 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Scottish Parliament. I'd like to remind members and the public to turn off mobile phones, and any members using electronic devices to access their committee papers should please ensure their turn to silence. I've received apologies today from Kenneth Gibson and Emma Harper MSP is attending in his place. Emma, do you have any relevant interests to declare? No, I do not. Thank you very much. Our first item of business is around table evidence session as part of the committee's inquiry into arts funding. The inquiry follows on from our work last year in regular funding, and we aim to consider the wider issues on the future of the funding of arts organisations. We're particularly interested in how we support our artists and our cultural freelancers in Scotland, and we're looking, hopefully, at models past and present and around the world in terms of sustaining not just our arts infrastructure but our individual talent. We have a fantastic round table this morning, and I would like to welcome Professor Richard DiMarco, CBE, Harry Josephine Giles, David Leady, artistic director of FireX Theatre Company, Rona Matheson, chief executive of Starcatchers Theatre Company, Ken Matheson, jazz musician and Raymond Villacchese, artistic director of Neo Productions. The inquiry is wide-ranging, and we are focusing on a number of themes this morning. I'd like to start on the support for artists, because you've all made written submissions, and I'd like to thank you very much for that, because I found the written submissions really useful, particularly in terms of some of your suggestions for arts funding, and many of them are very innovative. Also, the barriers, particularly for yourself as cultural freelancers. I'd like to start with Harry Josephine Giles, if you don't mind. You mentioned in your submission that it's easier to get money if you have money. You talked about how organisations that employed financial and fundraising officers found it easier to get grants, and that has particular barriers for artists working on their own. Do you want to elaborate on that and perhaps some of the interesting solutions that you had to that particular challenge? The basic problem here is that the majority of money that you get to make art comes from public funding bodies, and in order to get that money you have to fill out a funding application. Filling out a funding application is a really specific and quite difficult skill, and it's a skill that you have to learn. It's a skill that you have to really work at. I've been doing it about 10 years now, and I've just about understand it. It's not a skill that has any correlation whatsoever to artistic talent or merit, so if you're any good at it and I'm lucky enough that I've got decent at it, then you're better able to get the money, and if you're no good at it, even if your art is brilliant, then you have to pay somebody else to do it for you. That's why in arts organisations we have fundraising officers. We employ people within arts organisations who have that specific set of skills for persuading people to give you money so that the people who are good at making art and managing art and directing art can focus on that stuff that they're better at doing. That obviously creates an inequality, because then when you have an organisation that can pay a fundraising officer, they've got better getting money skills than freelance artists who are not being paid to do that. As somebody who works as a freelance artist, I never get paid for my time writing funding applications, and as somebody who's a co-director of an arts organisation, anatomy arts, we've got more money, we've been better able to pay me to do the work of trying to get more money, and if that sounds absurd, that's because it is absurd. We have to try and get money to pay me to get us more money, because if we don't do that, then we're less able to get money to do the work that we want to do, which for the most part is just paying artists to make art. One of my major suggestions on that is that when an arts organisation is funded to have a fundraising officer, that fundraising officer has some time set aside to support freelance artists, specifically freelance artists in their sector. It's not that radical a suggestion, because this is something that's already happening. I've been really well supported by some organisations who support my work, or who support anatomy's work, and have offered their fundraising officer to give their time to help me figure out how to write funding applications. That's entirely voluntary, which is reasonable enough, but there is still an inequality there that disfavours freelance artists and makes it harder for us to get money. Does anyone else want to come in on that particular subject? Yes, we could. The point that Josephine makes there is particularly acute with black and minority ethnic people, some of whom will not have even the language skills to be able to... English is not their first language and they don't have normal Scottish skills of expressing themselves, normally let alone in some very archaic forms that you get from Creative Scotland. This is an issue I've raised with Creative Scotland for years. They do say we will look at giving internal support to organisations like that, but the reality of it is it's very thin on the ground really. To have paid applications, people who can help you with applications would be a very, very useful thing to help particularly with black and minority ethnic organisations. Anyone else? Ken? David? As a measure of the amount of work that Harry Josephine is talking about, we for the last nine years have been RFO funded. We are no longer. We announced our closure yesterday. Before that, when I was project funded, I worked full time for 12 months of the year running the company and I was paid usually for about seven or eight weeks work and I just stretched that money out over the 12 months. Running the company and that work of raising money and managing a company of that size with a very small staff took my full time for the rest of that year. I just wasn't paid for it. The situation that Harry Josephine is describing is very extreme of the amount of unpaid work that goes into getting that project funded. Richard DeMarco, you obviously have a perspective going back quite a long way, if you don't mind my saying so, saying your submission. Is the situation that is described for artists today a historical one or is it something that has arisen more recently? Well, I think that the main point I'd like to make is that things have changed dramatically in my lifetime. I mean such a meeting like this would be unthinkable in the days when the Arts Council of Scotland existed and which represented the only body you could go to representing the government funding that you probably needed. And of course the art speak that now you have to learn to negotiate all the pitfalls before you actually get anywhere near being considered as, how can I say, a valuable contributor to the cultural identity of the nation. Well, all I can say is that now it's difficult for me to consider the problems. I've read all the statements made and I feel very strongly that everyone's in a very difficult position. No one can be, how can I say, happy about the situation. And I am feeling that we're living in a very difficult, almost, well, a time of crisis and everything is unstable and everything has to be short term. Because there doesn't seem to be a view which takes you forward into the lifetime of those children who are protesting in the streets at the moment representing our school children. Worried about a situation which is going to affect us all, which is the condition of the planet within the cosmos. I don't think I've ever known in my 88 years upon the planet, I mean I don't think anybody in this room can possibly understand what that means. But it means that I have very clear memories of something called the Second World War and the 50 years of the Cold War and what Scotland was all about when in 1947, as a result of the war, there came into being a great gift which was unexpected, almost miraculous, and which was given to the people of Scotland in the name of the Edinburgh Festival. It brought an international stage to this country which has never been given to any other country in Europe. It was like being given the space of the Olympics. It was an arts or cultural olympiad that were given. I don't think we've used it properly and now it's simply a money making machine which enables something like 2000 stand-up comics to feel reassured that they have a future. I don't think it benefits Scotland in every corner of Scotland that I can think of and I think there are many big issues here that we should be considering which is what is the role of any institution representing a cultural identity contribution to this cultural identity of Scotland at a time when we are not sure about what that future is. That's certainly going to be a lot to think about. Thank you. I'll just bring in Alexander Stewart because I know you had specific issues to do with that. You've touched on the whole idea about the support and the funding that you have this morning. It's quite obvious that, in the sector, you live from hand to mouth, you live on shoestrings, depending on your all-trying to capture that resource and that finance. It may be project led or it may be over a one or two year period. You have to, as you've already identified, bring in individuals to support you to achieve that. Is it the case that maybe there's a breadth of resource that cannot be infinitely given to you all? It has to be given out in a proportion. That proportion sometimes depends on what's flavour of the month, what's flavour of the year and organisations like yourself have to adapt your programme or adapt your lifestyle or adapt your company to try to attract that. Is that very much how it is? That's what I'm seeing from reading some of your submissions. Without that professional support that you're asking for, you have to have, then you don't survive. I would say that's how it appears. I would say that it's actually worse than that. The way that the current funding system works claims to be giving you a series of priorities that you need to meet, but even if you're an organisation that does manage to meet those, the position that we were in is that we achieve to a high level in all of the priorities that they set and they didn't fund us and they refuse to explain to us why they didn't fund us. As I said, you fill all the criteria and you're doing a really good job and you still go to the wall and you don't get feedback telling you why. It's just that the funding is no longer available or it's not where we think we want to put money in this time. Even blander than that, they would just repeatedly fall on the idea that it's very competitive and they would just generally repeat, we'll be creating a new fund in the future and you could apply to that and we've decided to give the money to other people. We had a three and a half hour long meeting where we asked, I think, 20 times for an explanation and they refused to tell us. So what needs to change in that environment and for us to be involved in that process as well because we have a role in that whole process too? For me the highest priority is peer review. I don't know how other people like Rona can feel, you haven't said anything yet. Can I say something to touch on this subject? Part of the problem is in the way that the absence of budgeting impinges on all of this. I was going to say right at the outset, I don't see this as a creative Scotland bashing exercise because the creative Scotland didn't exist, some other similar body would have to exist. It's nothing to do with that, it's the methodology they apply. The way I have survived as a professional musician is also to be an accountant and I've split my year as much to music as I could afford to and I've operated as a full-time pro during that period, so it's varied from six months to a year to three months or whatever. Anyway, the upshot is that I've had from two successive heads of music that there is no budgeting. There is a pot, it's not subdivided into genres, it's not subdivided into specific arts types like theatre, music etc. Never mind the sub-genres that exist within all the panoply of the arts. That, to me, is an accountant, it's just madness. You couldn't run a sweety shop like that but it hits every one of us in the arts by making everything totally unpredictable. It turns that what should be a budgeting and allocation exercise into free-for-all