 Good morning and welcome to the 17th meeting of the committee in 2019. I would like to remind members and the public to turn off their mobile phones, and any members using electronic devices to access committee papers should please ensure that they are turned to silent. Apologies have been received today from Tavish Scott MSP. Our first item of business is an evidence session as part of the committee's inquiry into arts funding. We will take evidence from two panels of witnesses, and I would like to welcome our first panel, which comprises Rona Alexander, vice chair of Voluntary Arts Scotland, and Jeanne Nicholl, who is a visual artist, who is also past president of the Scottish Artists Union, and Jeanne has co-led some research on in-kind work in the contemporary arts sector. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us today. Mook, I could start off by asking Jeanne to maybe talk through the research and what it found. The project that I did was with fellow artist Ailey Rutherford. It came out of discussions between myself and Ailey coming from previous experiences of taking part in a variety of art festivals, all of which had a common theme, and that was the difficulty in getting paid and the willingness of artists to self-exploit in a way in order to take part. In-kind was a research project that the two of us undertook as part of G.I. in 2018 last year, which is Glasgow international festival of the visual arts, which is a very large visual arts festival based in Glasgow. Our project aims to map the hidden economies of the visual arts and below the waterline economy, so charting the unseen and the unaccounted for efforts that enable so much of the arts to take place, so exploring unpaid labour, mutual support favours and volunteer hours. I suppose that it is relating to a feminist notion of the economy. We took part in the across-the-city strand of G.I. G.I. has different strands, some of which are curated and funded, some of which are funded by arts organisations themselves, but we were in the part that was completely unfunded. It is the largest part of G.I., the largest section. Artists are encouraged to find and use new and unusual spaces across the whole of the city. There are 90 exhibitions and 78 venues. The total funding for G.I. gives out £13,000 bursary—this is in 2018 anyway—but the total funding was about 114,000 total funding across 90 exhibitions and 78 venues, but the vast majority of the artist taking part are self-funding. Our project was asking artists to log their out-of-pocket expenses and unpaid hours that they were contributing to take part in G.I. We created a mobile information unit and worked with statistics that we set up our own website. Artists log their hours and their out-of-pocket expenses. It was displayed as a data visualisation that was updated in real-time throughout the whole of the three-week festival. The point of it was to highlight the issues of precarious nature and the unsustainableness of the huge amount of self-exploitation. The contribution that artists were having to make in order to take part in G.I. You can see more about our project. We have a website at www.inkindproject.info. We have the data visualisation on the stats. We have done subsequent events at the Barbican in London. Our project coincided with a report called Panic. It was published by sociologists and statisticians from the University of Edinburgh and Sheffield. The title of the report is Panic, social class, taste and inequalities in the creative industries. It is looking at the way that arts are meritocracy. We were asked to take part in workshops at the Barbican as a result. We have created a list of demands through other workshop events, followed up workshops at Kenning Park project and we gave a presentation across party group on culture here, basically just to illustrate our project. You can find out more about it online if you would like to. I was just to get that on record here. This is something that we have discovered through the written submissions and through some of the other evidence sessions that we have taken. It is the amount of work in the art sector that is unpaid or which does not attract fair pay. Rona, what is the extent of the problem? I am here to represent voluntary arts Scotland, which is the national development agency for those who take part in arts and culture in their free time. It is from painting groups to sculpture dance, country dancing and so on. Our evidence is less about fair pay for artists. When we work with voluntary groups, we would encourage them to pay fairly on the rates when working with professional artists. I guess why we are together is that we are both with the parts of the sector that are a little bit under the radar and below the waterline in terms of funding decisions. You want to say more about the scale of the problem? My other hat on, which is an executive member of the Scottish Irish Union, is that since 2012 SAU has conducted a membership survey. We have amassed a whole load of stats and information about how artists operate and how they support themselves. SAU basically represents professional work in artists in Scotland. We have a membership of over 1,300 professional artists. We have amassed all those statistics. We know that over 50 per cent of our membership there was a question recently about volunteering in the arts. We found out that over 50 per cent of the membership of SAU that is filled in the survey are taking part in volunteering within the arts. It is kind of endemic. It is almost like a way of operating. It goes along with the fact that about 80 per cent of our membership has been self-employed. The way people work when they are self-employed means that they are not supported as far as holiday pay and maternity pay. All the rights that come when you have salary are just not really an issue. That is another factor within the arts, obviously. Some of the written submissions that we have had looked at ways to address the issue. Some of the suggestions were your requirement for funded organisations to dedicate at least 50 per cent of their annual budget to artists. At the RFO row, there was quite a lot of concern that a lot of the money was not going to artists, but it was going to organisations that were administration focused or management focused. Other suggestions are that organisations that do not pay union rates should not get funding at all. What is your view on some of those solutions? It has taken SCU quite a number of years to get Creative Scotland to embed our recommended rates of pay within its funding structures. If artists or organisations put in for funding, they need to show evidence that they are using SCUs or other equity musicians' unions, other arts unions' rates of pay. That has helped the situation, but one of the issues is that getting funding is incredibly competitive. One of our demands is trying to make the arts less about competition. Artists are basically competing, so individual artists can only apply to the open fund through Creative Scotland. It is one large pot of money across all art forms aimed at individuals as well as organisations. We find that really low rates of our members, like 60 per cent of our membership, have never received public funding. Over and over again, we hear that our members find it really intimidating. We have got ridiculously high levels of dyslexia within the visual arts. At Glasgow School of Arts, we have got an entire department related to dyslexia. Even just filling in the forms, I think, people find quite intimidating. The budgets, adding percentages, the whole kind of… Even to myself, who I have got 25 years of experience as an artist, I graduated in 1989. The thought of doing a Creative Scotland funding application is probably at least three weeks' work. It is intimidating and I have got all that experience, so I hate to think what recent graduates feel like coming out of art schools with that kind of uphill struggle to tackle. I could talk all day about this, but another issue that SAU have realised is that over 60 per cent of our membership are over the age of 50, which begs the question, where are all the young artists? Are they disappearing down, off, down south? Are they not seeing a union as a relevant thing for them? We provide public liability insurance as one of our membership benefits. It is advantageous for artists to join if they are working in the sector. We are worried about the fact that it seems to us that there are so few. Although there are high numbers of students going through the art schools, the ones that are not ending up working in call centres or working in bars, who are able to and take on work in what is an incredibly competitive sector, that is a major issue. It bodes badly for the future. I could create a Scotland that they do local authority funded in certain cities. They have small pots of money such as £2,000 grants. Again, those kind of funded things might facilitate projects, but there is no way in enabling people to survive financially. I have a supplementary from Stuart McMillan. Jenny, you just mentioned a moment ago about dyslexia. I am one of the conveners of the cross-party group on dyslexia. Do you have any percentages or any indication as to what the figures are for people? I am afraid that I do not have those figures at my fingertips. It is not something that we have questioned particularly in our membership survey, but it is something that we probably should. I know that, anecdotally, it is almost like a natural place for people created. People with dyslexia often levitate towards—my partner is dyslexic and he is a cabinet maker. One of my daughters dyslexia is extremely creative. Dyslexia and creativity almost go hand in hand. I think that that idea of form-filling and applying for funding is additionally tricky when you are dyslexic, as you are probably well aware of. For me, looking at the inquiry, there are two things. One is the question on how the current pot of money is spent. I suppose that is why we look at things like individual artists versus organisations, but also how do we increase the size of the pot? Is that really what the issue is here? How do we get more money? To ask a question about the voluntary arts sector, I suppose that it is to ask, Rona, how important do you think that is when the Government and all the parties sign up to it, a policy of increasing wellbeing in Scotland, investment in health and investment in education, volunteer arts is an area that traditionally is very underfunded and exists on a shoestring? Do you see the benefits that you as an organisation have to those other policy areas? Do you see any moves towards those policy areas making a contribution to art? Are there any examples of co-working? We think that it is hugely beneficial to the broader wellbeing agenda and to social connectedness. The product of art is not there, but there is also the process of taking part in being a maker and particularly working in groups that can give so much benefit in terms of wellbeing and connectedness. It is a very difficult landscape and got increasingly difficult because of the less local authority funding to small grants, the micro grants that the voluntary and amateur groups would need maybe to continue their work or to do work in areas with less social or economic capital or to work with an artist to maybe improve their reach and participation. It is an extremely difficult landscape and just the points that Jenny has been making about the proportionality, I suppose, of applying for funding is equally the case for voluntary and amateur groups. They will very rarely have ever accessed the open fund from Creative Scotland because of the work that it takes and the demands that it makes. The kind of schemes that the people who are part of our network really appreciate are awards for all, which is small project funding or micro grant schemes. We have been able to offer those in some cases, which just help with hospitality and with events costs. It is also a really good example, I would say, of Creative Scotland funding to the Shears refugee festival to allow refugee and asylum seeking groups to put on events right across Scotland because, of course, many local authorities are hosting refugees for the first time with the Syrian intake. That is something that is a really positive development, I would say. Local authorities and the awards for all, are you aware of any conversations that are happening with other bodies, whether it is NHS or any other statutory bodies, or does the private sector make any contribution to your area of work? It is very difficult to get private sector contribution both to us as a network organisation, because most corporate funders prefer to fund direct outcomes with direct beneficiaries that they can see and put a label on. A network organisation like ourselves will not struggle to access that funding. At a local level, people will get support from local businesses, but it is not at that transformative level. Good things will happen in some areas, but it is not a universal picture. I have had residences working in care homes and things like that, but they are all very random and sporadic. The work that I did was for Aberdeenshire council. There are lots of different arts organisations doing, like another hat I have is a trustee for engage, which is the national organisation for gallery education. They do a lot of work that is very diverse, with different galleries doing outreach projects. That all has an impact in trying to bring people from more diverse backgrounds into the arts. Local authority cuts have really affected artists in general as a source of income. Previously, under Labour, there were cultural co-ordinators. People look back and think that that was a conduit between artists and schools. Artists are not necessarily very good brokers for themselves. They are not necessarily very good negotiators, which I think is why pay is always an issue. No matter what level of status you might be in at careers, artists always find it difficult to negotiate, even if they are at a high level of success. The cultural