Chamber and committees

Good morning. I am grateful that the cabinet secretary has agreed to come back to talk to us about the situation at Historic Environment Scotland. I appreciate the fact that he recognises that it is an important issue and that he recognises the importance of the cultural offering in Orkney, which I am always keen to highlight. I am sure that he will have enjoyed Orkney’s cultural offering in the past.

You mentioned some of the relationships that you have with other organisations, such as the enterprise bodies, in addition to those that you have with the likes of Creative Scotland. The budgets for some of our enterprise bodies are tighter and more focused, and local government budgets are under real pressure across Scotland. What are your thoughts on how that is having an impact on the culture sector? How are you trying to address that? What are your concerns in that regard?

Mr Harvie, you can go next.

You talked about closures. Across my region, I do a lot of surgeries in libraries because they are great locations. Often, they are not as full as I want them to be, because they are very important. People tell me that they do not know when their library will be open because of opening hours restrictions. Rather like banks and post offices, they are still there but they are open for only a few hours. Is that a big problem?

I suppose that I have the same question for you, Rachael. Orkney has some fantastic museums, such as the Pier arts centre in Stromness. At the Stromness museum, which is a private museum, you can see my great-great-uncle’s Scotland cap. It is definitely worth a visit.

However, there are real pressures. For a number of years, I dealt with the Falconer museum in Forres, which had to close due to the pressures that it faced, although it is about to reopen or become available again. Where do you see the pressures on museums and galleries from the local government funding side?

I am glad that you mentioned the Scapa Flow museum. I have been going there since I was a child. It sits across Scapa Flow from my home, and it is a fantastic new venue—perhaps it is not so much a new venue, but there is a new opportunity there.

This is the second part of the question—I will come to you on this, Rachael, and then I will come back to you, Alison, if that is all right. I represent a massive region, with very dispersed communities and huge rurality. How is that a particular issue for some of the organisations that you represent or work with? It is difficult enough to keep funding within a town or a city, but some rural institutions are extraordinarily important, particularly those on islands and so on, but they face difficult challenges with funding.

Thank you.

A lot of those places are very niche. I highlight the Orkney wireless museum, which is a very good visit if you are ever in Kirkwall. I am not on the board, and I do not take a cut; I have no tickets.

Alison, could you comment on the same issue around rural and island libraries in particular?

We have lost a lot of the rural services that came out to communities. It is always great to see the Orkney mobile library’s pictures taken from ferries while it visits islands and the like. It is a really important local resource, and it is important that we keep it.

I am conscious of the time, convener, so I will pass back to you now.

Good morning. As an Orcadian, I strongly agree with Alison Nolan—I do not want to go all George Adam and Paisley on this—that the Orkney library and archive is a fantastic resource; it is brilliant. I am also delighted—perhaps there will be disagreement on this—that Orkney has rejected the visitor levy. I am rather a cynic on it. It would be a huge burden on many local businesses and it has been set up to push tax burdens on to local authorities so that central Government can cut funding.

I agree, though, with a lot that has been said about the importance of culture on high streets. I was on the Economy and Fair Work Committee when it did an investigation of town centres, and one thing that came up from that—I think that it was from a visit to Dumfries—was that we need cultural institutions on our high streets to bring people in, because high streets are entertainment rather than just places of purchase. However, the moving of galleries, museums and libraries involves money from local government.

Alison, in your submission you talked about the “sustained budget pressures” on local Government cultural spend. Will you speak about that a bit more?

Following up what Keith Brown just said about the genealogy side, libraries across Scotland hold huge amounts of genealogical data and information, family papers and so on. I imagine that quite a lot of that is accessible to some of these big, commercialised genealogy websites, but I do not know whether libraries get paid for that. Do the sites pay them for such access? Might that be another potential revenue or funding source?