for the entire arts community. First come, first served, loudest voice, that's how it works. It's what's known in accounting circles as midden accounting as I referred to. You shovel the money in and nobody knows what's in there. They know the amount that's in there but they don't know what it's for. Then you shovel some out at the end and then suddenly you apply for touring funding or project funding towards the end of the financial year because an opportunity has arisen and there's no money left. Is there a small number of people who seem to have the control base as to what is given and where it goes? I think that there's clearly some issue inside the funding body that there are always tensions between finance and the other departments and finance has the responsibility for maintaining the budget. I understand that, I get all of that perfectly but it's how they then deal with it because if you don't know what it is that's costing you money but not giving you returns, you can't do that in a sweety shop. You need to know what actually creates your margin and your profit and what's costing you money. If they had proper budgeting broken down to genres, it doesn't mean that that is a fixed figure. The health service is a classic example of how this can be made to work in very straightened circumstances where if there's a budget that's seriously underspent as the year progresses, then elements of that budget can be allocated to crisis areas where they've had unforeseen circumstances or whatever. The technical term for that is viring the budget. In academic accounting terms it would be a subvention of part of that budget to another part. They can make it work. I don't understand why every business and every commercial business under the world has to make it work as well because nobody's got infinite resource. I think that there are a number of issues that we have. Obviously Creative Scotland is the primary funding body in Scotland and I think that's one of the biggest issues that we have. If you are making art for art's sake then Creative Scotland is the only route. As an organisation Starcatchers, some of our resource comes from Creative Scotland to do a very particular part of our activity and we are funded from other areas in order to do the other work that we do. If you're an individual artist or your daily work is purely about making art then Creative Scotland is your only mechanism for support. We have issues within local authorities who don't have statutory provision and I have some questions around some of that and particularly with the evolution of cultural trusts that have meant that what provision there has been within some local authorities has been devolved to cultural trust. That has an impact on people in communities who are trying to make art and I can't access support locally to deliver that work. Within our Creative Scotland landscape we obviously, years ago when I first started working in the sector, we did have theatre fund, dance fund, there were the different art form funds and a number of years ago it probably came from the sector that we felt that actually we make much more sense to have one pot of money. Hindsight is one of those things that you look back and go. The way that the open project money resource has evolved has become much more problematic. You've got individual artists in the funding round with organisations being judged against each other and that doesn't seem to be the most appropriate way for that to work. There is an absolute need for infrastructure and the organisations that we have to be supported but there are some more creative ways that we need to look at that whether they are regularly funded or whether they are smaller organisations who operate through the project resource that is available. One of the biggest challenges that we have at the moment is that we are really constricted by the funding model that we have. You end up having to obtain the money and if you fit the criteria you get it and if you don't fit the criteria you don't. Yes and no. One of the biggest challenges is that there are lots of applications that absolutely do fit the criteria but the resource is finite. When you have lots of applications that are as strong as others then the funders are having to find arbitrary reasons to say why they are not being funded. I think that the need for peer review actually in the funding process is something that we need to really revisit. I just want to put in a perspective from the BME community. In Scotland within the context of limited resources and what Creative Scotland have available to push out as some of my colleagues have said what is happening is that it's not a level playing field as Harry has just clearly articulated. What that means is about two years ago I asked Creative Scotland to give me figures as to how much of their available money is actually coming through to the black and minority ethnic communities. I think that the population is about 9% of Scotland's black and ethnic minority. I'm still waiting for two years to actually get answers as to how much and I know why they can't tell us because it's basically nothing. So all this talk about inclusivity is just that. It's talk. The reality is that none of this available money for whatever reason that Creative Scotland makes its decision. The truth of the matter is that none of that funding gets to include black and minority ethnic communities and that's the reality of the situation regardless of what the criteria may or may not be. Picking up on some of those points, Ken Matheson's point about V-ring and so forth. In many of the submissions that the committee has received, people have called for long-term funding. How does that approach fit with those calls? I don't know if you're a proponent of those calls or not, but many are. So how would that approach fit? The nature of the funding system makes it very complex. If you're a large organisation and established company, then you're in the continuing funding field, which is on a three-year cycle, but you can still come a cropper in there even if you're a very respected and well-established company. If you're not in that category, I'll cite the example of what I was looking for in that we're seeing a long-term decline in the audience for jazz. If there's no audience for it, it will disappear, at least in Scotland, because people cannot be expected to turn out, put in hours and hours of practice and turn out to play gigs for money that is now the same as it was before. That was in the 1980s, and that is the reality in the jazz world today, that most of the gigs that you can get by picking up the phone and chasing them are going to pay something like £20 to £25 a man. Nobody can live on that, considering a player of any standard has got to practice constantly and play constantly in an improvising situation to maintain match fitness. It works against people in the smaller genres. My experience was that I addressed this about three or four years ago with the then head of music. He heard what I was saying. The need was there to generate performance opportunities in order that the music can be protected. I came up with a model. I'm not claiming this as foolproof, but that therefore means that it has to involve the promoters, people who are going to take a risk and put something on. They've got to be part of this dialogue. They very frequently get left out of the dialogue. We're sitting talking about arts funding, but they are actually very important. They are the people who get art to the public, whatever the art is. They had to involve that. The method that I came up with was that my band has a base figure fee. There's eight of us, so it's quite a hefty one. They're all new professional players, so they all have mortgages to pay, kids to feed. They can't go out and work for 20 quid. It has to be a working wage, a sensible working wage that reflects their talent as well. It's quite a sizeable figure. What I came up with was that we'll give the promoter a 33 per cent discount if the funding organisation covers that in order to get performances and the aim was to get performances back into theatres, which have stopped pushing jazz. They won't programme jazz because they think they can't make money on it because they think there's no audience. There's no audience because people haven't heard it. They don't know what it is because it's being pushed right off the map by commercial music. Jazz is of the instant. Even though you are working in the case of my band, we're working off orchestrations, but every solo is of the instant and will never happen again in that form. It is a very complex area, but we were successful with our first two applications. The third one was dismissed as being just more of the same. That was because we had to get into certain places in order to expand that and take the music further across Scotland. It's easier to get a job for an eight-piece band in Glasgow and Edinburgh than it is in Inverness or Nairn or Helmsdale or any place outside of the central belt. That was one of the crucial aims of the project. It could never be a one-year, two-year thing. It had to be an evolutionary thing. It wasn't just for my band because I then told other people in the business who had good quality bands, here's a template. Use it and see if it works for you because it has worked for us. The third year I applied for it was a crucial year because we had three members of the band who were in their 70s and we needed to get fresh blood into this in order that it might continue because it's got an international reputation that's worth maintaining. It was dismissed as just more of the same, but an element of that was to fund rehearsals to find the right people to fill these three chairs. Two of them have retired. I'm still stuck with it and I'm still doing all the unpaid admin. The band has gone because it was dismissed as just more of the same. The band went from 25 performances in that third year of application that were agreed and ready to be contracted subject to funding, went from that to six, and nobody can live on six performance fees in a year. I had a meeting with Creative Scotland with the new head of music and the jazz representative in that department. We went through it all and I was given all sorts of things that I should address. I was encouraged to reapply and asked to address certain points. All of those points had actually been covered in fine detail on the application. It just hadn't recognised it and understood it, so I then have to question how capable are, how much knowledge do the people who are doing the assessments actually have about the genres and what the actual life of a working artist or whatever genre? I know that we want to get into peer review issues shortly, but I think that the point that you have made about the lack of involvement promoters in relevant fields of jazz being one is a very apt point and something that I hadn't reflected on, but something that the committee needs to reflect on. It's also very disappointing to hear what you say about Creative Scotland's approach to jazz because they don't seem to have one. If they're just going to tell you that your application is just more of the same, what do they expect it to be? It's jazz music and it is an instant performance, as you rightly say, but the attitude that it's just more of the same, but do they not have any commitment to jazz as a medium? Whether it's a commitment to jazz or not, I can't possibly say, but what it tells me is that they don't have an analytical mind looking at the applications that come in to separate what is a one-off application for funding to make a specific thing happen or something that is actually a longer-term plan which is being spelled out to them in three different applications. A longer-term plan to bolster the genre and try to ensure that it is successful. One of my concerns is that conservatoires and music colleges are churning out youngsters. There's going to be nowhere for them to play unless there's a thriving scene. The only way that there's a thriving scene is if there's performance opportunities. It seems as simple as ABC to somebody who's in the business. It just tells me that the people who are doing the assessing have no grasp on the reality. Will that be peculiar to the jazz genre or whether it's across the board? From discussions that we've had earlier on this morning, it's pretty obvious that that is a prevalent problem. If I might touch on both of the previous questions, what's the role of long-term support and what you do about the need to prioritise if funding is restricted? For me, we've heard some good