co-ordinators were a really good kind of route or conduit for local authorities and for all the kind of work that was going on in local authority areas. The cuts to arts budgets are always very easy. It seems to be relatively easy to cut arts budgets rather than the cliche of funding a hospital. There are lots of organisations that see that link between artistic activity and general wellbeing. The Government is currently working on the cultural strategy. There have been a number of drafts and consultation events. Do you think that the cultural strategy is going to address some of those issues? What you are describing is a fairly piecemeal situation, a lack of strategic direction, whether that is at a national level or at a local government level. That seems quite varied as to how different local authorities approach culture. Do you think that the strategy will help to address any of that? I think so. I would think that they have been doing enough research and it seems to have been going on for years, the kind of cultural strategy stuff. I think that it will help. I hope so. I hope that it goes some way to recognise the issues that are below the radar at the moment, the areas that have had less voice in the past than the big institutions. There could be a redressing of the balancing. As you are talking about cultural co-ordinators, it is a lack of any uniform infrastructure at a local level to support, to highlight, to refer on to opportunities and network. It keeps coming up in my head anyway. If the arts were ring-fenced, Murray Council cut its entire budget. It was only 60,000. It was only one arts administrator and an assistant. It is probably the size of it. You could buy a Land Rover for that and how many Land Rovers are driving around Moray. The budgets are not necessarily large, but they can be very significant and have a far-reaching effect. Artists initiate a lot of projects and bring in other funding. They are innovative and catalyst for other things happening. I would say that employing artists or engaging with artists is money well spent. Finally, Janie at the beginning talked about diversity. I don't want to say any more about the current financial landscape of impact that is having on diversity. I have heard some comments from other witnesses about BME representation, about older artists, about women's involvement in art and the challenges that are. How much of an impact is the current financial landscape having on this agenda? It is definitely having an impact. Who can afford to be an artist? For the GI, artists had to sign up to work for three weeks to man their exhibitions for three weeks. That is not including all the work that goes in prior to even putting on an exhibition or to set up an exhibition. You are talking a bit about a lot of work. I just think that it is not sustainable. Artists struggle to sustain careers. Lots of artists end up dropping out if they have family commitments. It means living in this precarious situation. We have statistics to prove that high percentages, probably about over 60 per cent or 70 per cent of our membership, are earning less than 20 grand a year or way below what is considered to be the average income or earnings. They are basically low earning on low pay due to being self-employed and the difficulties in getting paid and sustaining these kind of careers. You do think that they are contributing a lot to the overall culture of Scotland and internationally the reputation of artists. Generally, it should not just be people from privileged backgrounds that get these opportunities, but more and more it seems to be that that is how it is panning out. It was the same picture in the community sector. If you are in an area of economic prosperity with a lot of social capital, you can perhaps continue to be involved in the arts without funding, but where funding is really vital is in our more disadvantaged communities or where there isn't, and to bring in arts expertise perhaps to increase audience and increase the quality of the work and engage more people. If that is missing, then it is getting a more and more unequal playing field. As voluntary arts, one of the key things that we try to do is support diversity in the arts through our epic awards to highlight really good examples of where that is happening in different communities and different parts of the country. The proposal for a universal basic income in Scotland has moved on quite a bit in the last few years. There are four local authorities that have now agreed to trial it. Some of the written evidence that we have received for this inquiry proposes that a UBI would be beneficial to artists in Scotland. I am interested in your thoughts on how that might work and how it might change the landscape, particularly for individual artists who are not part of wider organisations or networks. I mean, at the Scottish Arts Union, our AGM last year, I can't remember the guy's name, but from RSA came and gave a presentation about universal basic income. It does look like it could be a way of supporting people to have creative lives while being supported. Another thing that we have noticed with our membership survey, which I keep going back to, is that a lot of artists are in this older age bracket. It seems to us that there is evidence of people putting off creative careers until they retire or taking early retirement in order to then be in a stable enough position to take on creative professions. Do we want all our artists to be at that spectrum of the age group? Again, that affects the diversity of the age span of the arts. I think that freeing up the universal basic income, because the old age pension is a universal basic income. It is non-means tested. No questions asked income. We already have universal basic income, but we just don't give it to younger people. I think that it would be and SCU would be really interested if that was rolled out within different areas of Scotland. The social security system, as it currently exists, is something that came up in our round table discussion with artists last week. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on artists' experience with the current system. There was a suggestion last week that, in the past, some folk have continued to do their art while it was used, while on the dole. However, the system, as it has changed over recent years to become a more hostile one, has even made that essentially impossible. Is that something that the artists union in particular has noticed? Is it something that you have seen in your networks? Generally, I suppose that the benefit system has become so vilified and problematic and difficult that you imagine that people avoid it like the plague in a way. In the past, I know lots of artists who did start off their careers claiming benefits on the dole or whatever. There was the Enterprise Alliance scheme way back. I don't know if any of you remember that. She was the start of many small businesses where people were putting out records or setting up record companies. I was involved in a scheme called Fuse, which Patricia Fleming—I don't know if you've heard of her—runs our own organisation. She ran a scheme called Fuse because she managed to… It was kind of like the Enterprise Alliance scheme and it allowed artists to… They didn't have to sign on every week, but it was within that kind of system. We got money for materials and stuff like that, but it was for a whole year. You were kind of forgoing that whole thing of having it fill in forms, but within a sort of creative setting. That was an interesting kind of model that she managed to wrangle, make the system work for artists, which I think is quite unique in a way. I don't know if anyone has ever managed to do that again. The point that Jenny made about the demographics skewing towards folk who are older and have access to a pension, is that something that you would see within your networks? Yes. I think that there's a large number of groups where older people are in the majority, certainly, within our membership. We'll speak up for them as great creative people doing great things in their community. A big challenge that the groups that we work with have is bringing in new members of the group and refreshing their organisation and how they run the making connections with younger people, bringing them in, certainly. I realise that the reasons for that will be substantial and varied, but are those financial constraints a significant part of that for younger artists that they need to go elsewhere to secure some kind of income stream? Yes. I think that it's really about the profile of volunteering, generally, that there's points in your life when you're more able and willing to often volunteer than when you have a young family or a full-on career. That's certainly the case. I suppose that it returns to my point about why funding to level the playing field between different areas is so important, because you often need to a level of financial security to fully contribute as a volunteer. I think that there's evidence to show that the sort of drop-off within five years of art school is something like the people actually operating as artists after art school, within, you know, after five years, there's a drop-off, I don't know if it's down to like 10 per cent or something. Obviously, artists go on and operate in different sectors and that's great because they contribute to society, bringing that kind of creativity with them into different spheres, but in a way it is a waste of all that kind of input for people not to be able to push on and have what you might consider to be successful careers. I think that it goes right back to young people choosing subjects at school. It's like if there's this kind of idea that the arts are not going to be a viable occupation when you come out of school and your parents want you to do well in life, they're going to push you towards the sciences and become an adopter rather than the arts. Obviously, people do the arts because they want to, but it's very problematic. I'm going to be doing a workshop on Monday at the Glasgow School of Art to the graduating years professional practice, and it's that idea of having to go and speak to a room full of 20 or 30 young and optimistic arts graduates and give them a bit of harsh reality about the statistics. Young graduates think that they've got this career trajectory that will be, where in actual fact, 25 years out of art school and I'm still struggling to get paid quite often, so it's quite a tough career choice. I would say that where young people often do get involved is using the arts to highlight other issues of concern that are central to them and that that's where working with artists can be so powerful, whether it be dyslexia or autism, or bringing issues to the fore and finding self-expression. We see a lot of that again through our epic awards. Our last year, when it was an autism project for member Clyde, very disadvantaged community who do fantastic work, which I think they've even brought to the Parliament to raise awareness of how to be around young autistic people. Kenneth Gibson, did you have a supplementary? I followed on from what Ross was saying, he was talking about basic income. We were in Ayrshire College on Monday and we spoke to a lot of young people and one of the issues that came up was diversity, not necessarily in a good way between what happens in some educational institutions with regard to artists and others. For example, we were told by a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art that no assistance whatsoever was provided in terms of helping them, giving them any support or instruction or information or training in setting up a business or applying for grants or even filling in tax returns and stuff like that, whereas Ayrshire College did all those things. Do you have any concerns about that? Is that something that you would like to see established across the board so that, when young people are starting out, they have a solid grounding in how to negotiate themselves their lives through? There's definitely a lot of scope for that. At Scottish Arts Union, we've become affiliated to the STUC and we've got union learning funding now to run training programmes for artists. Again, this is post-graduation, but I think that art schools do professional practice, but it's maybe a one-day event. Often, at a time when graduating students don't really see the point or maybe don't engage, I think that what you're talking about at Ayr College is to embed those kind of life skills. Obviously, those kind of things like becoming self-employed and doing your own accounts, you learn by experience, but to actually be shown the steps of how to do it would be extremely beneficial. Obviously, the discussion that we had today and the discussion that we had last week and a point alluded to by Clare Baker, we look at all the asks and the very wide range of asks and all very laudable, but then we look at the pot and we come back to the pot. Starting with the way things are structured at the moment, principally through Creative Scotland and the national companies Creative Scotland, what we need to do ultimately is to take a view on is this the system that we should have going forward or should we have a different system? Starting with that, what would you see as a possible way forward? Keep it as it is, change it, overhaul it completely. What would you see as a way forward? You could make changes to Creative Scotland that would make it more accessible, that would make applying for funding a lot easier, maybe for smaller chunks of money. I was saying that each application doesn't seem like this kind of uphill struggle. You could maybe do something that actually supports artists. There are other models in Ireland where artists get travel grants and help to exhibit abroad, things like that that could be happening. It's hard to say, but I think that Creative Scotland has its heart in the right place, but I think that the way money is being dished out, a lot of people feel is quite inaccessible and problematic. The key for us is transparency and