 Good morning and a warm welcome to the constitution Europe External Affairs and Culture Committee. We've received apologies from Mark Ruskell, who has other committee engagements this morning. Our first agenda item is the budget scrutiny culture sector funding. It's our only agenda item today, it's part of our pre-budget scrutiny work and the committee is currently looking at continuing impact of Covid-19 on the culture sector and its long-term future. This will be the committee's second panel on the topic. This morning we welcome to committee Mark Baker, orchestrator of the Stove Network, Fiona Campbell, convener of traditional music and song association of Scotland, TMSA, Clara Cullen, venue support manage, music venue trust and Mike Jones, managing director of the stand comedy club. I can welcome you all to the meeting. We're going to move straight to questions this morning. There are many members who ask a question if they want to direct it to a particular witness, please do. I'll ask that panel member to answer first. If I could ask a general question at the beginning. Both the Stove Network and the TMSA have talked about the importance of culture in wellbeing in our society and the Government have indicated that they want to move to wellbeing society. I wonder if I could ask a little bit about the cultural social prescribing model from the Stove and also how wellbeing society affects your organisation. I'll go first to Mr Baker, then to Ms Cullen, and then I'll bring in the other two witnesses for an industry view on this. If I could write Mark Baker first, please. Thank you chair. I've got lots of feedback there. We're all right. I think I should say before I start that while I sit on the National Partnership for Culture, I am in no sense representing the National Partnership for Culture today. I'm purely representing myself and the Stove Network. You're asking about wellbeing. I think what we've seen during the pandemic, as we've seen in crisis before, perhaps most notably in our own culture in World War II, the role that culture played in filling in for essential services as essential services were lost during lockdown. We've had numerous reports from social services, et cetera, of the incredible role that our cultural practitioners have played filling in for essential services. I think what I'm here today to do is to propose a significant shift in the way that we regard culture and support it as a fundamental means of making a fairer and more equal country on one built on climate justice as well as wellbeing. So, yes, social prescribing is an important model, I think, of people being referred to cultural organisations and cultural practitioners as part of a wellbeing approach from GPs and other health professionals. We need to be looking at this as a much wider range. We need to be thinking about changing the way that we're thinking about culture. At the moment, we think predominantly about culture from a sort of top-down point of view of something that people go to engage with rather than something that people are involved in making. That is the opportunity that has been shown through the pandemic, but that has been an essential part of people's wellbeing, taking part in cultures away and being part of initiatives in their own communities. In Scotland, we have an incredible tradition, the Cayley tradition, the storytelling tradition, all of these things that have traditionally bound our communities together. That is the way that we need to be thinking about culture in the future of other ways of cultural practitioners being part of enabling and supporting those kind of activities within our communities. That is what is going to lead to well-being, increased stage in communities, increased fairness and equality as we're working through a grassroots position. What we're posing here is a sort of a way of looking differently at culture of saying, let's invest significantly in that grassroots approach. This Scottish Government's Culture Collective project, 26 projects around the country that are working on a regional basis, placing, you know, it's a Covid proposal based on the idea of, let's give culture by our freelance practitioners that are out of work, let's put them to work in communities. We have over 250 jobs being created around the country and people working at that grassroots level. If we can continue that momentum, there's also the creative communities project. If we can continue that kind of momentum, we can really build a new way, a world-leading way of thinking about culture and making a slit between that and the culture of excellence that we're taking people to see in the same way that you would think about sport as you invest in the participation in sport and you invest in the elite sport. I think that we should be thinking about culture in that kind of way. Thank you. Can I bring in Ms Campbell, please? Thank you very much for the opportunity to give this evidence and also just want to preface everything I think I feel what I say today with the factors that I appreciate what the Parliament and the Government have been doing in this time of uncertainty, but obviously we're looking to see how we can improve and go through and come out of this at the other end. So I feel like sometimes I've been rather negative in my thoughts, but it's all to do with the idea of improvement and constructive criticism. So one of the things that I like to pick up a lot of what Matt has said I would agree with, for example, the whole idea of grassroots and I'd go one step further about sort of being very clear that we're supporting what people want to do. The voluntary sector side of things in the arts and culture is a very large base of people and it's about understanding that a lot of those people are not necessarily working within the context where they told what to do. They are the ones that are organising, animating, bringing opportunities for artists into their community and vice versa. So I think that role of the grassroots and also crucially the volunteer organiser needs to be supported and recognised and that's where one of the things I was writing in my evidence paper was concerned that I, from my anecdotal information and general sort of contacts, feel that there's been... Some people will have fallen off out of that pool of volunteers for various reasons. For example, they've not been well or they've sort of got burnt out because they've been doing a lot of extra work than they may normally be doing above what they might be doing just usually organising an event or some of those things because a lot of them have been going and trying to sort of make connections with people on a personal basis. For example, there's the group set I'm aware of singing where people have been going and sort of visiting in gardens singing outside or just trying to sort of make sure that social aspect of culture isn't lost and that's actually one of those key elements of wellbeing. I mean we've been talking about people's isolation and that their resilience and people who have got some of those cultural activities that they can maintain either individually or on a group, maybe online have generally been having a better experience than mostly people who aren't, who were isolated you might say in the first place. That's where I come back to another issue is that I think a lot of the structural problems and the issues that we're looking at today and in the evidence papers were actually there already but they've been more exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic because the fragility of the systems has been tested and in some cases found wanting in many cases. So I think that if we can improve on that in general I think it will make us more resilient for anything like that happens like this again and also makes it shift that Matt was talking about. I mean for me I termed it as real support and understanding of the role of cultural activity in everyday lives. I sort of feel there are people who still have this view that we don't need the arts, we don't need culture, we don't need craft, we know it's just sort of and they use the word amateur in such a manner that is judgmental rather than necessarily for the love of it, where