Chamber and committees

Building on that, I am interested in where creative community hubs sit within your strategies and organisation and how you will consider funding them through the new funding model that you are developing.

Last week, we were quite struck by some of the work that has been happening across Edinburgh to, in effect, reset the relationship between creative community hubs and agencies. In particular, there is the report “Working Better Together”. There is perhaps a sense that many community hubs feel that cultural opportunities are being offered to them but they are not being developed from the ground up—that a community development approach is not happening right now.

There has been other evidence—for example, from the University of Stirling, looking at Creative Stirling—about how creative hubs pivoted during Covid to take a much more inclusive and community development approach. Does that fit the funds that you have, or does it start to stray into other, siloed, boxes such as regeneration? How are you incorporating something that is much more holistic and about place making into your central funding, which is about culture but is also about much more than that?

Do you think that there might be a tension when large cultural organisations and festivals, such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, want to invest in communities but their investment can feel very top-down? For example, they might say, “Here are 60 tickets for something that we are producing.” One view that was quoted from the Edinburgh creative hubs is:

“If you want the margins to engage, then invest in the margins. It’s quite straightforward.”

Is the balance right? Is culture something that is being offered to people—I would not quite say “being done to people”—or can it emerge from communities? Is that partnership right at the moment? The view that we have heard is that sometimes it is not, and culture is seen as a type of philanthropy—“Would you like to come and see our show?” instead of, “What are you creating in your community and how can we invest in and develop that?”

If you recognise that, what role can Creative Scotland play in helping to reset, or at least question, the relationship in that partnership and whether it is working in certain areas?

Are there barriers in terms of the scale and capacity of organisations, particularly those in rural areas that might be suited to applying to a small grant scheme but less suited to applying for funding for a bigger project? I am thinking particularly about core funding. It is easy for organisations to apply for funding for a small project but, if the core funding is not there to invest in their buildings and assets or management or cleaners or paying for heating and all the rest of it, they are never going to reach the point at which they can come to Creative Scotland with a bigger, more transformative application to serve their communities.

Do you recognise that the core funding issue is a big issue and that it is not just about rural arts community hubs? It is also about urban organisations. If the money is not there to employ a manager or core staff, everybody will be running around writing short-term applications for project funding without anybody to run the show.

Thank you.

I have a couple of wrap-up questions. I was particularly interested in Professor Jackson’s comments about Scotland’s colonial history. Is it important that, in the way we project ourselves as a good global citizen, we are more aware of what that colonial history has involved. How do we use that to seek reparation and put into place meaningful opportunities to move those injustices forward?

Looking again at the annex listing laws that the Scottish Government considers are not obsolete, and the wider list of laws on which it appears that you are in agreement with the Westminster Government that they are now obsolete, I can see that the vast majority are in environment policy so I am interested to know whether the Scottish Government has sought advice from Environmental Standards Scotland, given that ESS was established under the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021 and has a key role in advising the Government on alignment with the EU.

That would be very useful, given that ESS was established as a statutory independent adviser probably for these types of situation. I would have expected the Government to liaise with ESS on this.

I turn to the cabinet secretary’s very useful letter that was sent to the committee last night. Is there clarity over what the process is for laws that involve responsibilities that are shared between the Scottish and UK Parliaments? What is your understanding of that process? Does it have to be absorbed within the processes that are in the common frameworks, depending on what the policy area is, then come down to discussions between individual portfolio ministers, between Governments and across the UK? Do you have clarity yet as to what that process for negotiation is? Is it between you and your counterpart? Is it between portfolio ministers? Where does that conversation now take place? There does not seem to be a codified route for resolving areas in which there is disagreement but shared responsibilities—and therefore, potentially, there is a mismatch between approaches that could be taken in either the Scottish Parliament or the UK Parliament.

It is on a different topic.