proportionality, and it feels for the groups that we work with. For ourselves it's a very small national development agency. We are regularly funded and we receive 390,000 for the three-year cycle, but that leaves us with a very small organisation. The reporting and application requirements are very heavy. I realise that the pot is very tight and has hard decisions to be made, but at the moment I think that the proportion of budget that goes to small grants funding through Creative Scotland is half a million pounds a year to the awards for all scheme, which we're very glad they came back into. That seems quite small to support community activity all over Scotland. It's very daunting to apply for the open fund, which is so competitive and so hard. All organisations can look at dividing how they use the money that they have. We benefit a lot from the funding plus that Creative Scotland offers, which is the professional support, the networking opportunities, access to facilities. Creative Scotland has helped us revise our cash for culture booklet and information for voluntary groups to make them aware of all the funding sources, and that's been a great help. As an emphasis on the things that the national agency can add beyond funding is equally important. It seems that there are two key themes coming across as far as working and adapting the existing structures concerned, so that the budget for small grants is about half a million, which seems a very small percentage of their budget as a whole. The point that Jenny made in particular about the excessive time that it takes to apply for this bit of funding, which is a very small percentage of Creative Scotland's budget. One of the issues that we discussed last week at some length was the issue of peer review, in an effort to try to get through this particular challenge of excessive requirements in terms of information needed to even make an application for funding and so forth. In the past, Creative Scotland or Scottish Arts Council involved artists more at the stage of reviewing applications, and it seemed to be that artists were more involved rather than being just this kind of sort of the arts admin side. People applying are more of a divide rather than something like a peer review system that would seem more accessible. There are also things that could change where, rather than individuals and artists competing with organisations, organisations are also going for the same kind of pot of funding. Individuals obviously do not have the resources that an organisation does, so they might not have the experience or a paid fundraiser. Individuals always feel—from my point of view, it seems that they are less of an advantage when they are going for that kind of thing. Where it is split up more into younger artists or recently graduated artists rather than it feels like artists from all stages of their career are competing for the same type of funding, and it probably is not taken into consideration. It makes it more intimidating for younger artists, I would think. In terms of one possible approach that would be to seek to have the provision of microfunding grants at that level, would that be something that you would welcome bearing in mind that a system would have to be devised such that you balanced the light touch inherent in such an approach but nonetheless with some checks and balance? The local authority funding that we mentioned earlier, where Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and different areas have small pots of money. It is a thing that, by supporting artists even with small amounts of money, can benefit greatly to do with kudos, but the support, the back-up, everything around that as well is not just the money, it is getting that kind of support. That can all help. I suppose that working in a local area rather than in a more centralised organisation, local authorities could be doing things that are for their local area with all the sort of benefits that entails. I agree that micro-France is best delivered at the hyper-local or the network level where there is a close connection between the funder and the people who are applying so that the trust is high and the monitoring is light. It is all about getting the money out and things happening and accepting a greater level of risk because you are closer to the people getting it. I think that there are very good examples of that. From the Paisley city of culture bid, there was a micro-France given and I think that you are still seeing the benefit of the groups that were supported through that process. They are carrying on. You seem quite enthusiastic with that notion as long as you anticipate that for it to really work, the local connection would be key and we should have a look at past Christmas. All our focus on place-based working would seem to provide fertile ground for that to be part of that picture. Annabelle Ewing's point. There has been some representation made that, when it comes to creating a Scotland fund, there are some organisations that will get funded, some of the venues that Royal ICM traverse. They are all going into the same bid, but we all know who is going to get funded in some ways when it comes to the big organisations. There have been suggestions that they should be taken out of the system. There is too much of a national significance, so we should make more divisions between ones that will get funded in other organisations. Annabelle Ewing's question is about geographic spread and whether the micro-France would help with that, because that has been a criticism of Creative Scotland. I do not know where the reasons for it lie, but there has been an inability of them to reach all areas of Scotland with their funding. It tends to be focused in certain areas. Do you have any views on that? That is still a question around how do we spend the current pot rather than how do we increase it? We know from our survey that we are quite unusual in that our members are spread geographically throughout the whole of Scotland. Obviously, there are very dense pockets in Glasgow, Edinburgh and the cities, but we have members throughout the whole of every region in Scotland. Any funding such as that can really benefit people, especially people living in the more remote locations. What is the question that you are asking again, Claire? The major institutions are supposed to be taken out of the RFO round rather than being dealt with separately. Is that like the Lyceum? Obviously, there are the national companies already. There are certain organisations that are very similar to those national companies. They are almost like institutions themselves. Again, it is the idea of different organisations having to compete for pots of funding. It is a harsh system. The idea of competing for three years of funding at a time. How can any organisation plan ahead when they are only getting funding for three years at a time? It is just not very practical. Again, it adds this kind of precariousness to the whole sector. I suppose that I see the art sector as this kind of stretch elastic band and things are pinging. At the moment, Stills Gallery has run into an Edinburgh here, has run into trouble with the City Council raising the rents, has put that gallery under threat. We had in relief dropped out, although it has been reinstated in a different way. In a way, it seems to be quite easy to close art galleries. People are not really going to take to the streets and complain as if they were going to, like they would if it was a hospital. Again, it is part of what we have in Scotland, which is a strong culture in the arts, something that we should be proud of. If the larger organisations were then taken out of that particular round and they were considered in a separate way, that could then skew the aspect of more money going towards the cities as compared to the towns and rural communities across the country. Would that be a fair assumption? It is all about how the overall pot would be divided, is it not? And who is judged to be in those national institutions? I think that it is. It is all about how the overall pot would be divided, is it not, and who is judged to be in those national institutions? It is all about how the overall pot would be divided, is it not? And who is judged to be in those national institutions and who is judged to be out of it? That would be difficult issues to resolve. I think what we are pointing to is how hard it is to have apples and pears competing in the same process when there are very different organisations and structures, and that does disadvantage, I think, both individual artists and community-led organisations. There are a lot of organisations that are maybe city-based, but they do a lot of work elsewhere. Artists come to the cities to use them. Did you mention the Lyceum Theatre there? Touring, exhibitions and theatre productions go throughout the whole of Scotland. Just because you are funding someone that is city-based does not necessarily mean that their influence is just in that one place. A few moments ago we spoke about the issue of microfunding. I would assume that the majority of artists when they graduate will set up as a small business. Would that be a fair assumption? I do not know if they set up necessarily as small businesses. A lot of crafts makers do set up as small businesses, but generally I am a sole trader. I do not see myself as a small business as such, but I am self-employed. I know a lot of artists who are. In terms of that, would you then be entitled to apply to business gateway for some funding to assist you to do what you need to do? When I set up as self-employed it was quite a long time ago and there was no funding. I do not know what the situation is now, but I am not sure if there is any funding out there. It would be worth probably investigating that. I noticed in some of the evidence that there was looking at the potential for community interest companies and so on. They can be funded through the lottery and others, but I know from other roles sitting on the board of an individual artist who became a community interest company. That, in itself, was a huge amount of work and effort that did not necessarily play to her artistic strengths and diverted her, to some extent, from her practice. That was a requirement of being an RFO funder. I think that it might be the right route for many people, but not for everybody. I would not say that. There are also things like the apprenticeship schemes that could be adapted, possibly for helping craft makers. Those are things that are locally based, but I do not know if they seem to be as quite inflexible. Is there something that could be more prevalent or used to help sole traders or small businesses, particularly the craft sector? In regard of the business gate, we are thinking about them over and above the other aspects of creative funding, as compared to something instead of. The issue of the peer review, which came up in the discussion on Monday in the issue as well, is not so broad about music or art. How would you want a peer review operation to be established to allow that to have a fair and transparent process in order to allocate moneys out? That is quite a hard one. Obviously, you do not want nepotism to be obvious. The idea of peer review is a good thing, particularly if you had something that was a rolling thing. People do not stay in a position for too long and seem to hog or dominate things. If you did have a rolling body of people that did peer-to-peer review. With another hat, I previously worked for a lottery funder. I think that peer review will work if it is open and transparent and flexible and does not get stuck. People take their turn and there is an open process for doing that rather than a closed one. I think that that could add a lot of value. Obviously, peers would be recompensed for doing that. They would gain their skills, too, and a greater understanding of the assessment process, which might help with the very difficult decisions that will always have to be made, help people understand the process. I think that when grant making is very closed for a long time, that is when people can be suspicious of what is happening. My final question is about additional monies. At the table that we were sitting at on Monday, a suggestion was put to us all regarding if somebody has obtained some money from Creative Scotland and they have obtained money to assist them in progressing with their career, then at some point in the future, if they become a big star, they become very wealthy. There was a suggestion that could they or should they potentially put something back in to help others going forward? I think that every start of the Scottish art scheme gets hundreds of letters asking for support from voluntary groups that have come from the same area. I know because that is what we do. If they can be compelled, I can't see what the system is. I think that there are well-known people who have made it and are probably often approaching support the arts. I think that an artist is a benevolent kind of fun and would be quite a nice idea. Sadly, in reality, the figures that we are getting back for people earning over 30 grand a year even is really small numbers. The trouble with being an artist is that, as I said previously, it does not necessarily mean that you are a good negotiator. You might on paper look like you are a successful artist but it does not necessarily mean that it is translating into getting an artist fee or exhibition fees or money in the bank. I think that because of the precariousness of it, it may be hard for artists to be able to account for things like that. There is always that precarity that you might not be flavour of the month anymore, you might not be asked to exhibit or to be given residences or your career could take a nose dive. I guess that it may contribute to them helping kind rather than cash. I think that there is an in-kind project highlighted that artists are giving a lot anyway and artists at all levels. Anecdotally, we heard a lot back from artists who are relatively quite well known or you assume they are doing quite well. In