it comes from and it's seen as a luxury and it's not really important when actually I think there's been a lot more evidence through the pandemic that it's become a very crucial way of people coping and it was there already but again it's become more clear that that's one of the ways that they keep going. I made reference to group forget me notes which it has a couple of professionals running it but there's amateur and volunteers around them and they made a link with a singing group in Plymouth through the online Zoom sessions they were running and I know one of the people in Plymouth actually fed back that they had actually I mean they have lived with a partner but they felt like if they hadn't had these twice weekly singing sessions they would have found it more difficult to get through the pandemic or the lockdowns because they have a history of depression so they were sort of like found it really helpful to be able to keep singing because they are a singer. So that's where the wellbeing issue is important for me that we recognise that fundamental role of culture in everyday lives as well as also when it's a special item or a special event and I'd like to again re-endorse a lot of what Matt was saying as well. Thank you very much Miss Campbell. Can I bring in Miss Cullen and then I'll come to Mr Jones. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'd like to just reiterate and agree with what Fiona was saying is that a lot of the issues that Covid-19 and this crisis have revealed were already there prior to the crisis and they've been amplified because of the crisis whether that be relationships between venues as tenants and their landlords or access to creative funding. For example, prior to the crisis the grassroots music venue sector didn't really have access to cultural funding, it wasn't part of Creative Scotland's regular funding or organisations whereas in this crisis for the first time grassroots music venues had their own fund so it was called the grassroots music venue stabilisation fund and that was the first time our sector had access to this type of support so that was a really huge breakthrough and a huge step forward in terms of, I think, the Scottish Government recognising the role of grassroots music venues as inherently part of the cultural fabric of Scotland and so going forward out of this immediate crisis phase and looking towards how do we move towards stabilisation and then hopefully recovery before we can address issues of wellbeing and those sort of causes and issues I think going back to stabilising the sector is going to be incredibly important and in order to do that we're going to need to focus within the cultural remit on things like the structure so the organisational ownership model of the sector improving things like ventilation so that longer term issues are addressed so that eventually there's more security within the sector and hopefully more security in the sector means that we can then continue to focus on wellbeing and mental health and the people who work in the sector as well but without stabilising it first it's going to be difficult to do that. Thank you very much, Mr Jones. The arts and the cultural sector at its best it's all about making connections and giving people whether they're audience members or participants in a workshop that sense of connectedness the sense of community place sense of belonging obviously in a comedy context there's nothing better than being in a room full of people where everybody's having a great time and one of the peculiarities of comedy as a live art form is that the audience is a key participant in the events and if you've got an audience that isn't engaged then the show can die but if the audience is fully engaged it helps lift the whole experience and the performers thrive on that and it becomes a virtuous circle and as somebody who puts on events if you're stood at the back of the room and saying 100, 150, 200 people all having a good time there's definitely a sense of job done clearly during lockdown we missed that the real live experience but what we did recreate was a live stream show being directly from the Emperor Club on a Saturday night to try and recreate that sense of community obviously it was very different comedians playing into a camera is a very different thing and some were better at it than others we tried to create other elements of that sense of being part of the experience so we had, using live chat and social media we had virtual heckling and people commenting on what they'd just seen and directly feeding into the show and really developed a sense of community when we first tried to do that we had no idea whether or not people would tune in we had hundreds of thousands of people over the course of I think there were a total of 24 broadcasts over a 14 month period and a lot of those people were repeat viewers and the other thing just briefly to mention is that was free to watch but we did encourage people to donate if they had a good time and boy did they donate we had a total of 200,000 individual donations which is a key part of our ability to survive financially but really showed us that we had a very strong brand and a whole bunch of people out there that did feel that connected us with us as an event producer and obviously we're now trying to capitalise on that as we start to rebuild and get people back in for what at the end of the day is the proper live experience but we were pleased to be able to have tried to develop that sense of community and connectedness throughout lockdown Thank you very much and I was watching quite a few individual performers who had a virtual tip jar when they were working during Covid which is quite interesting I'm going to move on to questions from the committee and can I invite Ms Boyack first please Thank you very much, convener I wanted to pick up the issue of employment that was a really good discussion about wellbeing thinking about the context of keeping people in employment in the live music sector and the cultural sector came very strongly across in some of the evidence the written evidence you've submitted to us already of the importance of the employment side I think in the music venue trust you talk about one in 11 jobs are in the creative industries I think that might surprise a lot of people Last week the evidence from the musicians union said that about a third of musicians were thinking of leaving the sector So in the context of this year and now our job is looking at what should the budget look like Can you say a bit more about what do you think the short term measures are that would help both retain people in terms of employment in the sector but also make it resilient as we're not quite through the pandemic yet and maybe if I could start off with Clara Cullen from the music venue trust because that issue came out in your evidence and then I was maybe thinking about moving to Matt Baker from the Stove Network because you were talking about the importance of retaining culture staff and then the others would maybe come in afterwards so maybe over to you first Clara what can we ask for directly now that would keep the sector going and keep people in jobs Yeah absolutely so I think that as you correctly noted in our sector the staff are really doing probably a five jobs at once because the infrastructure and venue you might be running the venue you might be promoting the king managing the bar and so it's sort of often it's one person a number of jobs and they're being supported by their team members as well and so at the moment we're not sure of the full impact of the Covid-19 crisis I think we're on staffing I think we're going to see that in the coming months hopefully as the dust settles and we can get a better assessment of the full impact on staffing but in terms of retaining staff I think it's recognising that music venues act as hubs for training and development throughout the creative industry so you might join a music venue as a bar staff and then actually you might start doing a little bit of lighting or sound technicians and then you move into doing that kind of field and so it's really recognising these spaces are training and development hubs and how can we