Chamber and committees

I am interested in what was being said in that discussion about the impact on artists, as employees and companies and businesses. I am also interested in individuals, given how many artists or people working in the sector are self-employed. I would like to hear from Matt Jones, or others, about the experience of self-employed people during lockdown.

Do you think that that has had a deterring effect on new freelancers entering the industry? What can we do to try to overcome that? Do we need to rethink what we do to reassure young people who want to become freelancers in the arts that it is a thing that they can do? That might be a question for Matt Baker.

Notwithstanding everything that people have said about the need to invest in the future and a homegrown workforce, I take it that the panel would agree that there is an urgent situation that requires the availability of visas on an emergency basis. I am keen to know whether Tavish or Elaine or the other witnesses would support the UK Government taking such a measure.

In relation to that, the panel will know that, in many areas, especially island ones, some sectors are struggling to find a workforce at all, which has implications for how we work together on issues such as housing. We will not have a workforce, wherever they come from, if there is nowhere for them to live.

If members of the panel do not like the term “trade-off”, I am happy to use another such as “interface” or “co-operation”. You can see what I am driving at, which is how we manage that relationship. Incidentally, I absolutely accept what has been said about the need for change and what Charles Millar said about the need for winch monitors to provide data.

Elspeth Macdonald touched on this issue in the first panel—do you feel that there might be a better way of managing the process of designation in order to avoid confrontation, as has happened in some places, and is there more that we can do to move forward the process of community involvement in the management of designations? I am not making a case against designation per se, but are there better ways of doing it?

Much of what has been talked about so far, especially by the previous panel, has involved the necessary trade-off between the future of the environment and the future of what are sometimes fragile rural economies. This is possibly a question for Charles Millar—I am not sure. We have discussed how the areas that are currently actively fished comprise a minority of Scotland’s seas. What kind of change should communities in those areas expect in the coming years?

You mentioned some of the economic benefits of the dispersal of work. I am interested in the point that you made about the cultural benefit. For example, one of the long-running questions about broadcasting in Scotland is what can be done to commission more drama here. I seem to remember hearing a rumour when the new BBC Scotland channel was established that we were going to get a dramatisation of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley”—I live in hope of that.

What can you say about new writing and a focus on drama? Everyone looks back to programmes such as “Tutti Frutti” as great examples of new writing and drama. Does the BBC in Scotland have discretion to produce something like that?

I want to ask Mr Dallman a question about an issue that his and other organisations have raised in the past—namely, the impact on their members of the loss of freedom of movement around Europe. I imagine that, to some extent, the situation varies from one European country to the next, but I do not know. What is involved in artists in Scotland seeking to work in the EU now? Please give examples, if possible.

My question is again for either or both of the witnesses. You rightly mentioned that a public service broadcaster can do certain things—such as providing a variety of programmes—that, for example, Netflix cannot or does not do. How much pressure is the BBC feeling from the competition with platforms such as Netflix, and how does that apply to different age groups, particularly younger age groups? On a related point, how does Scotland compare with other parts of the UK for people in essence opting out of the BBC altogether?

Thank you.

I thank the witnesses for joining us. I am not sure whether my question is for Ms Tavaziva or Mr Carson, but I want to hear your views on the long-running issue of spend in Scotland. We all welcome the fact that there has been more spend on big network productions involving Scotland, but are we not talking about two slightly different things? On the one hand, there is the part played by Scotland in big network-wide productions and, on the other, the discretion that the BBC in Scotland has to spend its money on the things that it feels to be important to it instead of putting that money into something else. Can you tease out those differences, and tell us where we are going with regard to the latter point about local spend?