Chamber and committees

Good morning, minister. Given that HES has been making more money, I was pleased to hear you say that you are looking at the idea of HES being able to keep any additional money that it makes, because that would be a real incentive for it to do more work. It is not for me to speak on behalf of the committee, but I think that, in speaking to HES and others in recent weeks, the committee was concerned that they did not exactly jump on the idea of exploiting their facilities to a greater extent as a huge opportunity. Given what you have said, and what we all know about the budget situation, surely HES should show greater vigour and urgency in seizing opportunities to maximise income from other sources. Can you give the committee any reassurance that that will be supported, encouraged and facilitated by ministers as a matter of urgency?

Thanks for that, and that is encouraging but, first of all—this might not be the view of the whole committee—the idea of public bodies accumulating reserves for no apparent purpose is not something that I am very supportive of. There will be different views on that.

However, with regard to those assets, I am keen to see a change in mindset, which is required so that imaginative entrepreneurialism takes place. I am sure that the committee will look at that in the future. Everyone talks about Badbea in the Highlands, for example—as I did last week—and the places that are important to people in North America as a result of the clearances. Parts of Scotland have Hanseatic league links, and along the road, for example, we have Picardy Place, which is a link between Edinburgh and that French region. I am also thinking about China and the presence of Scots in the banking institutions in Hong Kong and so on.

If HES did a complete audit of the important sites that it has, and some places that it does not currently have, and if it properly exploited those, that could transform the money that HES has to develop, maintain and improve access to its sites. That could also be done through fundraising—think of some of the corporate entities around the world that might be willing to contribute. It would be useful to know whether the Government would be willing to encourage HES to have a complete, fresh audit of what opportunities there might be in relation to every site. I know that it has an awful lot of sites, but it could start with a priority list, if that kind of approach was possible.

The tower has been closed for at least 25 years, as far as I know.

I will ask another question later.

I will stop being parochial about my own area. I was also thinking about Badbea in the Highlands, which is pretty grim for its significance. If you visit, you are on the edge of a cliff, so I imagine that you might want to be careful about how you get people there. You could engender interest from Canada and the United States, because that is where a lot of the immigration to those countries came from.

You could make the connections that you could tap into part of the criteria for any potential new acquisitions. For example, the Americans are the biggest spenders when they come to Scotland, and they are coming back—I have seen that around Edinburgh. The potential for dramatically increased income is huge if you can tap into what interests people. It would be true of different countries as well. Is there any capacity to do that on individual sites and see what the potential is?

Sure.

Generally, are there properties, such as Clackmannan tower, that have no real prospect of reopening?

I have a supplementary question to Donald Cameron’s first question, which was about closed and restricted buildings. Am I right in saying—I will be embarrassed if I am wrong—that Clackmannan tower is one of your buildings?

In fact, I think that we have corresponded on it in the past. Clackmannan tower has been closed for a long time and, as far as I know, there are no plans to open it. Do you have an update on what is happening with it, given its significance?

I have to declare an interest, because my partner is the minister responsible for this policy area. I declared that when I first joined the committee, but I will also declare it now. I thought about it last week, but did not do it.

I enjoyed your analogy about the lack of stonemasons, and I thought that it was appropriate that you talked about putting a finger in the dike.

On Clackmannan tower, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that it is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year—except for St Andrew’s day. However, the problem is that it is only open for external viewing, and my point was really about internal viewing. I have the benefit of being able to access the internet at the moment, which witnesses do not, and I see that that has been talked about since at least 2017. The reason why I mention the tower is—this will be true of so many different sites and buildings that you have—that it was owned by Robert the Bruce. It is said that he held a parliament there as well, but I do not know whether that is true. You can see why there is a broader interest.

My question is related to an issue that I raised last week. You mentioned the importance of ticket receipts and the number of people going through, and I would like to hear a bit more about that. Last week, I said that the consequence of us taking William Wallace’s sword to the United States and calling it the Braveheart sword was a huge uptick in the numbers going through the Wallace monument, which is owned by the council, not by HES. In a situation in which finances are grim and about to get grimmer, we can tap into the history and legacy of some of the buildings, particularly if a diaspora of overseas visitors might be interested. Due to cost of living pressures, it will probably be hard to get more people from domestic locations to go. How seriously and how vigorously do you consider maximising revenue from that source?

Inevitably, we have already heard comments about the scarcity of resources to allow people to do the things that they need to do to look after what we currently have. However, in relation to potential new sites, I might have missed this, but I did not hear any reference to economic regeneration.

I know that we can all list various sites, so I will mention a couple. Scotland’s first industrial production site for whisky, which was all taken down to London, was in Kennet, near Kincardine. In fact, the slip that it used to go down is still there. It is a roofless building that has trees growing up through it. The national lottery would not touch it because it thought that it was a magical building. Not far from that site, at the back of the council buildings in Alloa, there is the grave of John Jameson—he was Scottish, not Irish—who worked at the former site.

Outwith my constituency, there is the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell in Edinburgh. In Canada, there are, I think, two visitor centres for Alexander Graham Bell, and there is one in the United States. We have his birthplace, but we do nothing with it.

Might economic regeneration and an entrepreneurial helicopter view of new sites help to produce revenues for different organisations? Does the toolkit factor that in?