get funding or get recognition of that sort of layer into the wider perception of what a grassroots music venue does it isn't just a space for putting on music obviously predominantly that's the core of the activity but these are actually local community spaces where people can come and get their first taste of the live entertainment industry and often through the grassroots music venue as a kind of central hub they learn these skills and advance through that career to be very big touring musicians or working in the industry and arenas and so again like Mike was saying the grassroots level acts as the sort of entry point and the beginning of that development and can be the opening door to a really amazing and wider creative field and so how we can retain those staff I think is a longer term question and I think often when you do the maths the grassroots music venue is actually working for a lot less a pay than in other sectors because they're doing so many different jobs and wearing so many different hats at once and so I think there's something in a kind of philosophical sense about recognising the worth of these spaces and the people who work in them and the people who dedicate their lives to them because it isn't at least at the grassroots level usually a pursuit of money it's because of its love and it's because of the varying kind of opportunities you get when you step into a grassroots music venue so I think it's going to be a mixture of practical steps of how do we empower and enrich these people and then I think it's a wider perceptive and philosophical question of how do we shine a light and get the recognition within the sector that it is Thanks I'm also quite keen to think about how we can push for resources or where we should target them and if I look at the evidence from the Stove network Matt Baker you talk about the work of the culture collective you also talk about the systema model what are the top priorities you would say in terms of investment now to retain people in employment but also to keep the sector going for the next year or two years as we come through the pandemic Do you want to pick up that issue? Thank you very much Sarah Yes I really like Clara's idea of the training and development hubs and I think that's part of the root of it What I'd like to say there is about retaining the cultural workforce is that I think just a little example from where we are of that training and development hub idea that Stove has pioneered an idea of creative place making so we're a community development trust the only one in the UK that's run by artists and we've grown to be a social enterprise with a turnover of half a million a year employing 10 local people in creative partnership projects in communities but crucially supporting the growth of the culture and creative sector so we're best known for initiating a community buyout at Dumfries High Street which people might have heard of was the midst of a quarter project and I think that kind of idea what Clara is talking about is the same kind of idea but that has a sort of different scale of approach by investing in projects at community embedded level so what I would be advocating for is a national investment of community embedded art programs that would provide stable fair work income for the cultural workforce and support the freelance economy and if regional and city programs were coordinated could also support teams of associate skills in production event delivery, arts administration, marketing etc and that as you say along the system and model residents in schools basically putting our freelance our cultural workforce retaining that cultural workforce by putting them to work in community settings within the infrastructure of local organisations like grassroots music venues like people like ourselves comedy clubs wherever that because we have the innovation in the arts sector as co-composition entrepreneurs we know how to make things happen and that innovation and creativity is fundamental to us getting out of the COVID situation so training and skills would be essential in that as well both the people seeking to start out in the sector it's been a really fundamental part of how we have worked of trying to break down that sense that it's basically only entitled people that can join the cultural sector who can afford to volunteer rather bringing people from disadvantaged to background people to experiencing inequality bringing those opportunities into the cultural workforce and we'd be doing that as Clara has been describing through that on the job work experience providing opportunities for career progression for people at all levels of the culture and creative sector and being a doorway for others to enter the sector directly from that community base where there is a diversity inclusion in the growth of the sector and I think if you took that significant investment approach to that community embedded art programme so you're not talking about directing money at the large theatres etc you're talking about doing that from the bottom up but where the large theatres etc would come in is that you would be adding on top of that community embedded programme an active research and development programme that was looking at that work as it was going on and mapping the way that it was using those other bits of infrastructure resource that we already have in the cultural sector and seeing which bits of those are going to be useful within that new model of a grassroots cultural creation that's the foundation of our growth and progression as a country from here Okay, bring in Mr Jones Mike Jones, sorry and then Ms Campbell and then I come back to Ms Boyack Yeah, we're at a very difficult phase at the moment with the impending ending of the job retention scheme which has been a key part of our ability to retain some staff throughout this period Once that ends then we're going to be exposed again to the harsh realities of the commercial situation and we're going to just reopen our venues in Scotland where currently our marketing strap line was previously live comedy every night but at the moment we're doing each of our venues in Scotland and England an average of three nights a week and the number of customers we've actively reduced our capacity that we're currently our physical capacity number of people in the room is at about 66% so the fact that we're doing fewer events to fewer people clearly means that there's less money coming through in terms of box office and food and bar sales so I'm in a very strange position at the moment of as we kind of potentially fall off the end of the JRS cliff I'm having to agree and negotiate with people reduced hours contracts that reflect the level of work we have available for people to do at a point where we're trying to grow the business but because we're not going to be back at pre-Covid levels or at least a year I would say that my ability to offer hours of work to people and this is across the organisation including office staff and venue staff it's entirely dependent on our levels of activity which in turn is really life dependent on the number of people that want to come and see events at our venues the positive news is that almost everything that we're putting on at the moment is selling out so there's clearly a demand there which we're looking to to meet but as I say at the moment I'm engaged in some quite difficult conversations with whether there's admin staff or box office staff or marketing staff saying well we're not doing 20 shows a week across the organisation we're doing maybe half of that so this working patterns are going to have to reflect that so it's quite difficult to maintain morale and focus during that kind of process cos clearly what we want is as we grow the business all of our staff to be engaged on that but if you're limiting their input consciously then that's quite a difficult equation to square miss Campbell we're not we're seeing you now miss Campbell but we're not hearing you unfortunately I'm looking to sound engineer miss Campbell I don't think she's hearing us in the room perhaps somebody could try and get her on boarded by phone again if that was possible go back to miss Boyack that's really helpful to