points about the problems within Creative Scotland on long-term support. It's vital to broaden the answer to both of those questions beyond Creative Scotland, because this one public body shouldn't be the only way that the arts are supported. It isn't the only form of long-term support. The two major forms of long-term support are more or less gone. It's entirely gone in Scotland now. On the one hand, local authority funding, which Rona has mentioned, and on the other hand, the benefit system, social security. It might seem a bit strange to you, but if I talk to folk that are 20, 30 years older than me, many of our major artists and major organisations are built on people working as artists while being on the dole. I've done that too. I built the beginning of my career on the dole, and I know I'm not supposed to do that, but it is what I did, because there's no other way of doing all of this unpaid work unless you have a basic amount of financial support. For decades, post-war, and it was part of the post-war settlement that was referred to before, being able to have some kind of level of social security while you began building an arts career, that's what enabled a flourishing of the arts post-war. That is a form of long-term support and the ability of local authorities to also have a role in that, whether that's the greater London authority or another one. They were huge funders of the arts, and both of those forms of social support, both of those forms of long-term support, were also, and this is picking up on Raymond's point, ways to diversify the arts because they're lower barriers of entry. Those of us who are from any marginalised group, whether it's people of colour, whether it's women, whether it's disabled people, and let's remember that it was the defunding of disability arts organisations that led to this massive stramash a couple of years ago in the first place. Those are the people who most need those kinds of support and who are most obstructed from accessing. It is a major barrier, as has been pointed out, accessing support through Creative Scotland. So, when it comes to prioritisation, for me it's a strategic question and it's also a political question. What do you want arts funding to do? For me the function of any collective project, which is what government is, which is what arts funding is, is to further equality and justice and quality of life. Quality of life is also quality of art. We want everyone to be able to participate in the arts as much as they want and to get access to good arts. The more diverse that is, the better the art is, because the more people you have from different backgrounds doing art, the more interesting and exciting and new the art is, and that's what's being obstructed. So, the question of prioritisation is what can you do with arts funding to lower those barriers of entry, to diversify the arts, to enable those who are marginalised to participate more fully, and that for me is how prioritisation should be directed. Two things. One is that I had an interesting experience a few years ago at a conference in Europe, where somebody European just laughed at the UK saying that you can't get arts funding in the UK. You can only get funding for social engineering. British arts funding doesn't believe in funding art. You have to prove that you're achieving some kind of social aim rather than an artistic aim. My experience of the funding from Ash, as Harry Josephine called it, was that I had a meeting with Creative Scotland where Janet Archer said to me, I don't think that as an organisation, Creative Scotland is very good at funding art. I said, don't you think that's the most damning thing that the head of an arts funding body could say about itself, and she shrugged and said, I suppose so, and I think that's very revealing. I'd like to respond to that just as quickly as I can, because I don't want what I just said to be mistaken for social engineering. I understand the diversity policy and the inclusion strategies are usually, not always, but sticking plaster on the basic problem, which is money, which is equal access to the resources. It needs active inclusion strategies to get past that, but really the more equal you make access to the money, the more diversity comes. It's that way round. You don't fix diversity with the diversity policy, you fix diversity by enabling people to get the money, and then the art happens. I completely agree that that leads to better work. There's a fundamental problem that's nothing to do with Scotland or Creative Scotland, and that is that the arts in general in the UK are not appreciated in the way they are in many other countries. I did a stint of about three, three and a half, four years as treasurer of the Scottish Jazz Federation, which has gone and is not sadly missed, I have to say, from the jazz community, because it never provided any tangible benefits to the musicians who are obviously the bedrock of the form. Anyway, there was an initiative by the French equivalent of the Scottish Jazz Federation to jazz services in London and the Scottish Jazz Federation about setting up a touring network covering France and the UK. Everybody thought that was a terrific idea. When we got round to talking about what the money would be, the French walked away and shook their heads because they were looking for something like three times the money that would be the best that would be on offer here. That's what they're used to being paid, because the culture is actually appreciated there. You go to countries like Brazil, the national culture is almost fetishised in Brazil. I've lived in Brazil and was just astonished at how well musicians could be paid for quality work. There is a different mindset at almost certainly a national government level, but there is also a community feel about it. That's why in Scotland it's so important that we get this right, that we need to find a way of doing it. I don't want to get political, there are enough politicians around the table for that. In a country where there is a very restricted amount of national funding, that's going to be a very difficult equation to solve. I know that there are other members who want to talk about international models, and perhaps we can come to that later. I don't know if anybody else wants to come in on this subject of peer review, because I can see that there would be pitfalls to peer review as well. There are pitfalls there, but there have to be ways of ferreting out people who have got vested interests to ensure that they don't affect the dialogue. I would rather have an application reviewed by people who actually knew what I was talking about than people who have no understanding of the life of a musician or an artist or sculptor or whatever. I've got a son who's a sculptor and he's had to go into full-time teaching in order to make a living. We've had peer review previously under Scottish Arts Council and it wasn't perfect, but it allows the voices of the sector to be heard through the decision-making process. I think that when we have this tension between the different sectors that we work in within the arts and the funding body, how we build the relationship and the communication and the trust between the sectors is really, really important. Having peer review as part of those decision-making processes is absolutely essential. It's challenging within a children's theatre context. We have a very small children's theatre sector that is looked at internationally as one of the shining lights of the Scottish arts scene, but there's a very small number of people who have real understanding of work for children. When you're having applications reviewed, there are tensions there from my perspective, but I would absolutely welcome the idea that as part of a funding process that other people who understand working in our sectors, working with theatres, working in communities, there's that input into that process. I think that the pitfalls of peer review are actually quite easy to mitigate against. I think that when you have rolling panels, so people don't sit on a panel for a really long time, when you have panels that are large enough that individual members can't unduly influence them, you can have split panels where the first round of decision-making is done by a very large group who offer very brief feedback and then it goes to a panel of 10 people who sit round a table. That's before you get to asking people to formally declare any interests that they have. I think that all of those things mitigate against a lot of the downfalls much more than the system that we currently have, which is a very small number of people who have remained in post for a long time make decisions. If you actively diversify the panels, if you make sure that they're not just representative but are taking affirmative action in who's on the panels, then you also start to undo the power structures that are there in the decision-making at the moment because it's currently left to who's employed by Creative Scotland and that's subject to exactly the same power structures as everything else. The peer review, if you diversify it beyond population levels, then you can address that too. I would add that diversity is also including people on those panels who are not currently funded. I'm sure that you want to come in on that point. Just a question on the peer review. Would you be suggesting that the criteria would still be the same but notwithstanding the fact that all people and individuals on the panels could change? I would say that those are different issues. I think that the criteria of how funding is apportioned is a separate question but peer review is like democracy. It's not perfect, there are things wrong with it but it's the best option that we have. With regard to the criteria, I think that peer review group could also input as to what the criteria for funding is. It's about giving artists a voice. As my colleagues have said, you can rotate the people that are on that and diversify it but don't just limit them to the decisions and the applications. They can also be part of your resource in making the criteria in the first place because they know what they're talking about. That would be a way of using that to make sure that the criteria itself is fit for purpose. Can I ask another question? Who then selects the individuals to be on the peer review panel? The balance between people being able to apply and people being asked to apply. Previously, when we have had peer review, often those panels have been dominated by arts administrators who have applied for it and there's not many high-level artists in that group. Often those high-level artists are too busy but if they'd been asked to do it, they would have done it. It needs to be open to anyone who wants to apply and can prove that they are knowledgeable in the field but it also needs to have some degree of selection as well so that you make sure that when we look at that list of peers it really is a list of diverse, highly qualified people. Richard Dymarco, do you suggest that in your submission that the panels should be composed of artists from various disciplines that were remunerated for their time? We're talking about peer review and you suggested in your submission that committees awarding grants should be composed of artists from various disciplines. My heart goes out to anyone who is applying for funding for something which I delight in, which is the great art form we call jazz. Nobody can control or anticipate or quantify the value of jazz as an art form. I'm thinking of Mike Hart today. He was a great friend of mine. Without him and his way of life and his commitment to the language of jazz we wouldn't have this great tradition in Scotland the way it is now. It's in a very fragile state, I can see. I'd like to know how many jazz players actually make the decision about how much funding goes towards the development of this great expression of culture. Zero. I just want you to know that if we're looking at this committee the words culture, tourism, Europe and external affairs dominate. I'm not sure now that you can equate whatever you call culture with tourism. It's a different ball game that we're talking about here. That is suffering. There's not actually helping Scotland at the moment. Certainly not Edinburgh. I'm talking about tourism. It's completely out of control and it doesn't improve the cultural identity of this city. I was thinking of the word Europe because we are not actually in this particular ending of the second decade of this third millennium. We're not in control of the great political game that's being played. I'm