actual fact, financially they are struggling or really not doing as well as you might have thought they would be. I think that that highlights that. I understood. There is no doubt that we are a creative nation and that continues and you have given very strong evidence of that today and how people can be really inspired by doing things and how they managed to do things. At the end of the day, it is the strategies that are put in place by local authority or by government or Creative Scotland. Do you think that there is a distinctive role between the three of the use, between Creative Scotland, local government and the Scottish Government, to try and co-ordinate all of that? You have touched on today that there have been some successes but there does not seem to be the transparency, there does not seem to be the co-operation amongst them all to make that happen. Obviously, there is a certain amount of co-operation and talking to going on but I keep going back to the fact that there are local authorities, Stirling, Moray, different places that have completely cut their arts budgets. To me, that seems crazy. What about the people living in Moray? What do they think? It does impact, it is impacting children, it is impacting older people, people who would normally get the chance to be involved in the arts. I suppose that I see that as being really short sighted. I think that the organisations need to talk to each other. You have also mentioned today about ring ffencing. That may be a policy that should be reconsidered in some situations that there should be at least a minimum basic level of resource put into local government or whatever it may be to make sure that that is contained. Yesterday, I was down in London at an engaged meeting and we were talking about the Welsh branch of Engage, Clyde Cymru. They have been involved with the cross-party group on culture in the Welsh Government and its arts and health. It is like the art rather than it being culture, which I suppose you think of as slightly something on its own. It is the idea of arts and health and how it is so integrated into wellbeing and things like mental health or just health in general of people. It is a slightly different way of looking at it. I am coordinating all that. It gives you much more of a pathway, even a career, because at the moment what we are seeing in some of the arts, if you are in management or if you are in administration, your career is sound and secure to some extent, but if you are an artist that is not the case. You are losing the talent into different, because they are only trying to find a way to sustain their lifestyle. Things like the use of unpaid interns and things like that, hopefully it has become less recently. I think that the impact of that is that it does undermine actual jobs within the arts, which is something to be avoided. Thank you very much, Jamie Greene. I have a number of quite diverse questions, if you will bear with me. One of the things that we talked about at the session in Ayrshire was the striking balance between providing funding for small arts projects that are measurable and have measurable audiences, versus the dilemma of funding something that is art for art's sake in allowing artists to simply be creative. Do you have any views on that? I mean, I think that in an ideal world there would be funding for both, so I think that that idea of arts, the arts encouraging participation so that people from diverse range backgrounds actually take part, that is a really good thing and it kind of helps to kind of demystify. Through engage, that is an organisation that is working with gallery education obviously, who are trying to be this kind of interface between what might seem intellectually difficult for people to kind of grasp and when you actually get people into galleries, young people or children or whoever into an gallery and actually engaging with the work and kind of demystifying it and then creating their own artworks and response or whatever. Yeah, all that kind of stuff can kind of happen. So yeah, I suppose we need, as a nation we need people with creative visions or to be able to develop that and create careers as practitioners but we also need to encourage the general population to take more of an interest in the actual arts as well. You know, like we've been talking about already, the idea of the link with sort of health and wellbeing and how it can benefit everybody, not just somebody who thinks that they're an actual artist, professional artist. Yeah, that's very much the approach of voluntary arts about the value of participation in the arts as a tool to create a wellbeing and social connectedness and which would presumably help build just as you've seen the political system. Do you have support for more funding for the arts because people will understand it being less intimidated by the arts in the galleries or the opera houses or whatever? I think that Creative Scotland is helping to fund things like Scotland and Venice where we're putting internationally renowned artists on the world stage. It's highly commendable but they're also funding organisations like Engage who are encouraging gallery educators to the other end of the world. I suspect I'm encouraging young people and children into art galleries and to try and demystify all that and to engage with it as well. The criticisms that I heard certainly in my table was that Creative Scotland turned up in local communities and put on events whereas there are local groups, there may be better placed to do some of this. They understand their communities, they're more engaged with people and far more accessible or deemed to be more accessible to people and that may be perhaps a structural problem with Creative Scotland. The other feedback that I got which was interesting and I'd be keen to hear your views is that the panel felt that Creative Scotland was very good at big ticket items in supporting our national organisations, well known organisations. But there was a disagreement as to who should provide or make local decision making and at the moment some people think local authorities who perhaps used to have more resource and culture officers, other people felt keep it away from local authorities as much as you can. How do you think that Creative Scotland could change structurally to ensure that it does look after those big tent events but equally is able to administer a micro-local level in terms of small funds and dealing with very small projects at community level? It'd be very hard to do that without the infrastructure there and the local authority at the local area to work with which is the thing that we were pointing out is now lacking. I'm sure that there are approaches to work in partnership and there are parts of Creative Scotland that are focused on, it's the same part that we report on, that are focused on working with local authorities and developing place based working. The criticism is about the place based approach being under resourced or underdeveloped in Creative Scotland but I understand that that's something that they have been putting a bit more emphasis on, obviously could do more. The point that we were making before about the three levels being joined up and some greater definition of what adequate arts provision means at a local level and what a budget would be is an essential part of solving that problem. Back in 2008, under the Scottish Arts Council, I was involved in a scheme that they ran called the partners residencies and I did a year-long residency based in Falkirk at Callender House and that was a really great experience for myself and the other artists who I did the residency with. It was a way of genuinely engaging with the community because we were there for a year and we had the resources of Falkirk Council who had been funded through the Scottish Arts Council in order to enable that to happen. I think that it was a really good example of that localness working but with funding coming down from Creative Scotland. In Glasgow at the moment they've announced an artist residence in every ward, I think it was there 10 or 20. That's a new innovative model that Glasgow City Council has rolled out. I think that people are really interested to see how that works. It's the idea of artists being embedded in communities and genuinely engaging and not just parachuted in, which is obviously very important. I'll try to keep this brief because there are two very separate questions. One is around how do you make the application process more accessible. We had some feedback that the process is quite onerous for artists who are maybe not used to completing lengthy forms or don't understand how they can answer the questions that are not relevant to their type of art. Also, as we spoke earlier, adversely affects those of dyslexia or autism or people who are not used to working in very complex online application environments or who rely on the skills of professional applicants. The other one is around whether you think that art students should be given more business training because it's apparent that many creative people are very good at what they do artistically, but when it comes to setting up companies, filing accounts, tax returns, writing business plans, raising funds in the private sector, that's something to find more difficulty with. We don't give enough focus on that type of training in the art school environment. Do you have any thoughts on either of those? There's a lot of work that could be done helping young artists to gain skills in business skills. It might seem onerous to them at the time, but they would benefit from it. There's definitely scope for that. For the application process being more accessible, it would make it more of a level playing field because that's one of the issues. If you're articulate and good at writing, you're almost at an advantage to people who find that problematic. It becomes less about what you're creating or making and how you are able to write about it, which is another issue within the arts. That's a separate issue. It's an over-academicisation of what's going on rather than concentrating on what people are trying to create or make. We're facilitating early conversations with people so that people don't waste time if they're not going to hit the mark of whatever the outcomes of that funding. I know that a two-stage process can be quite useful if there's a quick triage. Those going through to the second more developed stage have got a much higher chance of being successful. That's something we, in the big lottery fund, used as a way of trying to reduce the burden on applicants. He's spent most of his time filling forms rather than being an artist. He's been quite sad. I think it's a bit of an frustration. They should be having a conversation in that case to find out what it is they could be doing differently or what it is about their work that doesn't meet the outcomes of that fund. That ends our first session. I thank both our witnesses for coming. That was a very interesting session. We'll now suspend briefly to have a change-over of witnesses. I'd like to welcome our next panel of witnesses, who are individual artists and creative freelancers. They are Katrina Holmes and Emma Jane Park here at the Parliament. We're going to try to bring in Kirsten Gow, who is giving evidence via video conference from Dura. We're having a few technical issues at the Dura end, but Kirsten is just going to join us as soon as they are resolved. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us today. Perhaps, if I could ask an opening question, we're looking at fair pay for artists. In order to deliver that, one of the things that has come through is that we need to be able to convince the general public in what the purpose of arts funding is. I wonder if you would like to reflect on what you think the purpose of arts funding should be. Should it be artistic excellence to support amateur arts, audience development, genre support? What do you think the purpose should be? I personally think that it's a really broad purpose, and it needs to be a broad purpose. I don't think that any of those things are mutually exclusive. I think that's part of the issue that I know I'm facing on a regular basis. I have quite a broad practice, and I'm asked to place my practice into silos. At times, if I'm working with a community practice that is seen as something other than artistic excellence, that's a huge problem. For me, the purpose of public funding in the arts is about believing in the arts and culture, and believing in the contribution that they make to society. It's about funding artists to do their job, which is to make art. I think that it's about funding a range of artists to make art, some who make art specifically in an area of social justice, some who make art for art's sake, and I think that there's a real lack at the minute. The reason there's public confusion, or sometimes lack of public support for the arts, is because no one can tie down what the strategy is or what the aim is in funding public art. I say that because I'm from a family who I regularly have the potholes in the road argument. If there's a pothole in the road, why are we funding arts when we should be sorting the potholes in the road? My family don't go to arts events. I'm one of those anomalies where I didn't grow up around loads of arts and culture in the way that I now experience arts and culture. I see the benefits of those things, but the difficulty is that my parents still don't understand what my job is. I think that that's about visibility, and I think that it's really difficult to be visible when your life is spent having to sit in closed rooms, writing applications and securing funding instead of being out on the ground doing what you do and talking about what you do. For me, for the next 10 years, the role of publicly funding the arts should be to create more visibility about arts and culture and its place in society. I think that only once that is in place can you move on and discuss the role of publicly funding the arts. From your point of view, what would make things