get the evidence there in your comments cos I was looking for that kind of short term comments so the comment from Mike Jones there about the importance of the job retention scheme given that we're not out of Covid yet but also the ideas that came from Matt Baker about linking into communities and for me it kind of ticked all boxes because it's employment retention it links into wellbeing it links into communities and potentially the next generation coming through and retaining the skill set so we're very keen to see see that issue so there's keeping people in employment, there's keeping venues open is there anything else in terms of structural support that you think that we need to be looking at I don't know if any of the witnesses want to come back in again having heard the last comments I don't know if Matt Baker or Clara Curran if there's anything else you want to come in with before we move on to the next question around the table I'll go to Mr Cullen first and then to Mr Baker Thank you Sarah for us coming out of this Covid crisis it does go back to some of the structural issues that were amplified or exacerbated by the crisis so for us it's the fact that 93 per cent of all of our venues are privately owned to private tenants and with landlords as opposed to community-owned and so I thought it was really interesting what Matt was saying about his community scheme a few years ago because I think moving out of the crisis to create resilience until we address the issue of long-term ownership it's very difficult for venue managers and sales to implement schemes whether they be improving the infrastructure of venues or improving their green capabilities it's quite difficult to do if you don't have very long leases or you don't have security of tenure and I think what we saw in the crisis particularly with the Music Venues Trust Save Our Venues campaign was this huge outpouring of love from general community for their grassroots music venues so we had local communities raising millions of pounds to save their local music venues and I think that interaction or what that demonstrated was that there is a desire from the local community to be more connected to their venues and I think moving forward we could create resilience within the sector if we moved more towards community ownership model or community benefit society model which is taking place in some of the other nations and I think that's probably quite a concrete policy measure that could be explored to create longer-term resilience so if this type of crisis was to happen again venues would be in a better position to react because there would be more long-term security within their actual ownership models Mr Baker Oh sorry No it's okay, I was going to say Matt Baker I think the points you made about Dumfries I've seen that about moving into the town centre and is that a model that you think could be applied elsewhere as we try and regenerate our town centres and link culture in? Yeah it can go, as we're looking at our hollowed out retail town centres the entertainment economy town centres is going to be vital we're all talking about how do we make up town centres active, vibrant places that people want to be that gravitate to so that you get football for new businesses you get the cultural sector is incredibly good at that entrepreneurship innovation part of starting new businesses and growing new enterprises in town centres that's what's happening in Dumfries that's what I can see out of my window right now I think Clare's point about the long term nature of building is really important and also the long term funding it's something that gets talked about a lot we're in a situation where we are constantly getting offered because of the success that we've had we're getting offers to say we want to partner on this project which means opportunities that we could bring into our region for our creative sector and we are literally stumped for capacity because we're spending so much time trying to raise funds to continue the co-operation of the organisation so we're constantly hamstrung by that short term funding that would make an enormous difference to have that security because the way I talk about it is that the security of some of those key organisations gives shelter for other organisations to go up around them so you create these clusters that's how the creative sector works and we're working on a regional place making network at the moment in Dumfries and Galloway in five of our rural towns around us to build capacity for the kind of way that we're working but at that sort of infrastructural level that you guys are looking at I think they're listening to Clara talking about community ownership I think that there must be enormous potential here to join up with the place based investment programme because the community sector that's being supported you could see local venues as part of that community sector that isn't happening at the moment you could also see we have to basically become a different person for the different strands of funding that we have to apply to here different language all the time and there's also opportunity there in the market that's what we're seeing in particularly the rural areas in South Scotland that I'm familiar with but the community sector has become a vital market for the cultural sector it's different to the cities where you have a big critical massive cultural business it's more dispersed in a rural area and the community sector has become a vital market for the way that creative businesses are living and I think coming back to that idea of that community embedded work for freelancers that basically would feed the entire cultural infrastructure if you had that security for freelancers to work at that community level they are also then free to go on small tours with their bands the company clubs have built their own a new work in the theatre sector all of that is made possible by that security of key work in community settings thank you I'm going to offer a chance for Mike Jones and Ms Campbell to come in very briefly on that I'm conscious of time and I spend a lot of time on that subject here but if Mr Jones or Ms Campbell want to add anything Mr Jones just briefly two key things for us we're very fortunate to own our Edinburgh premises but we rent in the other venues we do have very benevolent landlords in Newcastle Newcastle City Council who gave us a rent rebate last year and in Glasgow until very recently it was the Scottish TUC who gave us 100% rent free period from the onset of the pandemic but those leases will revert to quite chunky commercial leases but we did benefit from that short term benevolence in a similar vein rates relief which we received was invaluable as a part of the overall funding package which we were able to to access but again that already is tapering off in England and from 1st of April we'll kick back in at 100% in our case which is clearly something we need to be able to deal with from a financial point of view much of Miss Campbell's with us at the moment I don't think she's mine, she'll get back on on to the call, I'm very sorry for that if I could move to questions from Dr Alasdair at all in place thank you very much I was interested in what was being said in that discussion about the impact on artists as employees and as companies and as businesses given how many artists people working in the sector are self-employed so I just wonder if any of you could say it, I don't know if this is one perhaps for Matt Jones or others about self-employed people and their experience of lockdown I'll maybe bring in Miss Cullen first on that one and then move to Mr Jones and Mr Baker Sure, so I can only speak quite generally on this point the vast majority of the people who work in the creative sectors are freelancers that's been the model for the last decade and so this crisis has been particularly hard for people who are self-employed and the relationship between grass with music venues and the artists who play there largely the artists tend to be self-employed individuals and so getting protecting that layer of the creative industry is vital for us and the wider music ecosystem because others seem without artists