worrying about how this country of Scotland can actually be in a position to contribute the way it should. At the very heart of European culture is a Scottish dimension and we're being deflected away from... Scottish jazz is different from English jazz, from French jazz. There's a particular quality. I remember Sandy Brown playing at Lundstein at the Art College way back with Al Fairweather. If you don't know these names and you're on a committee judging what kind of money should go towards the development of jazz, you probably are unfit to make a decision. Who on earth was Al Fairweather? And what was he? He was an architect. And who was Sandy Brown? He was an architect. But they were actually really about the sound of jazz. And they contributed a sound which affected the whole population of the Edinburgh College of Art at the time. We didn't realise we were being given the great gift. This sound of jazz on the highest level of achievement was permeating the college every lunchtime. Now I can say now that I'm worried about the whole business of how we deal with the word culture. I think culture should be identified with what I think cost the Edinburgh Festival to come into being. Which is another word and that is healing. The Edinburgh Festival came into being not because people wanted to make money or to develop a tourist industry, but because the world was in desperate need of finding out how it could possibly consider a future. It was the year 1947, two years after the disaster, the tragedy of the Second World War. And it came into being because the Lord Provost knew full well then that it was about the flowering of the human spirit. And it was about the need to heal the terrifying wounds that society was enduring at that time. Not just the rationing of food and the rationing of clothes, but the rationing of light, energy. I just want you to know that we're in a very dodgy situation here and we should be asking the question of what do we mean by just opposing the words culture with tourism, Europe and external affairs. In this particular session we're entirely, I can reassure you, we're entirely focused on culture. I'm going to bring in Tavi Scott. It's very tempting to get into that philosophical discussion, but perhaps better not. David, ladies, you've already touched on this, but the bit I really thought was interesting in the context of peer review in your submission is your observation that organisations should not receive funding unless 80 per cent of their assessments in the last two years have been rated very good or excellent. Describe what you mean by that. Under the Arts Council, your work was regularly assessed to check its quality, to check that if we're trying to fund excellence, are the people that we're funding excellent. An assessor would be paid to come and see, if you're a theatre maker, to come and see your production. They filled in a pro forma review where they were asked to give ratings across six categories to each of the different elements of your production and an overall rating. You've got a series of those over time. In theory, what should have happened at the time was that 80 per cent of those needed to be in the top two categories for you to move into the group of applications that were considered to be funded at all. The idea is that people who are not good enough get taken out at the beginning. When we moved to Creative Scotland rather than the Scottish Arts Council, assessment of artistic quality was got rid of completely. There is absolutely no assessment of whether or not people are good at what they do. There's only assessment of business priorities. Your thought is that the previous system had some considerable advantages. The previous system worked well. What shocks me most is that I talked to senior management at Creative Scotland about this and they took copious notes because they didn't know that this is how the system used to work such a short time ago. Ken Matheson's point that those assessors that you described would have been, in his case, someone who knew jazz. Yes, they were peers. I was one of them at the time. I had personal experience of this. I was invited to a music advisers or assessors meeting where they were discussing new contracts. I pointed out that I wasn't actually a music adviser to the Arts Council, but there was a journalist of the same name as me who wrote on jazz for the Scotsman. He was a music adviser. I pointed out that they probably got the wrong guy. They said, no, no, it's you we want. You mean you want the journalist or the drummer? Yes. They said, we want the drummer. I went along. I was the only person, there were 25 music advisers from covering different genres. I was the only one who had actually made a living as a performer. Everybody else had come from an administration or, in one case, a journalism background. I agree. In principle, it is a system that should work. It has to be made to work. It has to be done properly. Do you want Raymond to want to come in? I agree that there is a need for artists to be involved as an art administrator and producer. I sit in that world, but I advocate for people like me. We cannot do the work that we do with the artists, but having that balance of people who understand the business side of things, alongside the artists who make the work. What is the point of any of this if we do not understand what the artists want to make, how they want to make it and what they need in order to do that? I have been in Scotland for 26 years, so I remember when the Arts Council used to do assessments. A couple of days ago, I spoke to a very senior person in Creative Scotland who told me that work from black and ethnic minorities was generally viewed as substandard. I agreed because we are not funded. The problem with the assessment is that organisations will take one, for example, the lyceum, who get 2 million quid. The assessors will assess that organisation's work in the same way that they will assess work that is done by ethnic minorities who get no money whatsoever. You cannot compete with the lighting, with the costumes, with the quality of production that the lyceum is able to put forward because you simply do not have the funds to do so. However, the assessment criteria is the same, and that does disadvantage people who have not been funded to begin with. The assessment and the people who are on it and the resources that you have been given needs to be put into account when you are being assessed in terms of the work. Being incorporated within a proforma that part of the review is an acknowledgement of what level of support people get at the moment. You can have a realistic expectation that if someone is receiving no funding or is receiving £500, they do not have the support that they have if they are in the building. I also want to send a note of caution on the quality assessment. Half of my point was just made there, so I will leave that. I entirely agree with that. The other half is that I am a bit concerned about the levels of monitoring and assessment of quality, both because of the power structures that are involved in that, but also because in arts as an education, as in most of society, we have a bit rather too much assessment and monitoring, and that also costs money. I just want to always bring it back to the money, but there is a huge amount of money spent in the arts doing monitoring, doing reports and not spent on making art. I just have the suspicion—it is tricky to get your head around sometimes—that if we did far less of that, we might get better art. Just as if we tested kids less in school, they might learn more. That is why we have the system that we have now. I am not totally disagreeing. I am just being cautious about it, that I would not want loads of monitoring on what the art is, because the more time you spend doing that, the less time you spend making art, and the more the power structures get involved. I am trying not to make that philosophical, but what happens if every time you are funded to do something, you are sitting there anxious that it is going to be funded badly or that your whole career is over? We deal with that enough with the reviews, as it is. I am a little bit worried about that, about the effect that that has on the art. Sure, there are solutions, but I will leave it there. I don't know why there was a move away from the old system to the new system. For the reasons that Harry Josephine is saying, lots of people hoped that if we got rid of assessing artistic quality, it would have just allowed artists to flourish and make great work, and it would save money. I don't think that that's what's happened. It's difficult to give us a perspective on the assessment of artistic quality. Is there a rule for that in funding of arts? I think, for example, I find unrecognisable this thing called the Edinburgh Festival, a great flagship, as it is now from what it was in its first 40, 50 years. I've experienced every single Edinburgh Festival. By the way, I'd like to point out that there's something called zero funding, and for about 15 years I operated on the basis that I had no funding. I would create an international programme with no money at all, and at the end of the year I'd break even. How many people would take that attitude and see that the arts, which are not about commerce, not about commodifying everything in sight, but are about an expression of our inner being, our souls and the soul of the nation, and therefore they should be forever linked to the world which we call education. Our educational system at the moment in Scotland has fallen very, very well below the standard that I was used to in my youth. I'm saying now that I think that we have to completely rethink this whole idea of what is the power of the cultural language that we use. It is the one and only language that we have to express our love of life. Therefore without it society collapses. Do you realise all the political statements that can be made by any political party add up to nothing compared to one great sound by one great jazz musician or one great poet? I've discovered this because I don't know. I think I must have produced in my lifetime something like three and a half thousand productions, theatre productions and exhibitions. Most of the funding came from outside of Scotland because I realised that Scotland wasn't geared up to providing the money. The end of the festival, through many of its most outstanding years, had to depend on foreign money on the British Council and on the kind of funding that you identify with Europe. I'm actually very conscious that I sit here, that I came into violent contact with the powers that be. It was called the Scottish Arts Council and they didn't like the way I was suggesting that art had to be on the highest level, something that we used to deal with the terrifying problem of our ever-growing population of human beings. Back in our prisons and I concentrated all my attention on the whole idea that the art world had to encompass the world of penal reform. That didn't go at all well and I was accused of bringing dishonour to the meaning of art. What a great achievement. I brought dishonour to the meaning of art in Scotland and of course dishonour to the meaning of art with regard to the demarc or whatever it was called, Gary. It wasn't a Gary anyway, it was just a way of life which was a continuation of what the traverse was all about or the paperback bookshop. I'm thinking that you've got to fight with all your might for the language which you dare to call art because it's the one language that will somehow or another move in a way which is mysterious beyond belief towards those generations that are yet to come. I dislike intensely the fact that I was told that you can no more have anything like an annual support from the Arts Council. It's gone. You are now reduced to this whole concept of project funding and I remember thinking, I don't want to be involved in something so stupid and pathetic because what I'm concerned about is the fact that the language of art lasts well beyond any one lifetime. It should be the language we're using to actually as a gift towards future generations and it should be the language which, if you are a serious politician, you know is going to be the legacy that you deserve to give to anyone you love who is at the moment a child and is going to be breathing the air and drinking the water of the world in which we live. So I'm saying that I don't think I would, I don't regret that moment when the Arts Council said, you are now cast out, you don't belong to our world of government thinking. I was very happy that that