 Good morning, and a warm welcome to the 19th meeting of the Constitution, Europe, Excellency Affairs and Culture Committee in 2023. Our first agenda item is a decision on taking business in private, and our members can tend to take agenda item 3 in private. Yes. Thank you. Agenda item 2 is to take evidence on our culture and the community's inquiry, which is focused on taking a place-based approach to culture. This morning, we are joined by Alison Evans, who is the Interim Director of Strategy and Planning at Creative Scotland. Karen Dick, Head of Place, Partnerships and Communities at Creative Scotland. We are not having opening statements this morning, as you have submitted written evidence to the committee, and thank you for that. If we can move to questions, could I open with the Scottish Government's culture strategy committed to working with Creative Scotland to do a map of local authority support into culture and to explore future models of collaboration between the national and local bodies? I wonder if you could just give us an update on how this work is progressing. Yes, I can start with that. We began with that work, which is about mapping the structures and financial channels in the sector, and how we all work as national bodies with public bodies in the period before the pandemic. I had made some progress with that, which was clearly with other priorities through the pandemic. We were turning to that this year, and we can say a bit more about the plans for that, but I wanted to be clear about that piece of work. It is not a special planning piece. It is not an asset register of all the cultural assets across Scotland, which we do at a local level in a lot of our work, but it is not intended to be a piece of work that maps everything in Scotland on a map. I was on the committee to visit Edinburgh to a couple of culture areas, one of which was Westerhales and the Whale Arts Centre. When you say that about not being an asset register, that is obviously very much a cultural centre at the heart of a community. We also found out about opening up empty units in the local area with other organisations, partner organisations, and the collective opening within the shopping centre. How do we get a view of what is happening across Scotland if there is not a feed-in to local authorities and yourselves about all the different strands of culture in the community that are happening? Do you think that Creative Scotland is aware enough of initiatives like that in the communities? I will take that. One of the things that we do at Creative Scotland is to, apart from being through all of our colleagues and the people that work in Creative Scotland and Screen Scotland, and the connections that they have through funding, development and advocacy work that they do, one of the ways that we understand what is happening in local authority areas or in communities is through briefings that are created by my team, which we call the local authority briefings, the area briefings. Those contain information on not just what Creative Scotland funds, but how much funding goes in from the local authority, the major assets and festivals, down to film locations and areas that have been used as filming locations, to capital investment that has gone in from the National Lottery Fund through the Scottish Arts Council since the lottery began in 1995. We have all that information contained in briefings and things. There is no substitute for the work that we do in talking to people, going out into communities, attending things like funding fairs. The general work that we do through our people that apply to us for funding and us responding to their things. As you mentioned, Wales is part of the culture collective programme, which is 26 lead organisations and their partners across communities in Scotland working together in communities. On the Edinburgh example, why we would not look to have a national asset register because of the scale of resource required for that and the upkeep, which you will appreciate would be an almost daily task with a team required. When we are working locally, those exercises can be hugely helpful to have all the partners around the table and mapping not only the assets that we know about, but ones that the local community feel could be brought back into use, so exactly your example from vacant shopping centre lots, for example. I am interested to know where creative community hubs sit within your strategy as an organisation and how you would consider funding them going forward within your new funding model that you are developing. We were quite strot last week with some of the work that has been happening across Edinburgh to effectively reset the relationship between creative community hubs and agencies, particularly the Working Better Together report. Perhaps the sense that many of these community hubs feel that cultural opportunities are being offered to them, but they are not being developed from the ground up. It is not really a community development approach that is happening right now. It has been other evidence that we have seen from the University of Stirling, looking at creative Stirling, for example, how creative hubs have pivoted during Covid to take a much more inclusive approach, a much more community development approach. Does that fit with the funds that you have, or does that start to stray into other silo boxes like regeneration? How are you incorporating something that is much more holistic, much more of that placemaking into your central funding? I think that there are many examples of that in our funding mix. Obviously, we are approaching a period in which we will reset our relationships with a group of multi-year funded organisations. Some of those are larger organisations that we all know very well, but many of them are also community organisations that are working in exactly the settings that you are talking about. Beyond that, our open funding picks up many of those types of community hubs. We fund some of the networks, whether that is creative Edinburgh, creative Dundee or organisations like charts in our Gail and Bute. Awards for all is another one that is much more of a small grants scheme, so typically within that you would be seeing choirs, local halls, other kind of settings funded. We have a range of devolved funds that work in that way. I think that culture collective, which the committee has obviously heard quite a lot about, but also our place partnerships, that targeted work brings a lot of organisations and settings of that scale into our funding mix. I think that, as Alasdor said, there is a mix of things that you will find in a lot of those community-focused organisations that you might have visited or heard from before. Many of them are funded by Creative Scotland through many different routes. We have supported creative sterling through some of our targeted routes through our place partnership and through our