feeling like they can have a stake in this industry then we can't promote them, we can't put them and so everyone is worse off if that layer of the industry feels like they can't feels like they are forced into the industry and so that's my quite general point on that one Go to Mr Baker and then to Mr Jones Thank you Sorry Are you wanting me to Mr Baker, yeah Sorry Okay, thank you The points that I were making were basically directed at freelancers when I'm talking about mentally I'm talking about freelancers and they are ultimately the majority of how the cultural sector works Yeah, when lockdown first happened the we had to switch MSs really, really quickly we worked between wider community and supporting the cultural sector and we're in the town centre but nobody really lives in the town centre in Dumfries so our community vanished the wider community and we focused to all our efforts on supporting the freelance economy and we found the key things really were providing work so we had very little to start with small micro commissions that were just people were in lockdown, didn't know which way it was up, didn't know how to continue to be creative if wrongs in an absolute mess but we kept people going with that and then gradually were able to draw in through supporting communities funding etc work for artists for freelance for freelance creators and create those commissions but the other key bit was the need to retain network that infrastructure vanished overnight the creative sector functions through talking to each other and that's how jobs get shared, ideas get shared projects get started so the key sort of like perhaps the development hubs of the corridor we're talking about cultural organisations of all strike were absolutely vital to maintaining that network of connectivity the freelancers we saw people who were falling out of that were very quickly drifting away from the cultural workforce and that idea of investing heavily in a community embedded programme to bring work to freelancers is fundamental I think we are just going to lose so many of the people who have valuable skills that have been built up over years that make us the country that we are Mr Jones in our last pre Covid year we spent a million pounds we paid artists a million pounds performance across all our venues and during the Edinburgh fringe almost all of those people will be self-employed so that's a million pounds that is just not flowing for that part to be ecology and the other thing is during the Edinburgh fringe we expand our operations significantly and normally take on a whole bunch of technical and production staff all of whom will be freelancers and I'm not aware of the status of all of those people and what financial support they've been able to access as individuals but again there's a significant chunk of our annual budget which just wasn't flowing to those people in fringe 2020 or indeed the recent much reduced fringe I was just going to ask on the back of that if you think that's had a deterring effect on new entrants if you like into the industry new freelancers and what we can do to try to overcome that if you think that we need to rethink what we do to reassure to reassure young people who want to become freelancers in the arts that it's a thing that they can do I'm just curious to know whether you feel it's had an effect on new people coming in maybe one for Matt Baker I'm not sure that isn't actually something we're seeing because in our particular community the arts have been really active through the pandemic so people have been gravitating towards it I talked a lot about trying to make those opportunities at that community level to diversify our workforce and that's the big challenge is to convince that sector that the arts and culture is a viable career we focus really strongly on always paying people and paying people at good rates so that that sense of being part it's something that you can afford to be part of and want to be part of so it's just there is a risk there that as visible cultural activity diminishes that people will drift away but if people come back to that and invest in community embedded projects then the opposite is going to be true because they are visible opportunities for people to take advantage of finally on the back of that Mr Baker I was interested in what you said throughout your contribution about building rebuilding from the bottom up and the importance of small venues and small cultural activities I please don't want anyone to take this as criticism of Scotland's large performing companies but does this imply in your view anything about the balance given that we are talking about a budget here the balance in the future that will have to be struck between larger and smaller enterprises and the arts has Scotland got that balance right is there anything you want to say about any of that yes that in itself is part of the root of the issue here I think you know if you take it about I mentioned the World War 2 situation but out of the World War 2 situation grew the Arts Council of Great Britain the initial Arts Council of Great Britain had two very distinct strands and one was about people making their own culture participation growing culture and the other was about creating culture that people went to go and see in the early 50s John Maynard Cades took over as the minister responsible and he did away with that strand of the making your own culture and that's where we have lived with that vision of culture and the way the culture is funded from a public point of view ever since of focusing on making excellent culture and then making that accessible for people I think we do need to look at that differently but just turning around to Creative Scotland and saying deal with your budget differently is not an answer Creative Scotland has a tiny budget because what I'm suggesting is that we need to go back to that original Arts Council vision of two strands of the way that we're looking at culture participating in your own culture and viewing top notch culture so we need to look at ways that we can bring in money to feed that other strand because really what we are investing in culture at the moment will really just maintain that first model of culture as something which is to be consumed by the public rather than made by the public so we need to look at a way of funding that making in public and that's where I think we need to be creating significant alliances with the health sector, with the education sector with the regeneration economic development sector and not being afraid to say that culture has a part to play in all of that and the way that we're making that transition around climate as well I think Miss Campbell is back in the room and wants to come in on this. I've asked if people do want to answer a question it's been directed to somebody else if they could put an R in the chat in BlueJeans so that we can it's very difficult to do this and get a feeling you don't get the feeling in the room that someone wants is desperate to answer a question but I'll bring in Miss Campbell for now. Hello, thank you. If I can actually talk about the two questions that have just come in before the first one is about self-employed we're very concerned that there's a lot of, obviously, freelancers in the traditional arts sector and trying to make sure that they have the opportunity to either make money during the pandemic. My digital capacity today has shown some of the problems that can face individuals because they may not have the capacity or the resources to buy good quality for example. There's that and the idea of traditional support for organisations and artists is very key. It's been already mentioned about the furlough scheme finishing that's also accompanied by the SIS scheme finishing so that the next six months is going to be key about keeping people in that workforce whether they're through an organisation or whether they're self-employed. This is actually an issue that's come up with the traditional arts working group, which is a creative Scotland advisory group. There is already evidence that young traditional artists, particularly looking at different careers or already moving into different careers because