happened because I thought, I believe that all the artists that I represented and that's people like Hugh McDermid, people like Ian Hamilton Finlay, troublemakers, because they were asking the kind of questions that politicians very rarely are in a position to ask and they were actually defenders of the truth because that's really what it's all about. Art is about truth, telling the truth, it's not about false truth, it's about truth and it's also about beauty, the things that we cherish most, the things that this building is supposed to represent and I'm thinking it's ridiculous that when I was given the job of being director of the Edinburgh International Festival's official programme of contemporary culture, I had to raise £7 million and not a penny of that came from Scotland. It came from countries like Poland, Romania, the Baltic states and these countries actually were in desperate need during that time of expressing their concept of truth, political truth as well as cultural truth at a time when they were fighting for their lives, for their identity. I'm going to have to stop you there because I know that Emma Harper has some questions about international working and I'm going to thank you very much for that and move on to Emma. I'm interested in how innovative funding approaches occur in other countries and I know that in the Starcarchers submission it says that our European neighbours recognise the vital importance of funding theatre and dance for young audiences. Denmark has over 70 full-time companies but Scotland continues to lag behind so I'm interested to hear about some of the examples in our submission from all across the planet including our European neighbours so what could we do different, how could we learn from our European neighbours and others? I was supposed to lead on from that point. That's 70 fully funded children's theatre companies in a country that's the same size as Scotland and they have the opportunity. They're funded to make work and if it's not very good it's okay. They're funded to experiment, take risks and also make some exceptional work. That's a decision that their Arts Council has made to invest in those organisations. At the moment we are part of an Erasmus Plus project. We're working with a company from France and a company from the Netherlands and our French colleagues, the artists there are in a position so we are paying for our artists to ensure that they have the resource they need to live within the delivery of this project. The French artists are supported by the state. We found the sites as we were going through the project. Where was the resource coming from? The French artists? Where was the resource coming from? The Dutch artists? This is what we were doing for the Scottish artists. The Erasmus Plus programme only provides a small proportion of the resource that we need to fully deliver the project that we're doing. Those two French artists, because they've delivered a certain amount of activity, are able to benefit from a stipend from the state and that's how they're able to participate in that project. Personally at the point in my career where I needed to no longer have a day job, my solution to that was that I paid PhD and that small amount of money of the stipend that I received for the PhD and it was a practice-based PhD so it allowed me to focus entirely on making that work. I spoke to lots of European colleagues who said, we have a similar thing where you ask the arts funding body for that and that you reach a point in your career where you've shown that you're an artist of promise and they'll say, here is 8,000, 10,000 euros to see you through the next year, you can focus on your work. That money is incredibly good value to the funding body because that person is at a point in their career where they suddenly blossom into being able to create a lot of work. I think that's one of the gaps that we have at the moment in focusing entirely on organisations and that individual artists who are not yet at the point of setting up an organisation and may never be somebody who works in a form that needs an organisation to get supported in that way and it's really good value. I took exactly the same route out as a freelance artist. My PhD funding runs out in September and I have literally no work of any kind after September so that's going to be an exciting time. Similarly, the only way that I've been able to develop to earn a minimum wage as an artist, which is what I earn, I almost never get any more than a minimum wage, is through funding not just through Creator Scotland but getting money off the British Council of European Union-funded projects in Europe. Until this year, I've had more money from European countries and through EU funding than through Scottish funding, although things have got better for me this year, which was quite nice. From that experience, I'd love to hear from anyone who knows of any other European forms of support for artists, because I know that you work quite a lot in Europe as StarCats, so I'd love to hear about more of those. Two others that I've heard about are in Finland. There is subsidised housing for artists, which, wow, what a dream. In France, there are tax breaks, as well as the possibility of a stipend for someone who is working as an artist. Those forms are so worth exploring because of that diversification. Ideologically, it sounds a bit weird to just give artists a house or give artists a tax break. It actually works out cheaper because they're not then applying for funding, they're not doing all the monitoring, they've got this time to make the art and they make more art and they do make more economic impact if they're doing that. I'd love to hear from anyone who knows of more. I don't necessarily have all of the details. I know that, in the Netherlands colleagues there, it's easier for some of them as individual artists to access funding that they need. We're in discussions with an organisation that's attached to a university in Norway where they have huge amounts of money to run programmes of artist residencies. The artists are funded to be there for periods of time to develop ideas and work. They run hundreds of residencies every year and the artists are funded. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head about some of the other things at the moment but I could certainly do some investigations and share those. Ross, did you want to come in at that point? I struck back a couple of things that Kent said. The first was the mention of Brazil. My understanding is that part of that is formed by the way Brazilian culture has developed over centuries. Part of it was a five-year period in which it truly flourished because Brazil appointed an internationally renowned songwriter and guitarist as their minister for culture and he transformed Government policy around that. One thing that I want to touch on was something that you said earlier. Those who shout the loudest here, often being the ones who get in the door now, if we think of the strash of a couple of years ago, that was certainly to some extent the case. I think that everyone would understand those who were facing closure because they were losing out on funding that they expected to get. Of course they're going to shout as loud as they can to try and secure that funding. However, how do we build a new model in Scotland, a sustainable model, that minimises the chance? Obviously those who shout the loudest are those who are starting off with the most privileged, the most connections that they're networked. How do we design a system that doesn't allow for undue advantage in those situations where those who can shout the loudest create enough pressure and get funding that they might not have other what it's got? If I could come in on that from, again, a BME perspective. At the moment, in terms of the funding, the BME community gets zero. If you were to increase that from zero to eight or nine per cent of the available funds that would transform the landscape of art in Scotland. There is one thing that I want to say on that particular point. Scotland is a wonderful, diverse country to live in, but its artistic output does not reflect that at all. By increasing from available funds zero to eight per cent to reflect the current nation's demographics, that would be a model for me, which would reflect Scotland's openness and diversity and project Scotland as a country that's welcoming to people of all creeds and colours, which it is to live in, but that's not what you see in the art. Are you aware of other countries that do that better for minority communities? The Americans do. I'm from South Africa. The South Africans do. I think that the culture that's produced by a country should reflect its citizens, and Scottish culture is all about tartan and haggis. Scotland is changing, but that is not being reflected in the artistic output of this country. The many countries that do very successfully at that. I'm going to say a reply to Rossi's question. I think that if you're going to sit down and rationalise a new method of funding or an overhaul the existing method of funding, it has to start with the inclusion of the arts community. It can't be designed in absentia by management consultants for some ridiculous fee, because that is the way very often bureaucracy deals with these problems. It has to involve people who actually understand what life is like if you can't make any money from doing the thing that drives your life, because that's one of the issues. For people in the arts, it is actually a life force that is there to do this. Whatever the genre is, whether it's performance arts or fine arts or whatever, they are driven to do this. It's a voice within. If we don't let that voice out, we stifle all of those talents. I can remember going back to the days of the Scottish Arts Council trying to understand, I wasn't applying for anything, I was trying to understand how the funding system worked, because with my accountant's hat on, I was interested in knowing how the system worked. If there were opportunities for some plans I had to develop some musical ideas, I would be interested in pursuing them. Basically, it boiled down to, we don't have you on our radar because you're not an established artist. I worked in four continents as a professional musician and was better known in New York than I was in Murray Place. That's neither here nor there. The point that I was going to make was when we got into how you get into the position of being an established artist, I asked them, OK, so there's this eight-year-old kid called Wolfgang Mozart living in Westerhales. How does he actually get his talent developed? How do we know there's not a Wolfgang Mozart in Westerhales right now who could be perhaps one of the most influential and whatever art genre he or she is talented in? How do we know that these people will ever actually be recognised? And there was no answer to that. Absolutely none. So it has to involve anything that any restructuring has to involve the arts community at a very significant level. I think we need to look at that sense of what we've got. We've got a hierarchy of funding that starts with the national companies being funded direct from government that then goes to a second stage of Creative Scotland and the hierarchy there of regularly funded organisations. And then you have those that are in receipt of project funds and there was a sense that from Creative Scotland that there is no distinction in their eyes between regular funding and project funding that there is no hierarchy but having sat on both sides of that fence, there is a hierarchy in terms of the relationship that you have. I think we also need to look at how do we bring those local and national structures together and again it comes back to my concerns around the lack of support from local authorities for artists and arts organisations. I think I've been coming back to that international perspective. I have a colleague from Ireland who I've been talking to recently and they have local authority support. It's not necessarily huge amounts of money but it's support that allows them to take work to different parts of Ireland as well as being supported through the national arts funding body. They also have a completely different agency that's looking at how they're exporting their Irish cultural product. For me it goes much farther than just what is the funding structure that we have within Creative Scotland. How do we bring all of those things together so that we actually have a national funding strategy for the arts that actually supports work from the grass-roots community right