easier in the short term? In the short term, I think a little more faith in artists. I can bring it back to money really quickly. I know on a personal level and from my peers having a very small but regular salary would make my life easier because I could then plan appropriately, but I don't think it comes down to money. I think that it comes down to resource and partnership and opportunity and lots of things that aren't just about throwing more money at the problem. You could throw loads of money at the arts tomorrow and it wouldn't fix the inherent issues that we face. It would be about having the time to be able to get on and do my job. A lot of people who have been around me when I'm doing my job witness this, that I'll sit in rooms like this and feel really uncomfortable, but I'll sit in them anyway. I'll sit in my applications and I'm quite fortunate that over a number of years I've trained myself to do so, but my greatest impact is when I'm in a room with people doing the thing I do. Whether that is in a rehearsal room at the Royal Lyceum, working as a movement director and bringing a show together, or whether that's working in a prison reform unit with young men who don't think the arts have got anything to do with them. It just looks like we're making cup city and having a doddle about it, but actually by the end of it we've really worked on a lot of interpersonal skills. We've worked on the benefits of having a creative output. For me, just the ability to get on and do my job would make the difference, which is either about having a salary and being able to just pay myself to do that so I don't have that worry, or having doors opened. It is quite a lot of the time I'd like to get on and do my job and you can't. A couple of projects I've run recently, very lucky because it was the year of the young people, were absolutely supported so they were free and there were three institutions. I walked into it and offered free arts projects for the young people in that area and people just weren't interested because it might disrupt their everyday life. I think if we can't give it away we've got a huge problem in terms of public buying and visibility for what we're doing. Thank you for that. Does that resonate with you, Katrina? It's an interesting question for me because I have gained quite a bit of arts funding for projects that I've worked on, but I'm also involved in promoting music and arts festival, which actually generates some of its own income. A lot of the conversation at the moment around arts funding is diversify income streams, social enterprises, you've got to bring in your own income and also people say, oh well if they're not, people aren't wanting to see it, why put it on? If it's not selling tickets, why do we need it? I think that's where arts funding comes in because new art needs to be made, risks need to be taken, artists need to be able to experiment to forge a new ground. A good arts sector and good artists is important for society and for our culture and for who we are and who we can be in the future. It's the inspiration for design and business and lots of things that started with poor artists doing crazy work and later became the norm because that's what art is. There's definitely the experimental, risky work that maybe audiences don't go and see and I think arts funding is really important for that because where else are they going to get funded from? Nowhere, but then there is the other point that it needs to benefit society, people need to be able to see that other people are enjoying it and people for more aspects of society as well, for more socioeconomic backgrounds and for more diverse backgrounds. There's an argument that arts funding should also be helping to enable all parts of society to experience maybe more accessible art forms, so maybe like music festival Nock and Gorach that I promote, so for example, or children's theatre or things that perhaps some people might normally go to see so arts funding should help to facilitate them going to see that. Practical suggestions in your submission, you've made a number of practical suggestions as to how you think funding could be adapted in order to make things easier for artists and cultural freelancers. You suggested for example, could there be a formal way to recognise freelancers who have a track record and have been proven to deliver? Do you want to expand on that? Yeah, so obviously you get the regularly funded organisations which are cultural organisations that do great work and have been doing it for a long time and are trusted to deliver that work, but there's no sort of equivalent for individuals, whether they are individual artists or individual producing artists or creative producers. There's a whole area there, but there's a lot of independent individuals working in the cultural sector that don't have any long term support or formal support in what they do, so they exist hand to mouth from project to project. There's an aspect of that that's part of the arts. You get new projects and if you work on a project then that's over, but that means that in the difficult times you could go under because you're not essentially bringing anything in. Having a child might be one of those difficult times for example when you can't get out there and network and meet the people and meet the other artists and also develop the ideas in your head to create the projects, but you can't get out there and you also can't make an income, so once you're out of the race you kind of lose momentum and you lose the contacts. For example, I had a baby about three years ago and just before I had three or four people coming to me going, do you want to work on this project? I said no to all of them. Three years later I'm like, oh God, they've gone now and I'm starting a little bit again. I mean I haven't lost everything but I'm kind of having to pick myself up again and get out there all over again and I'm determined to stay with what I do because I love it so much and I think it's really important, but I think it would be quite easy to go, hey, I'm just going to get a kind of easier, maybe more straightforward job that doesn't involve so much risk. Thank you very much. I think that we have Kirsten Gau. Can you hear us, Kirsten? I can hear you, can you hear me? Hear you, that's great. Welcome. Thank you for coming to us on to Claire Baker now because we don't have a lot of time and we've already lost some time, so Claire Baker. Thank you, convener. I wonder if the panel would like to comment on, we had an earlier discussion about diversity within the arts and Emma Jane Park talked about how you work as an artist as well as within prisons and social sector. We heard last week that kind of model of the artists working on their own work as well as working in other sectors and a suggestion that not all artists want to do that, that wasn't the solution, that maybe only suits some people. It's kind of a mixed approach. And then maybe comment on diversity within. I know Emma Jane Park was at the cross-party group on culture before and you've talked about women's representation. We've also had representation from BME community around difficulty in gaining funding and in the previous panel we heard about older, well the generation gap in art as well about who can afford to participate as an artist. Do you have some comments on that and maybe how within Scotland we could try to address some of these issues? I think there's quite a few things in there to unpack. The first being that I'm around a lot of artists that do different things and the reason I have a community practice is because I'm genuinely driven to do that and that is something that arguably I thrive when I'm doing. It's massively part of my practice to have that broad practice and I've been around a lot of artists who make unbelievable art, brilliant art, who, if they're driven to work in these environments as a tick box exercise or because it's trendy to have community participation, you end up putting people off really quickly because you've got the wrong person doing the job. It's as simple as that. I think that we need to have a balance in terms of strategy where we can have art for art's sake because it has a huge impact. I know that I can speak as someone from a very working class background who didn't have access to any art of that sort that arguably my parents would say is weird, just people weird and about. That is the thing that I needed in my life and it was an accident that I stumbled upon that and it's unbelievable and I think it's impossible, as you were referring to Catriona, to sell tickets to things if people don't know it exists, which is why I come back to visibility and I feel like you can't have diversity in the arts if you don't have everyone with access to all of these weird and wonderful things whilst you have the right people in the job to deliver that. I think that it's important that we don't put unfair pressure on artists to be something they're not and that ties into lots of different conversations down to application writing, down to all of the entrepreneurial skills that people somehow celebrate that I've had to learn that I'm not very good at, that caused me massive amounts of stress, deep rooted mental health issues and concerns. My whole family know if I'm application writing because I'm a nightmare because it's not actually what I'm programmed to do, I've just learned to do it and we're doing a disservice to the arts if we put people into positions where they're doing a job they're not cut out to do. The arts organisations that are funded by Creative Scotland, because there's a balance between management jobs within culture and actual artists, that there should be some capacity within those organisations to support artists who are writing applications and having to work on projects. I think that that's a possibility and I think that some organisations do that very, very well. I think that to use the word organisation in terms of art organisations is a fallacy because there's a hierarchy of organisations. Organisations have different purposes and to ask them to then work at cross purposes seems foolish at best. I think that it's about people knowing what they do and doing it very well and then if they're doing it well supporting them to do it more. Imaginate is an organisation that I would absolutely herald. They have a programme at the moment called Accelerator that I was fortunate to be part of where artists submitted a two page document with their artistic idea, talking about the art, the thing that artists can do. Then they invited four of those ideas and they sat with those artists and a couple of producers and wrote budgets with them, helped them to really look at the project and they funded two of those projects. I wasn't one of the funded projects because what I wanted to do was far beyond the financial support they had and the best thing that happened to me was them saying please don't scale down what you're doing to meet our resources because the art will suffer. Then they supported me to go on and get some form of funding to move forward with that project. Organisations like that, if they could be supported to do more of those things, would be really useful. What isn't helpful is organisations feeling like they have to tick a box by supporting artists and then I turn up as an artist and I know that no one really wants me there. There's not a lot of investment in me being there. I've been given a room, a very small subsidy to be there that often in dance particularly, which is one of my key art forms, results in a lot of solo work being made. There's a massive kickback in terms of programming dance at the moment because a lot of it is solo work. The reason for that is a lot of residences in which to develop your work come with a £500 a week bursary, which is one person's fee. People then just make work on themselves, which I would argue doesn't make the best art either, because if you can't see it, I'm not quite sure how you can judge the quality of it totally. You need other people in a room. There's lots of thoughts about those things but also acknowledging that some organisations just aren't cut out to do those things and it's not their aim so I don't think we should force them to. With that, I do feel that some organisations, when you talk about women's representation, particularly, I think there's a real struggle in terms of diversity and I can only speak as a white woman from a working class background, where I hear a lot of people saying, women in theatre, we need to gender balance these programmes. That chat's been happening for years and I think for me a gender balance is actually quite straight forward. You just only programme between 45 and 50 per cent male writers and male directors. Once you've hit your quota, you stop and you go and find the other ones. I really don't know what the complexity is. When we fall into artists who work out with a gender binary, they face far greater issues and that leads to some more complications because we've not provided enough support for those artists to have profiles yet. There's work to be done there but in terms of women's representation, there are women clawing the door down, there are lists online of female writers and female directors and I'm unsure as to why some of the regularly funded organisations are still struggling to meet that requirement and aren't being held to account for that. I don't know if Katrina or Kirsten want to comment on diversity issues or at all. I think we can't hear Kirsten. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, brilliant. So I'd like to echo what Emma Jane was saying there about in terms of supporting artists to write applications. I do agree with what she's saying in terms of not everybody, not every artist wants to be running workshops and it shouldn't be seen as that. Or participating in community arts and it shouldn't be seen as that is the only route to funding. In terms of supporting people writing applications artists, but also voluntary groups. I've worked with a lot of voluntary committees, for example, the Scottish Glass Society who were a bunch of volunteers who had some really good ideas and had some really good potential but didn't know the steps to access the next level of support and funding that could be available to them. In order to develop projects, I've done quite a lot of work with them. So I think giving people access to specialists that can actually really help them write really good applications, but actually the stage before that as well in terms of tease out whether it is a project that requires an application, whether it's just a good idea that they could be doing in some other format or if it's a big project that they could do. That they could benefit from some extra support on and I think that would in terms of diversity. I think that would help the diversity of applications that comes into into kind of funders because you're not then reliant on. The people that are already making applications already have the skills and the knowledge to make the application. If the problem is there isn't enough diversity now, then what do you need in order to get that diversity? And I think you need to support the people which it doesn't come naturally to in terms of making those making those applications and that can be people from kind of minority groups, but it can also be very small groups of volunteers and committees who are just doing something good, but with a small little bit of paid extra input from a specialist that can help them develop the project could go could go much further. I agree that there's this whole invisible area of work that has to be done before an application for funding can be put in and who does that work and how is that work being paid for? I mean, as a producer, a sort of creative producer, I do a lot of that and it doesn't really ever get reimbursed. If you're lucky you get the funding for the project and maybe you can try and factor in a small fee for the pre-work, but it's not an official thing. It's not in the funding application. You can't write in a bit for the work that you did beforehand and that's even if you get it. If you don't get it, well, there you go. That's just invisible work done for nothing and that's it. The support in terms of financial and not just financial but also support maybe in kind of work space, provision of work space, free work spaces, communal work spaces for freelancers, childcare, which I've already mentioned, things that doesn't have to always necessarily be financial, though that is also great as well if there was a kind of low level basic amount of grant funding or something available for people who are writing applications regularly. I also agree that it would enable more people who don't really understand the language and the way that you need to develop a project before it's ready for funding. I come across quite a lot of people that have great ideas but great ideas are the very first step in a long journey. There's a lot of professional skills necessary before you even get to apply for funding. If there was some way to support artists and producers in that bit, it would help diversify applications because you wouldn't just get the pros, you'd get all sorts of other people that might not normally be able to do that kind of thing. I'd like to come back in there if possible because I think that the two things that I'm also missing is the fact that we need to support the people that feel like they don't belong in the room and that brings me back to visibility. I'm from a working class background, I go back to where I'm from and regularly people say that you actually work as a dancer, like shot up. You know when you're like, no, no, I genuinely have done this for 12 years and I see young people, I've recently started a programme in Dumfries and Galloway, working with young people who think they may want to move into dance. It's genuinely shocking to them and me just being there on the ground visible, like I said before, makes it possible to them that that is an option and an avenue. I can't imagine how that feels if you are a person of colour, if you are a person with a visible disability who frequently sometimes can't get in the building, which is embarrassing in 2019, but feels like you don't belong in the room because you keep turning up to rooms where it looks like you don't belong there. I think that's why we need to invest in a lot of artists from a variety of backgrounds and send them back out into their communities to go, you belong in these rooms, so come and be in these rooms. That also leads into the comment of language. I'm absolutely against, really, really knuckleheadedly against, training people to understand the language because we talk about having to justify public funding. I just think that if the artists don't understand the language required to secure public subsidy, how do my mum and dad sitting at home understand the language that artists are then using? It needs stripped back, so we're talking in plain English instead of dressing everything up in aspirations and jargon and nonsense. Then we cut out a whole bunch of training that isn't actually needed in the first place and just sometimes in a kind way makes people feel a little bit cleverer than they are, which is an odd thing to want when art historically was a cultural need and genuinely for everyone. Thank you. Alexander Stewart. Thank you. You talked about the lack of transparency when it comes to funding. Strategies take place at Creative Scotland, at the Scottish Government level and we also have some strategies at local authority level. How co-ordinated should they be? We've heard from various people already giving evidence that there's a lack of co-ordination and some councils have removed their creative section completely and their cultural sections are demised. Other people specifically try to support specific areas, whether it be drama, dance or community, but if there was some kind of ring fencing and if there was some kind of real co-ordination, what kind of impact would that make? I think obviously local authorities are in an excellent position because they're close to the nub of the matter so they know their regional audiences, they know the types of issues that might be in that region and hopefully they know the artists or producers or organisations that are delivering. I mean, I'm lucky enough to have been able to have got funding from local authorities and it's been very, very useful. I have found in my experience that the amounts have been relatively low but the reporting has been relatively high and I think that local authorities maybe have tendency possibly to be a bit more bureaucratic because that's the way that they work perhaps in councils and when you're doing that amount of reporting for a small amount of money it's kind of a question of is this really worth it. So I would love, I think it's so important that local authorities are able to offer funding but I think it's very important that they are aware of how much reporting, I mean ridiculous amounts of financial monitoring for tiny amounts of grants and you're sitting there like splitting the pounds and the pennies and thinking, you know, at the end of the day and it also comes, again, this comes back to trusted people that you're working with, you know, if you trust an organisation or a producer or project manager to deliver this project, you know, you're not just going to let them go and not ask for some sort of reporting but to a degree you need to trust them to deliver that work and so definitely light on evaluation and reporting for smaller grants and you can kind of look at that depending on the size of the grant and I suppose, you know, national funders like Creative Scotland are an advantage because they can see the international and the national aspects and whilst they definitely shouldn't ignore regional needs they can kind of see the overview but I think communication between Creative Scotland or national funders and local authorities is really important so that they are covering all of the strategic aims, maybe local authorities might be more to do with audience participation and reaching new audiences and socio-economic backgrounds, maybe Creative Scotland might be more to do with risky art forms or but yeah, I think it's a good idea for them to take aspects of the things that arts funding should do and make sure that everything's covered, yeah. I think communication, sorry, do you want to come in? You sure? I think communication at all sounds like a dream and the idea of co-ordinated strategies sounds brilliant. I do have to question if there are strategies quite genuinely and I hate saying it because I really believe in public funding of the arts but I've read a lot of strategy in the past five years and I'm frequently handed aspirational comments and lots of things that people aspire to but things I know that if I wrote in a Creative Scotland application, my funding would absolutely be rejected because I'm told a strategy must involve me telling you what I'm going to do in detail how I'm going to do it and what the impact will be, even if it's something that's never been done before. I read a lot of strategy that is so broad and overwhelmingly aspirational that it means nothing. I'm a recipient of this fund, really candidly, Creative Scotland's new strategic touring fund. I don't think the fund has a strategy. I applied with a strategy for this project in Dumfries and Galloway so I was very pleased to receive that but I do wonder if we can really hone in on what a strategy is and then I think it would be easier for people to co-ordinate because if I tell you I want to drink that glass of water and you agree you want me to drink that glass of water we can get on board and figure out how I'm going to do that and the best way to do that. My fear when it comes to co-ordination is that more money will then be spent on conversations and I think there's more talking than action quite often in these situations which is worrying when I know that there are people who aren't being paid at the bottom of that. The other thing is I think with strategy that we need to look long term and short term and I'll come back to the regularly funded organisations on that within the portfolio that are organisations that aren't going to be rejected for funding. I worked at the Royal ICM Theatre and I love it dearly. If you turn round tomorrow and say you're not going to fund the ICM there's going to be public outcry as we saw in the last round of funding. There are some organisations that are having to do this application every three years and do this reporting excessively all the time and I wonder if they could spend the time on that with artists like myself or just have more budget to bring in artists to do their projects because they also have to cut budgets here and there and wherever they can. Then there are smaller organisations that are just new to the RFO portfolio that are arguably less stable. I don't think that there's great long term strategy in place and I think that without a long term strategy your short term strategy is pointless and if you bring that back to people as an artist I'm only ever allowed to think in short term strategy. I'm allowed to think project to project to project no matter how much I join the dots and if I join the dots too much I'm told that I can't be funded again because I've already been funded to do that. If I'm talking about building visibility for dancing Dumfries and Galloway that's not happening in six months that's not happening in three years really brutally and I worry that if there's co-ordination before this actual strategy we just end up with a lot of talk and money spent on cup city instead of stuff happening. In terms of going back to just Catriona's point there I think that funding at a local authority area is extremely variable. There are some local authorities out there that do it absolutely excellently. There are other local authorities which is unsurprising given the range of pressures on local authorities these days, the cuts that they're being asked to make, the general political background that it's not a priority for them and I actually would argue that in the vast majority of cases we shouldn't be asking local authorities to be the guardians of art in their local area. I live in Argyllun Bute. We have a really diverse range of geographies here. I'm sitting on Jira today, we've got 230 people live on the island. I was in a consultation on fuel poverty recently and they were trying to talk about how to make the data that comes through about the areas granular enough to understand whether national initiatives are working within all areas of Argyllun Bute. People accept that Argyllun Bute as a whole is a tricky, beasted kind of cover because it covers such diverse areas. People agree that maybe Mackey mid Argyllun Cintyra is still quite diverse and somebody suggested breaking it down into housing association areas. That covers Isla, Jira and Colancy. You would never group those islands together in any universe other than the fact that they sit together. We're very, very different in terms of economy, population, access to services and that kind of thing. The difficulty is that I think people often believe that the problem is solved and that funding is truly local if you put it out to local authorities. But actually the geography of Scotland is much more diverse than that. And it's one of the reasons why I would champion books, for example, which allowed somebody, an arts facilitator based on an island at an ultra local level. So something that's not funded for Isla, Jira, Colancy or Isla and Jira, but will be funded for Jira, for example, to say, I just want a little pot of money that I can then help other artists here. So they almost ended up being a funder from a funder. So they got funding from Creative Scotland and then they used that funding for various initiatives which included some group training, some grants to allow people to access professional development skills and a whole range of stuff there. But it was crucial that it was ultra local because I've lived in big cities and I've lived in