there's just not the work there and they have to put food on the table they have to keep roofs over their heads as well et cetera and the music isn't paying its way at this point in time for obvious reasons. We don't necessarily need to repeat those but I was going to make supporting Clara's points a lot that idea of stabilisation of venues making them available I'm aware of a folk festival at the moment who's having difficulty getting a venue for their usual festival in November so that's the issue about venues being able to take on events being organised by volunteers for example employing people who have access to artists is one of the issues it's not just about access to artists it's also access to venues and the venues being confident about being able to ventilate properly et cetera and I think a lot of it comes back down to what Matt was saying about the difference in the funding structure a lot of this is related to how well people have been core funded or not core funded and a better spread of core funding because some people don't need a lot but they may need less than what for example when Credit Scotland did the fairly recent regular funded application round it was a minimum of £50,000 you had to apply for each year when not every organisation needs that amount so you had to sort of inflate your budget to meet that criteria to be able to apply so there's different areas that we could be improving on and one final point about the instance for new people obviously a lot of people get their first taste of flourishing and music venues but there's also a lot of voluntary organisations and festivals and events that they cut their teeth on as well and get an idea whether they'd like to make a career out of it so that's where I think the issue about not having some of these events and festivals running in the usual capacity where you need volunteers to be at the gate to look after the artists et cetera means some of these some of the usual pipeline are not currently operating in the same way except for maybe when they need some digital help that's maybe where they come into their own okay that's it thank you once more to questions from Mr Cameron thank you thank you convener and welcome to the panel I'd like to just pick up on the question of funding that Ms Campbell spoke about, I found that very interesting point about core funding and being spread more widely can I come on to the issue of multi-year funding we've heard quite a lot of evidence that there is a desire for multi-year funding because it provides greater stability and yet as we know there is a kind of annual funding system could I get the views of the panel on whether they support multi-year funding and if I could start with Mike Jones please well I'm speaking from the perspective of an organisation that before Covid didn't receive any funding the funding that we've received has been exceptional I think all organisations need to be able to plan their business and their financial model over three to five year period and I think arts organisations that do require funding absolutely require certainty of funding across a broader period rather than living hand to mouth project funded organisations that's even more extreme but RFOs if they're to continue to develop artistically and commercially and obviously there's the increasing imperatives to develop ancillary income from things like food and drink supplies people need to know that their support is coming from so that they can plan and develop over a proper business cycle so absolutely yes multi-year funding would be a positive thing Can I bring in Mr Baker and if Miss Campbell and Miss Cullen want to come in on it or anything they want to add if they can put an hour on the charts but we'll go to Mr Baker No question that multi-year funding would be a benefit that would need to be spread wider I mean the basic reason is that if you're on an annual cycle you really don't get much chance to get on with the work because you're in that constant cycle of applying again and again and again and that means that we do need to make a fundamental commitment as a country that we want to invest infrastructure and that it's got a value and I think that comes back to that community point again but I won't play for it and I don't think we can just look to Creative Scotland and say spread that wider it needs to be spread wider Clare and Freon are saying there are different scales of organisation and if we invest in those organisations we invest in the kind of ecosystem that they support around them so we need Creative Scotland's RFO structure is predominant, the vast majority of that money goes to large and great organisations that are sort of effectively almost too big to fail that you can't shit in that so little room to maneuver in terms of that budget because if you were to say sorry Lyceum you're out in order to spread it a bit wider the howls of protest that would come at national level the political storm that would be created around the arts is incredibly good at making that kind of noise as we've seen around the last hours of running around so it does require us to look at innovative solutions and that may be the idea of looking at it as two streams and which stream are you in and the money from the other stream is not necessarily coming from that Creative Scotland investment in the large organisations but I saw that so it was asking questions about per cent for art on building contracts and that that could be an amazing commitment from the country I'm familiar with the system in Calgary in Canada where every city department has a per cent for art which creates these centralised funds but these are the kind of innovative solutions that we need to be looking at as a country if we're going to make this commitment to our cultural infrastructure which is sustainable and creates the kind of country we want to see if we believe in culture as an instrument for the changes we want to see I'm afraid we've lost Miss Campbell from the call again Thank you very much for those answers If I could move on to a linked issue which is to try and look beyond Covid if we can and I accept that this involves looking into your crystal ball a bit but in a year or so's time when hopefully we're out of the pandemic can I ask you how you think the sector in respect of your organisations will look and again how should that be funded and I appreciate you've touched on some of this in previous answers but if you're able to look at the kind of post-Covid landscape what will it look like and how should it be funded and could I ask Miss Cullinan first Sure, so that is a difficult question at the moment because in terms of our members in Scotland there are 25 music venues which represents the vast majority of most music venues in Scotland some of those venues are very actively in contact with us have used our support services in terms of support access funding the grassroots music venue stabilisation fund which was the first fund ever created in Scotland for grassroots music venues whereas others have been less in contact so getting a sense of the scope and the scale of the crisis I think we'll probably take a little bit of time after this immediate kind of crisis phase which is also why we're recommending some form of infrastructure audit to be undertaken so that we can really see how Covid has impacted are there music venues that have shifted to doing bar and hospitality and food or are there venues that might be music venue pubs and have shifted in the short term to focusing on the pub side of the activity rather than the music so at the moment that's a little bit difficult to tell but going forward hopefully I think some of these structural questions over ownership over the role of communities in their culture how kind of culture can impact other ideas whether it be health or infrastructure or high street regeneration it presents lots of exciting opportunities as well I think we can there is an opportunity in because of Covid we don't just have to go back to how things were prior to Covid which at least in the grassroots music venue sector was we were not funded at all in the kind of regular funding organisation rounds so I think it does present