up and it's recognised and it's clear and that it allows artists to do the work that they want to do? That's just reminded me of a very simple thing that goes back to what we talked about earlier about long-term support and the idea of fixed time periods. I've often suggested that there could be a flexible time period. Organisations at a particular point in their development say, we think we're in a point where a year of funding would be great for us and a major building, for example, says we need a 10-year commitment and that a touring company might say we'd like five years and the funder might come back and say we think you're at a three-year point. The idea of everyone being fixed in a three-year term and should we make that longer or should we make that shorter seems like there's a simple solution that it can slide and you can ask for a certain amount and then negotiate what you actually get. To come back to Rossi's question of how do you make sure it's not just those who shout the loudest, I do just want to pay tribute again to the fact that that Stramash was started by one of them and was started by an almost total defunding of disability arts in Scotland that happened because nobody had noticed that's what all the cuts were doing and it was disabled artists who were doing a lot of shouting and people shouting for them so I just want to pay tribute to that moment because it was a good moment for disability arts. To answer the question, Raymond and I have both spoken about the more that you lower barriers of access to arts funding, the more that the arts funding diversifies, a couple more solutions that I suggested and would talk a bit more about. One is the more equal the wages are than the more diverse the people commissioning and directing arts organisations are. I don't know if there's a national organization or a major international festival in Scotland that has a BMA chief executive, I'm not sure that there is. There's certainly a major shortage of women chief executives as well. One of the reasons for that and I did say this and it's not popular is too much pay. The salaries are too high and they're way higher than the salaries of the people at the bottom and because it's an elite occupation, it's an elite occupation that is complete being that level of chief executive is an elite occupation that is completely distant from the concerns of most artists. It means that the work that is getting programmed and the work that is getting commissioned is increasingly less diverse and I do think that there's a problem there that the funding of arts organisations can address that we should not be having that inequality of pay in the arts or anywhere for that matter but the arts is my industry. The other solution is that it's not just about how the arts is funded but which art forms are funded, that the art forms that tend to attract more funding tend to be the art forms that middle-class people like and they tend to be the art forms that white people like and that just is the situation and that is where the money is going. I work in poetry. Poetry gets more money than hip-hop even though it's the same stuff. It just does and it shouldn't be that way. Why should hip-hop, which makes more money for Scotland than poetry by the way, I shouldn't be saying that as a poet but it's true, why should that get less funding? It's regarded as an art form that's not seen as an art form that deserves that kind of funding and the same is true for other art forms and other vectors of marginalisation or vectors of inequality. So we actually have to think about which art forms is it that are valued and how are those brought in. The last point on this, there is now one Creative Scotland fund, the Create Inclusion Fund, which has just run its first round that was specifically for artists of colour in Scotland. It was peanuts, it was a fraction of the overall Creative Scotland budget and it does not go anywhere near far enough to addressing that problem. I'm glad that it's there, it's nowhere near enough and it's also only there because of a lot of us doing a lot of advocacy for a long time saying that this is a problem and that's a very, very small solution that doesn't even go halfway near what we need to be. I'm going to bring in Clare Baker now. I suppose that we came to this inquiry following the issues that we're aware of with Creative Scotland's regular funding model and we're looking at sustainable funding but it does strike me this morning that demand is clearly outstripping supply and if you just put more money into the system it would solve a lot of these issues. How do we put more money into the system? There seems to be a tension between more money going into the system or is this about Creative Scotland spending the money that it has differently and cutting the pie differently and then who decides how that is divided. There also seems to be a tension between does Creative Scotland focus on what we see as excellence and quality and how does that present issues around diversity and how do we get and who decides. It struck me this morning as well, running alongside us, is the Scottish Government's culture strategy that the Cabinet Secretary has been consulting on. I wonder if people have any views on that. Do you think that the culture strategy is going to address those questions that are going to resolve some of those issues? I'm a bit concerned. I don't think that it really deals with funding and while I do accept the Scottish Government and the UK Government are under financial pressures and it's tight budget, the cultural budget is tiny, it's something like 0.2 per cent of the overall Scottish budget was into culture, it's tiny. Is there a need for some, even if it's longer term and even if it's put in terms of ambition but a recognition that more money needs to come into the system either through Government or local authorities, where it's not a statutory responsibility as you've said. There is a huge variety across local authorities in terms of some that will appoint a cultural lead or a cultural sports person, some of them don't at all and how does that get us with a few issues thrown out there but if anyone wants to pick up on some of these. The best way of getting more money into the system and into every system is to raise corporation tax and raise tax on the top income bracket so that's the answer to that one. I've looked at the economics, I don't know any other way of doing it. It's not just about raising the amount of money, I'd love to raise the amount of money in all the publicly funded areas of life but it is as you say about addressing the inequalities. I'll leave it there because I've forgotten the second question and I just wanted to say that. I would say both of those issues. Yes, we need a lot more money being committed to the arts and culture and yes, it's also about how a funding body is making its decisions. I would also say that that question of diversity and excellence sometimes gets discussed with a false assumption that those two things are in conflict with each other and they're not. It's about different types of excellence, it's about having a truly diverse understanding of what excellence means in different contexts with different cultures. As Harry Josephine says about respecting what, for example, working class culture has a different conception of what excellent work is to middle class taste. That's part of what you can start to address by bringing in a wider range of truly diverse peer review voices that you're not focusing on a small number of people making decisions. I don't know if anybody wants to comment on that. I think that Rona mentioned the national companies that have protected funding and they don't come through Creative Scotland. I'm not suggesting that their funding is reduced in any way but they're in a different situation from everybody who's applying to Creative Scotland. Another kind of hand to mouth existence that other organisations lead. Do people have any views on that structure? I know that we've talked mainly this morning about individual artists and how they could receive support. There has been suggestions made that there should be a hierarchy within Creative Scotland. It should be recognised that some venues are of greater cultural importance than others and they should have a more secure level of funding or some companies, whether it's the youth companies or any, that they should have more confidence in the funding that they'll receive. For me, a lot of this is about how we value our children and our citizens. That's what culture is a real expression of who we are and how we invest in that and enable people to access the arts is a key part of that. I suppose that a way to look at it could be the tension there with the regular funded organisations and project funded. We have organisations and buildings that will be funded, a bit like the national companies. They will be funded anyway, but is it about saying, well, here are your core costs, here is your minimum running costs for running this building, but actually then everyone has then got access to a pot of money, which is about the art that we're making, because the tension comes because there are the core costs of any organisation that needs to be run. Actually, artists have core costs as well, but if extracting those core costs away from the pot of money that's seen for the art is an option that makes things more transparent and allows us to think about things in a different way, then I think there could be an interesting model that could come from that. For me, this is about how do we value our citizens and our society and the role that art has to play in that. I mentioned cultural trust being problematic, or you didn't sound that. Local authorities used to have art officers. Local authorities used to be creative links officers, culture coordinators, and there were people working within local art centres who were in charge of making programming decisions about the work that they would present for their communities. The introduction of cultural trust initially was quite an exciting idea that actually they had resource and that wasn't just about money, it was about space and it was about support, but gradually over probably the last 10 years that I've been working with cultural trusts, that support has disappeared and the resources disappeared and the money has disappeared. The programming decisions that are being made, when it comes to taking something out on tour across the country, you don't necessarily have people who understand theatre who are making programming decisions because they are looking at something and saying, The majority of work that we make is for babies, so we have capacity of 50 because that's the work that we make, but it doesn't necessarily cover the cost of, it's not financially viable, it's a horrible business model, but there is an audience for it and children have a right to it. So we are saying to this venue, we want you to take this show for your audience, there's someone within that organisation saying, but that doesn't cover its costs, so why are you programming that? So in previous incarnations they would have much bigger pieces of children's work that would sell out and they would offset the costs of almost like a lost leader and you've got something that's going to cover its costs 10 times over that can subsidise the work that needs to be subsidised, but that doesn't happen so much anymore. Is that any different with authorities that don't have cultural trusts? A lot of authorities that don't have cultural trusts are not making massive investments in the arts either, but cultural trusts were generally the areas that were making more investment in the arts, in my view. We are an Edinburgh-based organisation and we applied for some support through the city council tattoo fund last year and received a small amount of money for a pilot project, but that's the first time we've had any money from the city council. So at the beginning of the trust it looked like a good model and a way to give more significance and more funding and has it just been pressure on local authority funding that's led to work? Yes, it was pressure on local authority funding and the key ones that we were working with were about arts venues, museums, galleries, libraries, sports and leisure. You then got sports and leisure managers also having to make decisions about cultural programming. Their background is in sport and leisure, their background is not in theatre dance or cultural programming. So there's a massive tension there because you've got people who are trying to make judgments on things