very small islands and it's very, it is very common for people to think, oh, well, this is how we should serve that small remote area because this is how all small remote areas should be served. And yet, actually everywhere has different needs and different opportunities. So I think for me, local authority level is not granular enough. And my other argument would be that if you are claiming to be a national organisation and claiming to offer national coverage, you have to genuinely be national. Now, in a way, I kind of don't have a problem if you turn around and say, do you know what, reaching all these islands is a bit difficult, so we're just going to call ourselves a mainland organisation. That's at least honest. But if you say you're a national organisation, then I think it's really important that you show that a funder or a funding stream shows that they are proactively trying to engage with outlying areas. And that can be done through creating their own networks and creating their own engagement within communities. I don't think we should be relying on the back of local authorities. That initiative isn't working effectively. Are you then able to tap into some of the new priorities about wellbeing or health and social or community that then gives you that opportunity to try and engage and get that money that you require for your community? Yeah, possibly. But I work quite closely with community development workers over here. And it's just an extra day a week. I'm not kidding you here of looking at what is relevant to you and what you can apply for. So there is extra work involved in that. And we all accept that we don't have access to absolutely everything living in remote rural communities. However, there should then be some recognition that there is that extra work involved. And also it's the lack of a joined up approach. So as both of the other witnesses were talking about, it's the kind of, oh, there's a little bit of funding here and a little bit of funding there. And that's for that short term. And that's for that. And everybody has different priorities. And you can end up with a pile of admin on your desk and have been working really hard for a really small amount of money. And an example of this was I was recently offered some funding. I applied for some funding for projects that were supposed to be for the Argyll Islands. And I applied with a large chunk of pro bono time. I refused to call it volunteer time. It is professional services. So it's pro bono time. And was offered. I think it was about 85% of the funding that we applied for, which, you know, was about, we were offered about 900 pounds for a 4,000 pound project. And the amount of work and admin that went into getting that, and then the amount that they wanted back from us in terms of admin, and the amount of hoops that we had to jump through for 900 pounds, it was just ridiculous. And we ended up turning it down because we said, you know, we want to go away and rethink this project and look at whether there's a better fund to be applying to for this. Yes, there are other opportunities out there, but they are not necessarily joined up. You have to please several people and have a bunch of admin. Ross Greer. We've had some suggestions in the written evidence fact. I think one of them was your submission, Catriona, around universal basic income and how it could potentially help support artists, particularly individual artists in Scotland. I was wondering if, Catriona, if you'd like to expand on what was in your written evidence and if the other witnesses would like to contribute on the idea of what role basic income might play, particularly now that we're heading towards four trials in Scotland. Heading towards what? Sorry, just said that last week. Four trials. We've got four local authorities that will be trialling universal basic income in the next couple of years. I don't remember mentioning universal basic income because I'm not really that knowledgeable about it, but I probably talked about having some basic income coming in for freelancers to support those gaps in between projects or those development times, either creative ideas-wise or research-wise or actually putting things down onto paper and working them up. I'm not sure, again, it would probably need to be people that are established in the sector that are kind of trusted, these sort of RFI idea, which is rather than regularly funded organisations. I think I said regularly funded individuals, so I guess it would be recognising people with a proven track record over a number of years who have successfully obtained funding on many occasions. I've also been aware quite a lot with Creative Scotland when I've been successful getting funding that you kind of get the money and then they kind of go, which on some levels is great because you don't want people interfering with you delivering the creative project. Sometimes when I've come to my evaluation I've thought, I have wondered who's reading it and what they're doing with the information and whether that information is coming back to me. Will that reflect on me? I hope it will because usually I take a bit of time over my evaluations because I feel really proud of the project usually. I wonder how that is coming back to me and how am I known in the cultural sector or by the funders. I've also worked on a funding side, given out grants, the new art sponsorship grants when I worked with Arts and Business Scotland. I remember that when an application came in from somebody that you knew who had been working in the cultural sector for a long time, you still read it, you still assessed it of course, but there was a certain amount of reassurance that you felt and it was much more likely to go through. That's just the facts because when I first started doing it and I was less of a with the cultural sector, I was like, why is that one getting through easier than that one? It was because that person was a trusted person that had been working in the cultural sector and delivering projects for a while. The newbies maybe have to build up that trust after a while. Coming back to your original point, if you can find a way to recognise and trust certain individuals that have worked in the cultural sector for a long time, then perhaps there's an argument for a basic. I was watching the one that you did on the 30th of May and Harry Josephine was talking about how the dull used to support lots of artists and that was how many artists in the 80s got started because there was social security for them. It was unrecognised and it was a small amount but it made that difference. I think that there's a case for a yes. Before the others come in on that, on your point about perhaps the administration of that being about recognised individuals, folk who have delivered, is there a tension then between that and what we've just discussed around diversity, that the sector isn't nearly as diverse as it should be so that the trusted individuals skew towards older white privileged men, folk who've consistently got funding? I think that there is an issue with that and it has to be looked at and it has to be balanced up because whenever you, as a funder, having sat in a fund issues as well, whenever you give money to a person, there is a certain amount of trust. When new things came in we didn't know who that person was from Adam so we would read what they'd said, we would look at whatever we could find on them, we would try and find as much as we could but at the end of the day you hand over a lump sum of money, it's public money. You don't know if that's going to come back or if that's going to be delivered but there is a certain amount of risk in it but you have to be able to reward it to new people that haven't got it. I guess you may be looking at two approaches there. One is recognising people that have worked four years in the sector, backbreaking point to get to that point and they're not all white middle class old privileged men, I would say me and Emma Jane and our examples of those so they're not all but I would agree that a lot of them might be. The other approach would be how to diversify, how to support people that can't speak this funding language and how to, even if it's starting off with smaller grants for newer people and then working up big as the delivery and the trust grows. I don't have an easy answer but it definitely needs to be looked at. I'm a long-term supporter of the idea of a universal basic income. I have got a slightly different take on it to the take that Catriona has. I've spoken to quite a few people about where funding would have helped them in their creative career over the last few days. One of the biggest gaps is the move between being a student and being an established artist. Often I certainly know from my time in college that actually it allowed me to take risks, it allowed me to spend time investing in my art and then all of a sudden that stopped. I'm like oh okay it's not like I have an accountancy kind of qualification now and I can just try and get a job as an accountant. I pretty much have to look as a glass maker of how to actually now work for myself. Having a universal basic income takes a little bit of the pressure off people having to switch from the thing that they have trained in and spent a lot of time investing time and effort in to the kind of now I need to make money in order to pay my rent and eat and also then fund additional opportunities like submitting to an exhibition or attending an event or getting further training. So I definitely feel that that actually kind of a universal basic income model for people that just starting out would help plug that gap. I also think I work very closely with a lot of people that work in arts and voluntary organisations and do a lot of pro bono work on top of kind of the paid work that they get paid to do. And actually that is great that they do that and that they have passion but that leads to burnout and actually if there was the ability to say you know you could maybe work in your paid job one day less a week and that would give you a little bit more headspace to allow you to have a life and do more pro bono work then actually I think you would find that there would be more engagement it could lead to much more diversity in terms of the people that were involved in arts and community projects and working as artists themselves. I think there is something to learn from the French example of if you can show that you are, I don't know huge man's about it but you know if you can show that you're making a concerted effort to work as an artist or a practitioner or a creative freelancer then there should be some kind of support that helps you to do that in order to make that sustainable. I would echo everything everyone else has said funnily enough. I think it would support artists, I think that's really clear and particularly in terms of wellbeing because most of the freelance artists who are on the ground making things happen I know are absolutely falling apart. I'm permanently exhausted largely because I'm working too much. Last month I worked on some very worthwhile projects and I'll have been doing about 13 and a half hours a day it averaged out because I do measure the hours I do now and I'll have made at best £1,600 after all other costs are taken into account and that's not including the pro bono work that I did to enable those projects to happen. It's really unhealthy but I also think that it would support artists to then buy tickets and support other artists. A lot of the time I'm having to scab a ticket from a friend instead of reinvesting in the sector because I don't have enough money to do that and I think that it would support audiences because one of the big issues I see particularly with working class audiences is people don't have the time or money to consume art and so if we're not making art that people can get to I don't know why we're making it. So freeing up people's time would be a brilliant thing and also people's headspace to really engage with things. I think that with that it could possibly free up other resources. We're talking a lot about money but there's a lot of stuff that we could talk about that doesn't have to be about money. Rural touring, if you can get rural communities to invest in art there is free accommodation for the entire touring group because people just want to hang out with artists and I think that would happen everywhere but right now there are a lot of people who are having to subsidise their life by renting a room and actually you would save a lot of money if you weren't having to pay costs in a lot of areas. So try making work in Aberdeen, you spend more money on hotel rooms than you do on artists really factually unless you're willing to work at the weekends or make work at the weekends when the prices go down which is all very odd and I think it would add to quality. So there's a thing in Sweden called the Swedish Dancers Alliance and I think it exists in multiple art forms and it's like a universal based income that dancers can receive if they're not employed at that moment in time which means in the periods that they're not employed they can be training and making sure that they're keeping on top of their craft. One of the biggest issues that I face is that when I'm not doing the thing and getting better at doing the thing I'm doing something totally different and then I always, I'm really quite nervous stepping back into a room because I wonder if I've forgotten how to do it and I'm physically not on top of my game because I've been spending hours doing other things and I think if the quality of art improves engagement with art will improve it seems like a no brainer. Although with that coming back to diversity I think we would then need to look massively at who's assessing quality. I think there are huge gaps in diversity in the art and I think that's because the decision makers don't necessarily understand the lived experience of those artists and the people that they're making art for. There's multiple things I could refer to here. There have been a series of reviews of some