an opportunity to really rethink how the role of culture and how we deliver that going forward but I think unless we address them as those structural and systematic issues that were already prevalent pre Covid so ownership as might we say in business rates it's very difficult to envision recovery when we haven't yet got the stabilisation so that's going to be an issue OK to bring in Mr Jones and then we'll go to Mr Baker I think it's it's really difficult to see what the landscape is going to be like you know the war isn't over here there's a lot of things still to to play out as we start to rebuild but then there's still the the spectre of a winter lockdown hovering over all of this so I think there's a real tension between the broadening of the definition of culture which was clearly something which we benefited from an explicit commitments and recognition that comedy is a legitimate art form and that comedy clubs are worthy of arts funding that was a major box-tips for our sector but I think that definition has been broadened and there was a big life boat established into which a large number of very diverse and very different cultural organisations all with different sort of business models were invited to jump into I think the thing is having broadened recognition and having said oh yeah you were able to help survive how we enable those organisations to be fit for the future and able to thrive and develop from a very low point to fully deliver to their co-emission and what funders are expecting them to have as the key outcomes so going back to what Matt was saying we've got a situation here where we've said there's a whole bunch of people here that merit our emergency funding but we're faced with a current situation and a future situation where without that emergency funding we're going to be looking at redistribution of essentially finite funds and that's a huge challenge for funders I bring in Mr Baker hopefully to be forward by this Campbell Mr Baker I can paint a picture of the future as I say but I can only paint it in my immediate area in the south of Scotland so what I envision for the future is a creative place making network across the south of Scotland I'm talking about Dumfries and Galloway in the Scottish Board within that a number of key nodes that would be community organisations cultural venues who have reached a degree of core funding and each supporting a cohort of creative freelancers around them so you've got that cluster then through the fact that you've got that network you have the opportunity to share capacity, share experience share programming share physical kit and resources and you build with that, as we've been doing a strategic partners framework around it from the community sector, from the health sector from the education sector, from the economic regeneration sector from the skills development sector we've been working skills development Scotland a lot and that grows the larger mass of potential capacity and delivery supporting your freelancers is giving them the capacity to build new work and through the profile and advocacy and collective bargaining that you have and the network situation you have the opportunity to link to national and international projects delivery so that you can bring national theatre down to south of Scotland to work effectively within communities and direct communities and do the same with international projects and then if you join that all the way around Scotland as a network of linked funded creative notes you've got an amazing vision of a sustainable creative future for Scotland thank you can we bring Ms Campbell in hi sorry I'm going to go on again about digital capacity the issue for me is that actually sorry there we go done sorry for that bit there we go done sorry for that bit sorry about this this is I'm getting feedback I'm getting feedback now that should be fine what I've got what I've got is the apologies can you hear me now can you hear me now no I'm really sorry about this but if you could just remove yourself from the call I think we'd be able to proceed sorry about that can I bring in Ms Minto please thank you and thank you panel I was really excited to hear about your vision Mr Baker for Dumfries and Galloway and the rest of Scotland I'd really like to hear a bit more about how you plan that to work and how we do actually move forward to have that across Scotland I'm very sorry that Ms Campbell has just left because I had a specific question with regards to rural festivals and the impact of all the requirements and lack of travelling and the impact that that has not only on the performers but also on the communities because there would have been a lot of well-being and benefit from them that I'm also afraid that Ms Campbell made with regards to the minimum level of funding being set at 50,000 I know coming from a rural community that £10,000 goes much further there than it might in the centre of Edinburgh for example so any of the panel's thoughts on that would be useful thank you thank you Ms Minto and I'm going to ask the clerks to follow up with the TMSE for the questions to be answered for a written answer be helpful but I'll go to Mr Baker first for that one I'm sorry there were several questions in the journey and where we got short of time so is there one particular was there anything particular that you wanted me to I was really pleased to hear when you started talking that you were envisaging a network across and Friesen Galloway and you were interested to hear more about how you're planning to expand that throughout from Dumfries to the lights of Kirkcwbray, Castle Douglas et cetera et cetera I mentioned the culture collective project Scottish Government initiative of 6 million across the country 26 projects we're one of those projects and what we're doing is we're supporting community anchor organisation in five towns in Stranra, in Langham in Sankirk in Castle Douglas and in one of the housing states on the edge of Dumfries in North West Dumfries we're supporting those groups to host two resident artists for a year creative practitioners and the community groups have identified a particular section of their community that's particularly affected by Covid so for instance in North West Dumfries it's a block, set of six blocks of flats that have got a particular problem with turnover of intensities and those practitioners are then embedded for a year to work within those communities and bring forward so they're starting groups in Castle Douglas completely rethinking the gala day in Castle Douglas for instance but what our experience has shown is what having that security of time is bringing forward small social enterprises new groups performing around a particular thing that people want to learn or do together environmental projects it's starting community asset transfers environmental projects that grow from those kind of initiatives but the amazing thing is that all of those community organisations are now working together and collaborating on joint funding bits to begin to think of themselves as a collective enterprise and so in past years we've been competing for funding and now we're talking to each other about like let's all go for that thing and go together which is so much better than the funders point of view because they're not in a position then that you choose between General R and Castle Douglas how are they supposed to know whether you want to be deciding that at local level so if you build those networks and have the ability for people to talk and build trust and they then support the cohort of creatives around them it seems to be working Thank you I think that's a really interesting comment because it's maybe one of the few silver linings from the pandemic is that communities have found different ways to work together and different people have come out of communities with different ideas which maybe helps expand cultural ideas as well 100% and being given we've been allowed to think the unthinkable you've got a situation where councils have just been doing things rather than having to go through six different committees and prove outcomes before that which just works so well for the creative community that's how we function