that they don't have the skills and expertise to do. In our submission we suggested that perhaps 1 per cent of the government budget should be spent on arts and culture just to go back to that point of more money put into the system. It's a false economy to slash funding for the arts to 0.2 per cent of your available money, particularly for BME communities. Arts and culture has always been viewed as a way of improving one's life, so is sport, particularly for our communities, but in Scotland the root in music and arts and culture for BMEs is nonexistent. So what then happens is you find that young people are not involved in making music, they're not involved in the culture, so they're involved in other things. Government ends up paying for it through the criminal justice system anyway. The isolation of people as well leads to mental health issues, so you have to pick up the cost in the NHS. So the solution, yes, is about increasing funding to the arts and opportunity for people to engage within the arts. I think that not to spend the money there is actually a false economy. Now how Josephine did talk about you could increase taxes, you could raise, the government could raise revenues and you could put that in to involve different positions on that. But there's also been suggestions that you could, and I think it was Professor DeMarco talked about freelancers who would work in primary schools, that kind of model. So is there potential for other budgets, whether it's health or education, to make more of a contribution to the arts budget or to offer more opportunities for freelancers to work within those sectors? Do you think there could be more potential there to increase the income of individuals? That lets me make slightly less inflammatory suggestions. One of which is that I'm from Orkney. Orkney still has just a free instrument music tuition programme, I think that Shetland does as well, which means that every child in an Orkney school gets to learn a musical instrument for free. That is a remarkably cheap and remarkably effective way of providing employment to artists and supporting the growth of a culture. Orkney and Shetland have a traditional music culture and a music culture that's the envy of Scotland, the UK and the world. It's a huge music culture and a huge part of life. It provides a social situation, it provides tourism money, it provides work, it's vital and it is built on that thing happening in the education system. There may be one other local authority in Scotland that does it, but I might be wrong about that. It's been vigorously defended in Orkney and Shetland and it's really vital that that keeps going. Systems like that provide extraordinary levels of subsidy to the arts employment and the arts in ways of strengthening an arts culture that are actually cheaper. That plays into this thing of false economy that when social security stuff gets cut, just like when social care stuff gets cut, it actually becomes more expensive in other areas in the long run. That again is tying to this business. It's not just a creative Scotland problem. I've remembered what your second question was earlier, which is, can the culture strategy fix it? We've had a lot of culture reviews. I think that it can only fix it if there is a broad political mission at a political level, not just to try and fix this through Creative Scotland, which, let's remember, was created to try and fix some problems in the Scottish Arts Council, so I don't want a third organisation to do the same thing. It's a question of an overall government strategy about how all those different things link up health, education, arts and other areas of life. It needs that big level stuff or the culture strategy is only so much paper. I have concerns about the idea of just opening up a model that suggests that any artist goes into schools for 50 per cent of their time. Working with children is a very specialist way of working, and it's not just anyone who can do it. I think that there's often a perception that working with children is dead easy. It's really not. It's really specialised, and they deserve the best as much as anyone else. I would caution the idea that it's just become something that was kind of a free-for-all because it's a specialism, and we need to nurture the artists who want to work with children and support them to not just be working in schools, but also to make the amazing work that we're seeing at the International Children's Festival here this week, but also the work that's being presented in communities across the country. I did recently visit McRoberts Arts Centre and they employ a freelancer to do dance and drama. I think that it's a year's contract, but I'm not sure about that. They have employed a freelancer then to work with the community, to help work with their dance and their drama groups. Is that a common model? Is that to give an employment to someone who is a working artist? Is that a common model, or are those opportunities given by other people? Those opportunities are there, and Starcatchers is an organisation. That's what we do. We have a pool of associated artists, maybe 20 artists that we're working with across a year who are delivering across our programmes of work, whether that's the productions that we're making, that we're touring, whether that's our community engagement projects where we're working in places like Westerhales, like Lockgalley in North Ayrshire, supporting vulnerable families and their young children to participate in artist-led activity, whether it's our creative skills training programme that is funded through the Scottish Government, through the Third Sector Early Intervention Fund. We're delivering a programme that's about empowering early years professionals to use their creativity when they're working with children and families and really encourage expressive arts within our childcare settings across the country. We have this huge pool of artists that we're supporting. We're not unique in that approach. There are lots of organisations who are working with artists in lots of different ways. I remember that being a good artist and having those other skills are not necessarily the same thing. I think you could be an amazing artist in one form or another and be a really terrible teacher. Or just be somebody who doesn't want to go and teach other people or lead community workshops or even appear publicly in any way. I'm always wary of the idea of saying, let's fund people for this parallel, slightly separate thing. They can go into hospitals and be clown doctors because only some people do that. That replicates the problem that we talked about earlier that if you come from a particular educational background you might be good at writing a funding application. If you have a particular type of personality you might be good at standing up in front of groups of people and other people are really not. Stuart, you want to come in? Yes, thank you. It's two brief questions. First of all, the Scottish Government has funded a feasibility study into an idea regarding the basic citizens income that's working with four local authorities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, North Ayrshire and Fife. Some of the submissions have suggested that a basic citizens income should be introduced. Is that something that the panellists would agree with? Yes. I would say that I'm very interested in knowing more about it. I'm interested in the idea that there have been some rolling out in other countries that seem to not succeed in the way that people imagined, which disappointed me to read. In theory, I think that it's great in reality. I want to know if it works. It certainly has to be a more efficient way of spreading income across society than hugely complex benefit systems that don't really work. It has to be much cheaper to administer and much more effective in the longer term. I haven't really looked at the economics of it because I cast off my accountant's hat many years ago. I mean, if you just think about the bureaucracy that has to exist to run a hugely complex benefit system, something that's bog standard, simple, everybody's on a computer system, everybody's got a national insurance number, if there's a basic citizens income, it probably won't cost any more than it currently costs to run the benefit system and disperse the benefits. Possibly it will cost a lot less. What it also does is that I touched on the point that most people in the arts are driven people. They are there to do stuff and it becomes economically impossible to do it unless you have something like that basic citizens wage. That allows them the breathing space to know that their income is coming in, that they can actually sit down and write that piece of music that's been bothering them. That happens to me on a daily basis. I go out for a walk and I come back with a new melody or a new idea for an arrangement. I don't have the time to write it down and I don't have any market for it because there's so little work out there. That's one way that these issues can be addressed. The other thing that strikes me, putting my accountant's hat back on for a minute, is that the arts aren't just for now, it's the future. The funding of local authorities, the education system in general, is key to ensuring the cultural future. It seems to me that that is a no-brainer. That has to happen for local authorities to be in the position. I'm very aware that this isn't entirely a Scottish problem because the Governmental economy is largely dispersed from elsewhere. However, if you squeeze the local authorities, one of the first things that will go, as we've seen, is happening widely across Scotland, is that cultural education programmes get slashed. That longer term is fatal to the arts community, but it's fatal to the wider society as well. All those are hugely political questions, but all of those factors are interrelated. We have to ensure that the local authorities can provide a basis for the nation's culture. If we don't do that, what are we going to finish up? The second question is about regional funding. I've heard a number of words spoken today about the elite in allocating funding. There are 32 local authorities in Scotland. Understandably, the bulk of money goes towards the cities. However, there is a hinterland outside of the cities. Do the panellists feel as if other areas outside of the cities get a fair deal? I'm from Orkney? No, it doesn't get a fair deal in terms of national arts funding. It doesn't get as much funded work going to Orkney or being made in Orkney. Orkney has benefited a lot from European Union funding in various areas, including the arts, and it's really worrying for me. No wonder that we had the highest remaining vote in Scotland. It's really worrying for me that that is being taken away. European Union funding has also been a major factor in other rural areas, because it tends to end up there in lots of different ways. In terms of the ways that that plays out, it's the ability to make art in Orkney and have that be funded. I mentioned it in music, but it's somewhere with an extraordinary level of what we might call amateur or community participation in the arts. I do not know a person in Orkney who is not involved in artistic production in some form, but the vast majority of them are not paid for it. That is also okay. Not everyone has to make it their job. Some people don't want it to be their job, but the people who are involved in that way deserve to have support for that work, whether it's support for the buildings that they make it happen in, whether it's support for resources. One thing that I spoke about in my evidence was needing to not make this purely about professional arts, but to consider how the non-professional sector and the professional sector overlap how the people who do it for a job and the people who do it for pleasure are benefiting from the same systems, so that money needs to go in there. I think that that is always going to be especially the case in rural areas, because there are fewer arts jobs there, but also because there is a more communitarian form of life. That means that you have this kind of community participation in the arts. The other aspect of it in the very rural areas is what work tours to rural areas. If you want to take work to Orkney, I just did two weeks ago, it's really expensive. It is really expensive to take anything of any complex level to rural areas, and it's harder to get into the venues because the venues are smaller. There are attempts to address this issue of rural touring. I don't think that they have quite managed it yet, and there is