of the events that take me somewhere festival where white middle class reviewers have been reviewing work by artists of colour and it seems quite heavily that they've missed the boat and then given it low star ratings and that can really affect something. Or in my own personal experience I worked on 12th night at the Royal ICM and nine out of ten of our reviews were reviews by middle class white men who didn't understand the need to gender swap one of the roles in the production. As a young, quite balshy woman maybe is a word I would use. Seeing a woman play Lady Toby Belch was the thing I wish I'd seen as a child because it gave me permission to be lots of things and there was only one female reviewer caught on to the importance of those things. If you want to look at universal basic income and support and diversity, we need to then support diversity and all the wraparound stuff so that we don't end up with the people making the decisions and the people assessing the quality and the impact that has on quality making decisions where they don't have all of the information. Before I move on, we're very, very tight for time so can I ask the questions and answers if we could be as concise as possible? Thank you very much Kenneth Gibson. I'll be quite concise, we've talked a lot about diversity and there are a number of aspects to that and one of the aspects is of course the genres in the artistic world. I mean today with creative production, dance and glass making. Some of the people who have given us submissions have expressed concerns that there's not an equitable distribution of funding across the different genres. How do you feel about that? Do you feel there's a bias towards certain types of funding or do you feel that this is well balanced and if it's not balanced how would you actually resolve this matter? Should there for example be a ring fencing for specific genres if that's possible or how would you actually, it should be done in quality, how would you resolve that conundrum if indeed exists? I feel like, you know, Creative Scotland has heads of the different arts departments. I mean I'm kind of a bit torn on this because I can see why there's a sort of feeling that everything in one big open fund is too much and that's not just about art forms, that's also about sizes of organisations. Is it artists or is it networking organisations? I'm quite in favour of the kind of breaking down of art silos a bit because I promote a multi-arts festival, I suppose, that's particularly relevant to me because there are certain things about that multi-arts festival that I'm aware that they're not really going to fit into any of the kind of departments in Creative Scotland because it's not music and art, it's music and art or it's something that doesn't fit neatly into any one of those so from my point of view I quite like the mixing of silos although I understand perhaps in certain art forms maybe there's a concern that more is going to one than another. I think it's really complicated. I just think there's more of some stuff than others and that's historic and we would need to look at that history. Text-based performance is arguably more accessible than some other performance forms but that's because of the way text is taught in school and the way we're taught to engage with text as something that's a bit more solid so maybe there's a question there. Then I think there are some things that can't exist as much as others. This was one of the questions of the Strategic Touring Fund where it was suggested that to make an application you should have a minimum of 12 venues to which you think you would tour the work but for an aerial artist that's not possible because there's not necessarily 12 venues where you can put an aerial rig to tour the work. I think it takes a little bit of sitting back and that is where I would hope a national funder could step in and go we've looked at what exists and we've looked at what we want to exist more so we're going to direct some funding in that way without letting other things slip past. I would agree with the national funder looking at what exists and what else could exist. I think that there's maybe an opportunity to take a health check and look across the country and say how do we feel about the provision of theatre versus the provision of the visual arts versus the provision of more craft-based arts like ceramics and glass. I think really in order to answer that question you need to do that. You need to do a bit of a health check and say why are some areas thriving slightly more than other areas in terms of whether there should be maybe artists and genres specific organisations being the ones that are kind of looking after those genres. I think there can be positives to that however some areas will need more support in that than others because some areas more traditionally and I'm thinking of the Scottish Glass Society in particular are very reliant on volunteers and if you suddenly said well okay actually we're going to let you look after the glass kind of you know sector within Scotland. Here's some money to go and do that. We wouldn't necessarily have the skills to do that straight away. So I'm not anti kind of allowing specific genre based kind of support from specific organisations, but it needs to come with more than money. It also needs to come with kind of the backing for those organisations and the training and the support for those organisations. Thank you very much. Jimmy Green. We're really really short on time so can I try something different and just ask you some yes no questions because I think it would really help me because I think there's a lot already been said but I have some specific questions and I'll just fire them at you feel free to respond. Do you think that application for funding has just become a bit of a box ticking exercise in other words what's trendy you know if you say that we'll do something towards a certain audience because that's what's in this year we're more likely to get money. And therefore not really truly reflecting the value of the art in which the funding is required for. I don't think that's a yes, no question. At the base level no it hasn't, there's people who really want it to be more than that. At the top level possibly yes. Yeah my overall answer would be no but there is definitely a bit of the zeitgeisty thing you know obviously if it's something that's kind of in you kind of got feeling it's more likely to be successful if you can kind of tap into that. But no I think there's a lot of people that really care and really know about their art forms sitting in funders seats so no. I would agree with the other witnesses. And that leads nicely into my next question is we actually heard from some folk the other day a session you said basically just lie on the forms because we need the money. And the forms are the application process are geared up and often to to make you fail from the outset because you can't answer all the questions you physically don't have the information to or inherently creative people aren't always great at forecasting revenues audience numbers for example. For shows so how you know should should the application process change be less one size fits all and more tailored towards different art forms. Sometimes you have to be slightly creative with the truth because sometimes they're asking for information that you just don't have yet especially when the project is an early development stage and they're asking questions that you don't know because it hasn't happened it's not got to that point yet so you have to. But I think I mentioned in my submission you know I don't know the two stage process might help cut down on having to be so creative with the truth because you're not being asked for so much information so early on in the process. And I would say that I think creative Scotland are particularly good at you going back to them and going this is what we predicted and actually this information's changed. The difficulty lies in the fact that not many people know they have permission to do that. And that's where this feels like there's a lack of transparency because once you're in you're aware that you can go I said we'd reach 100 people and now we've moved on with the project we've realised it's for an intimate audience of two and you're told feed that back and that is absolutely fine. I would agree that a two stage application process would help. I would never I wouldn't say that I have been ever been creative with the truth on an application form. However I think I've just got a different perspective on it that I recognise that I don't have a crystal ball any more than the next person does. No it's not just the arts and creative people can't forecast revenue audience numbers. Nobody can. So as long as there is a recognition that it is an estimate then I don't see that as being created with the truth. I see that as actually just being as honest as you can be. Okay I appreciate your honesty and another comment was made to me on Monday is that at the moment funding is dictating the art not the other way round. Would you agree or disagree with that sentiment? No I wouldn't. There are definitely challenges in the funding environment but I don't think funding is no. I think there's a lot of integral people in the scene. I think there's integral people but I would agree with that statement because we have a sector whereby the only people who have long-term employability opportunities work in administrative positions or positions of power or are funders. There's no such role for an artist so that's going to be the way it goes until that balance is met. I agree that basically if you're just looking at the whole sway of the funding that's available not just looking at it from one particular funder then yeah because I often see people going oh well I'm going to put that project on the back burner until oh look that funds come up now I could apply for that fund. That would be relevant for this project that I had the idea three years ago. It's ridiculous that you maybe have to wait that time in order for a specific project funding stream to come up but I know of instances that people have had to do that so I would head towards the art fitting the funding rather than the other way around. That's the situation at the moment. Is that it? Yeah okay that's fine thank you. I'm going to get Annabelle in. Very very briefly I do thank you all for coming today and it's great that we've got live from Jura and we've got Kirsten there. Just one very quick question I could ask lots but we really are running out of time. We've heard that it's very time intensive to make the application. How quickly do you tend to hear back what is the actual process from start to finish? Somebody said in the previous part that it could take three weeks to actually make the application. How long does it take? Fundor but open project funding is eight weeks for a grant for below £15,000. Eight weeks to hear back? Eight weeks from your application being accepted and 12 weeks for over that the touring fund has a much quicker turnaround. The touring fund is fairly speedy actually compared to a lot of things and with other funders it can be three months six months. Any other comments on that? Kirsten? In terms of the Scottish Glass Society funding that I recently got funding for it actually took two years to develop that application on pro bono and volunteer time. We were supposed to hear back within three months I think the time scales were slightly longer than that and the only additional comment I would have to that is that that's actually one of the gaps that could be addressed by micro funding with quicker turnaround times. Because for example I've been invited to attend something at the end of this month I just got the invitation the other day I need to find £250 from somewhere to cover a couple of nights accommodation plus all of my travel because that's additional cost for me. The chances of me finding a funding within that couple of weeks time scale that will help me cover that is pretty much minimal because there's nothing that will turn around in that time at the moment. I've never been able to develop a project in three weeks I mean it takes it's not just getting quotes from people and putting numbers down it's also talking to artists and developing ideas and like building a whole like two years is sounds you know or a year for me kind of six months to a year minimum to actually develop a project. Okay so it does sound that it's a very cumbersome process at the micro if you like end of activity and a lot of time is wasted on bureaucracy which uses resources. It's also quite exciting because it's it's that's the creative process knows that development of that project it's just time it's time. There's another comment with time though that timelines don't add up so you're really struggling to ever get all I wanted to do was get ahead of myself and unfortunately in lots of ways I was very ill and had to delay a project for almost a year and thought finally I'm a year ahead I can plan the next one and then we're on this like plain sailing. No if you're too far ahead of yourself your funding will be rejected because something more soon is a priority so you can't ever get into a stable funding turnaround where you can long term plan which again leads me back to strategy you can't have one. And also I would just like to say really quickly that the it is cumbersome it does take time to develop a project but I don't want people to think that that's horrible. I love that part of the process I love looking at the potential working out how it could work working out what impact it could have that does take time but there is a lack of support for that stage of the project at the moment. I it's part of the job I love but I don't really get paid for very much so. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm going to have to stop there because we're almost at half past. Can I thank all three of you for coming to give evidence today it's been very very helpful to our inquiry and I shall now move into private session.