less visible on the ground. Where do you have a physical presence? Where do you have officers?

I am still interested to know what the impact of the loss of regional officers has been. The stakeholders’ testimony was that the work of Creative Scotland has perhaps become a bit more distant.

The paper that you provided shows the success rates of Creative Scotland funding award applications by local authority area. There is huge variation across the country; awards are not going purely to the central belt. However, some of the lowest acceptance rates include 33 per cent in the Falkirk Council area and 34 per cent in Dumfries and Galloway. First, there are patches of the country where it seems that fewer applications are being made—Falkirk and West Lothian councils had among the fewest applications for funding. Secondly, some council areas, such as Falkirk and Dumfries and Galloway, had quite a low acceptance rate compared with that other parts of the country where it sat well above 50 per cent. How do you square what you have just told me with that empirical data? How do you see that tracking across?

I appreciate your point that this is a huge area of growth, and we should absolutely back the sectors that are bringing growth, particularly in the culture sphere. Ultimately, however, the Government is facing a £5 billion shortfall in its budget and, whatever it may say, that is what is motivating a lot of public service reform. This might be a question for Iain Munro as well, but are there pieces of work that the Government has asked you—or other bodies in what is quite a full landscape—to stop doing so that administrative and financial efforts can be focused on the new separate entity of Screen Scotland? Has the Government had that level of discussion with either of you?

My area of questioning is a mixture of looking back and looking forward. The previous session of the Parliament was marked by several significant pieces of legislation that ran into issues. For example, there was the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’s interactions with the Equality Act 2010. Late in the day, the Government had to strip out all the provisions regarding conscientious objection from the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill because of their interaction with employment law. There were also other examples, such as the deposit return scheme and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024, although those issues were slightly different.

On the two points about the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’s interaction with the Equality Act 2010 and the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill’s interaction with employment legislation, I would be interested to hear your reflections on how we arrived at a place where there were such fundamental issues with those pieces of legislation so relatively late in the game and in their scrutiny that they were not viable in the form that they were in. Was that a failure of the committee’s scrutiny, the Parliament’s scrutiny more broadly or the Government’s awareness of those issues? It strikes me that those issues came out quite late in the day, so is the Government doing its job well in drafting legislation and is the Parliament doing its job well in providing scrutiny?