absolutely the demand for that in rural areas. They really want to be seeing this work, but there is a lack of funding to make that happen. Ross, do you want to come in, or are you? I have always been frustrated that the way that we talk about allocation of funds between the central and rural areas seems to mostly focus on where organisations are based, and I don't think that it's an accurate way of measuring provision. I think that because there is so much work that tours somebody, I would like to really know what's going on. You're a cultural practitioner, so I represent a rural area myself. From the point of view of cultural practitioners based in those rural areas who wish to make a career while staying in the area, I think that it probably is quite important. I'm not saying that it's not. I'm saying that it's really hard for us to measure that we don't really know the balance between people who are, for example, somebody who could be based in a rural area and working there, but the majority of the work that they show might be being shown in cities, and we don't have a way of measuring it, and I think that's not helpful. I agree with that point, but there are other things that are going on that allow work to happen to one of our projects that has been working in Ayrshire and in Murray with local artists and supporting them. That was third sector early intervention funding, working with kinship carers. We are based in Edinburgh, but we have that scope and the partnerships that we have allow us to work in those areas and ensure that people across the country are able to access and participate in those experiences. When you're talking about being able to access your early years funding, I haven't seen any of your work, but I'm sure it's absolutely of the highest quality. Did you think that it was helpful in terms of your RFO application that you did have that other funding stream from early years because there is a lot of money going into early years? Yes. I suppose that, as an organisation, we have had to diversify in that way because we have three very distinct pillars that are interconnected, the producing and touring work, our engagement work and this professional development aspect, and that has evolved over the last 12 years since we began in Muir House as a pilot project. The fact that we were able to have that consistent support was three years of funding from the Scottish Government that was then extended for 1920. That contributes a proportion towards our core but also supports us to deliver this training programme. Then we also had this project fund for the last couple of years. I think that what that allowed us to demonstrate to Create Scotland is that we are able to look at a portfolio of funders to support the delivery of our work and we were asking them to fund a very specific part of that. They funded 50 per cent of what our ask was, so we are still in a slightly limbo position with being able to produce and tour, but we can develop new work and we can support artists to explore how they want to make work for not-to-fives in Scotland. I think that the other resource that we have levied, Big Lottery money and the Scottish Government money, has allowed us to have a real bonus to that application process. Two questions, but for the sake of time, one of them is essentially just yes and no. I will just ask one question and then we will go back on them. The other question is that we have had a lot of feedback, particularly during the last episode of this, from artists who felt that there was an increasing amount of pressure to demonstrate a strong business case rather than purely artistic merit when applying for funding. That is something that we have discussed this morning, but the cultural sector is a significant sector of Scotland's economy and one of the strongest arguments that you can make to get funding is to talk about economic output. That is not all that art is, that is very far from all that art is, but how do you balance that tension between the fact that we do want to fund art for art sake and how culturally enriching it is in and of itself? However, this is a significant sector of Scotland's economy. How do we balance something between arts funding and what is essentially enterprise funding? Sorry, that was a yes, no question. No, that's not a yes, no question. Personally, I don't think that it's that difficult to strike a balance. My company has always been a very well-run business and we also made great art. I think that it's possible to do it. I think that you can judge those things at the same time. I would say that that's not just a problem for arts funding. One of the biggest problems that we've faced is that venues are obsessed with how many tickets your work is going to sell to a degree that's much more extreme than it used to be. A lot of the time that business pressure is coming from venues saying that we'd like your work but we need something that's going to sell out. There's actually two distinct things that you're talking about in the business case there. One is the business case for individual artists or arts organisations. The other is the business case, if we want to call it that, the economic impact case for the arts as a whole. The economic impact case for the arts as a whole is incredibly strong for all the reasons that have come up around the table. We absolutely bring in more money than is spent on the arts and we have all sorts of social benefits, the kind that Raymond has talked about, that can't always be adequately measured in economic impact but can be. I don't think that it's possible for individual artists or arts organisations to individually say that we're responsible for this slice of that pie of the massive economic and social benefit in the arts. I also don't really think that it's honestly possible for any arts organisation that is in receipt of public funding to say that they're making a business case. We're not. None of us are profitable businesses. We're not there to make a profit. In fact, most of the time, we have to be not for profit. Most of the time, our tickets are subsidised, massively subsidised, and they have to be or the art doesn't happen for all the sorts of reasons that we're talking about. We can't make individual business cases for our funding. The other aspect of all of this is that the stuff that does genuinely make money, let's say like a big musical, that can be a for-profit business. That business musical only exists because of the subsidised sector. An actor that works in a musical is probably working in the subsidised sector as well. They've probably been trained in some way in the subsidised sector. They might work in education sometimes. The subsidised and unsubsidised sectors are this huge overlap. That's another reason that we can't say. This bit of the arts makes a profit, so let's put some money into it. This bit of the arts doesn't, so let's not put much. It's all one big system, so we need to talk about the overall impact, not the impact of these individual organisations. Don't make us prove it, because we can't. We try, but we're lying when we do it. We do it every time, but we're lying. We know we're lying. People who fund us know that we're lying. It's all a big game. In terms of the broader discussion about funding and the public funding constraints that people have referred to, how do we encourage greater private investment in the arts? You mentioned that you had operated your organisation for a long time with zero funding. What advice would you give to people nowadays who want to operate without subsidy? Well, I think it was the most productive period for me, and it was the time when I had to make sure that the Edinburgh International Festival was all about the use of language, which was not just English. Because when the English language dominated the Edinburgh Festival fringe, you didn't have an international event. I remember having to rely on, well, it's all about the one thing that's not yet been mentioned. That is how art originates and is maintained in friendship. That means friendship between a group of human beings with shared ideals and hopes and aspirations. It means that decisions are made by a group of human beings who demand something that isn't yet being made available in society. I've been thinking of the groups of human beings that I was privileged to work with who wanted the spirit of the Edinburgh Festival to be in existence in the remaining 49 weeks of the year. The feeling that you're in an international city, a European city, not a Scottish city, not a British city, and they produced an extraordinary set of circumstances which didn't depend on money at all. It simply depended on shared values and desperately wanting to feel that they belong to something bigger than Scotland. That thing was the greatest gift given to Scotland, which was the feeling that we were not just dependent on Scottish history but on European cultural history. I advise everyone who's here today to read a book which has become a great success worldwide. It's now translated from English into Spanish. It's entitled Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. I think we're living in the age of artificiality, of dumbing down a world in which false truth, fake news, is as prominent as the real thing. The word Reclaiming Art is the key word that we should all be thinking about today. Art has been taken away from the hands of artists and placed into the power base of those that are at this moment better paid, more secure and more powerful in society. You mentioned Hugh McDermott. How do you think he would have survived in the current climate of arts funding? He would have been a state of rage. He was always in a state of rage, but it would have been increased to an amazing level. He was ignored, of course, by the Edinburgh Festival and I celebrated his 100th anniversary. He was then, of course, dead by presenting as part of the official Edinburgh Festival. I paid for the whole thing and I made it an international event because the one outstanding thing that we must see is as soon as we use the language of art, we're breaking down all national artificial barriers in time and space. We're speaking in the language which endures powerfully across the ages. I'm thinking that I rely on what the artist says, what Hugh McDermott was saying in his lifetime. I'll never forget that moment in a pub when we were sitting together and he said, Don't forget that Scotland has a future in the wider world. He reminded me of the fact that he once went to Venice to meet Ezra Pound because it was necessary for someone from Scotland to speak to this extraordinary human being who was one of the great poets alive at the time. He said, this kind of dialogue, this kind of international world, which Ezra Pound represented, belongs to us as well as all those people from all over the world who regard him as important. He went all the way to Venice to have that conversation and in a way, one single human being with very little resources in terms of actual money took the trouble to have that conversation. I'm concerned that art is not in the hands of artists and I think all of us here who represent this parliament should ask the major question because it's been asked so many times. What is our peer group? I mean, who are we in the hands of? Well, it's the case that in my long life I've seen that art is not really about artists. It's about the administration of art, well, the commodifying of the language of art so that it represents that one element which has to be present in all art expression, which removes risk. So, for example, you are guaranteed five star, seven star success in the Edinburgh Festival official programme instead of the risk of finding that you have to deal with play written in blank verse, which was TS Eliot's contribution to a very early play in the 50s in Edinburgh, a play written in blank verse, and another play which was in the French language, which would guarantee a very small audience. I'm thinking we're avoiding the one thing that all great artists use most effectively, and that is the element of risk, seeing the future, seeing that part of the reality that we have to deal with which is beyond any quantifying process in any system where we can guarantee that we're on safe ground. I think we'll just stop it there because we're looking at the future. I think that's a good place to stop it, so thank you very much. I should say that we have had apologies for Jamie Greene today, so that is now on the record. Thank you very much. We'll now move into private session. Thanks to all for coming today, making a contribution.