we try things to see what sticks to the wall and if it works we carry on doing it and that has become an accepted way of doing things in our societies through Covid which is we need to hold on to that that idea of a risk positive culture in how we're doing things an interesting people collaborating with people that's come out of the pandemic Thank you I notice Ms Cullen was nodding her head I think when I talked about £10,000 going further in a smaller environment if you'd like to give your thoughts on that Yeah, absolutely I think often by their very nature funding requirements are restrictive and they've particularly over Covid sometimes our venues have experience that they can't apply for funds because they don't have the right business structure or they're not they don't reach that kind of threshold and so I think having alongside having the kind of flexibility of now recognising their comedy and grassroots music venues our culture I think within general funding there needs to be flexibility as well what we have experienced during this year particularly for a lot of our venues they've ever applied for any type of funding and learning that skill for the very first time can't be underestimated it's learning to speak that language of funding is an entirely new thing for a lot of grassroots music venues and so things that we can do to create more flexible and dynamic funding streams which don't discriminate against smaller venues is definitely a positive thing and our sector is incredibly resourceful it can adapt very quickly it doesn't often need huge amounts of money to do that we've seen it with the implementation of live streaming within the grassroots music venues small investments micro investments can go a long way at the grassroots level that's what grassroots culture is all about thank you I wonder if I could ask a supplementary just in the back of Miss Minto's questions I'm really excited to hear Mr Baker's enthusiasm for the culture in place especially since a long-term music charity supporting young people in my areas at the moment building their own bespoke studio performing space but it leads me to ask about younger people because often maybe for Miss Cullen, Mr Jones more particularly young people may be excluded by age because of licensing and premises and just to ask what opportunities are there for younger performers and younger audiences to take part in these sort of live music and opportunities so if I could go to Mr Jones first Mr Baker You're right that a lot of our work is focused on an adult audience we do do shows for younger people and families but probably not enough of them and that's something we're reviewing within our business planning something which having said we're not an organisation that normally requires funding I think if we were to start to engage in more development developmental work engaging with schools or community groups to access young people that's precisely the area where we would require a small amount of funding to support that work but at the moment I would say that we're focusing on the commercial imperatives and the commercial situation that lie ahead of us at the moment as we start to regrow the business but we have said that we want to not necessarily go back to the default settings and do what we used to do pre Covid that there is an opportunity to grow back better grow back differently and so pioneering some of those kind of initiatives within a comedy context is definitely on our agenda Miss Colin? Yeah, definitely. I think it's really interesting the role that grassroot music venues can play in that development for school leavers and people of 16 and above as development and training hubs because I think it connects into a wider issue within our sector which is that of succession so a lot of the venue managers have been doing this for about 20, 30 years they have a huge amount of knowledge but what happens after they leave or who are they going to train up to to take on that role and that next generation within the ecosystem because if we don't have that if a vital person in the organisation leaves you don't want the venue to close because of that and so I think getting the idea of succession is incredibly important and I think it can be done through grassroot music venues diversifying their business and being recognised not only as places that are put on music but actually are central spokes within their community they open doors for people who want to experience what live music is like and act as that training ground not just for artists not just developing artists in their career but actually just developing the people who work in these venues as well and getting that knowledge and I think I guess my own experience I'm 27 and I started my career because I like to hang out on my local record shop and I was just looking at what they were doing there and that sparked an interest in live music and music in general and so I think that kind of access to music thinking of these places as places where you could have viable careers and that kind of respect for the culture is incredibly important. Thank you and Mr Baker? Thank you for asking that questions but really important one-on-one that's been a little bit missing so fast I think the question of young people generally is a vast one I mean in rural situations where a lot of the chat turns to how do you hold on to the young people how do you stop everybody disappearing and going to the cities I think the smarter way to look at that is to think about the opportunities that you're giving them before they reach the point where they want to go away want to encourage people to move and to travel and to get new experiences but give them the idea that they've got something to come back to the places to play I think he particularly talked about that the idea of the pubs are not accessible to the young people I think the idea of the cross-roof venues that Clara was talking about is key there but also the potential through that community network but by investing in those places giving them that core funding through a role you effectively make those places a bit cooler but for young people who want to associate with the cool of culture I think the town centre role is important as well I was involved in a conversation last night with some young people who were talking about the fact that they don't feel welcome in the town centre they feel that they're being looked at as if they shouldn't be there but they gravitate to a place like ours which is here somewhere which is actually a place of safety where they can be themselves and the fact that the cultural venue spread a bit of that influence of safety out into the public realm I think we need to think really smartly about the way that culture is working for young people and think about joining up some of that funding around that what I talked about on networks is vital too in the sense of a range of opportunity because in our situation if a young person is in Castle Douglas and Castle Douglas is specialising in performance but you've got a visual artist a young person you need them to be signposted to the right place in that network and there's a tendency through the funding models where an arts organisation will kind of hold on to its young people and not because they're getting funding to support those young people and not be signposting them to say you should actually go and talk to those folk because that's going to be more suited to where you are we need to create that culture of collaboration in order to join up those opportunities and arrange what is available to them and make the best of the resources that we've got rather than a one-size-fits-all approach Thank you I've got a final question from Miss Oh Apparently I preempted Miss Weber's question with my supplementary so apologies I thank everyone today for their attendance it's been very helpful and apologies again for on-boarding for Miss Campbell for the TMSA but we will follow up with her to get answers and invite her to comment on the questions that she wasn't able to answer today so that concludes our committee for this morning and I thank you to everyone once again for their contributions and I'll close this meeting