creative industries team to develop their work, particularly looking at how they support makers and people who are living and creating things to sell or developing creative businesses in sterling, as well as the work that they do directly with communities. I think that all of those types of activities fit within some of our funding streams at some point, or with other funding programmes that are out there that are not necessarily Creative Scotland funded because there are other lottery funders, such as the national lottery community fund, the national lottery heritage fund, who also support cultural activity, especially in the national lottery community fund, where it has got a specific community focus rather than, say, for crazy things. Do you think that there is a tension between large cultural organisations and festivals such as Fringe that want to invest in communities, but sometimes that can feel very top-down and feel like, well, look, here is 60 tickets to come and see something that we are producing? One of the views from the Edinburgh creative hubs is that, if you want the margins to engage, then invest in the margins, it is quite straightforward. Is the balance right there? Is culture something that is kind of being done to people but sort of offered to people, or is it something that can emerge from communities? Is that partnership right? The view that we had is that sometimes it is not, it is seen as a kind of philanthropy. We would like to come and see our show rather than, what is it that you are creating in your community and how can we invest and develop on that? I think that there are multiple different ways that manifests itself throughout Scotland. One of the things that we developed culture collective to be able to do was to allow the communities, so that the work that develops through culture collective is created by the communities, with the artists, with the organisations supporting them all. That is intended to, if not to, maybe to, regress the balance in some areas, but to give a voice where there might not have been a voice before. In some cases, there are examples of what might be felt as if it is that sort of more, we are doing good to communities, we are offering you something, come and see it, without understanding what that community needs or what that unmet need is in that community. There are multiple different ways of doing things. Sometimes, tickets to show is exactly what people need, but that does not mean that they do not need something else alongside that, to be able to then develop what they want or to have that control over what they need in their place. If you recognise that, what role can Creative Scotland play in helping to resettle or at least question that relationship, that partnership, about whether it is working in certain areas? It is a really good question to the heart of how we try to work and embed place-based cultural strategy into everything that we do. Part of that is through our funding, part of that is through development programmes, through place partnership. Everything that we see and whether it is a funding application or work that we are doing from a development perspective, we would be looking to see exactly what you have described, organic need and opportunity described by communities and projects that are going to co-create with them. We are very vigilant to projects and applications that would parachute into areas or where that relationship is imbalanced when it is about an organisation coming into community and saying, there is an offer here for you, rather than saying to the community what is it that your community wants or needs and how can we work together to help deliver that. It is at the heart of it and you mentioned Covid and the response from the cultural sector, which is extraordinary in some places in terms of how they pivoted to offer cultural activity to their communities and to provide a wider civic service. I think that that has really focused minds on that. We are doing some work with the University of Manchester on what they call the civic turn in cultural policy, their term, not ours, because I think that in Scotland culture has very much had a civic role for a very long time. We can see changes, for example, in Edinburgh and the evaluation of the place programme, which involves all of the Edinburgh festivals in part in community activity. We can see that change has progressed in how they approach community groups or how they let community groups approach them and co-create with them. We do not really want today to be about funding, but inevitably it comes up. In the back of Mr Ruskell's line of questioning, you talked about the pivot that organisations had. We have had lots of evidence about how organisations felt Covid reset relationship with the funders for that time. They became trusted organisations when all of a sudden the restrictions on how the money could be used, the project, all that eased off and it gave an opportunity for the organisations to use their own creativity to deliver, as you said, both a cultural but also a civic and a wellbeing service to many of the communities. That is something that the organisations are saying, we would like to feel that, but they are back to the funding cycle and the tick-box exercise, as they would call it. Has Katie Scott reflected on that in the way that it is asking people to bid for funding now and how you are assessing projects? Is there any opportunity for multi-year funding for some of the organisations that are trusted partners? I think cultured collective is a very good example of where we set a programme without set objectives and Karen can speak in much more detail about that approach. The broader point, obviously, was significant emergency funds through that period. We needed to disperse them at speed, so our approach was to ensure that we had accountability for those funds but to prioritise getting them to those organisations. We are back in a position where our funds are highly competitive, our open fund. In over 10 years at Greater Scotland I have seen it so competitive and the committee will know the position with our regularly funded organisations and with our overall funding picture. It is extremely competitive in that kind of environment. In order for us to make fine tune decisions about who we fund, we are going to continue to require to see how those organisations are helping us to meet our shared objectives for the sector. I would like to say that it would be easier to secure funds from us in the wake of Covid but that is not always the case. For targeted funds such as cultured collective we have been able to be less prescriptive about the outcomes that we are looking for in communities. Particularly for cultured collective, when we were designing the fund the key point for us was that we did not want to see predetermined outcomes because the outcomes should be determined through working with those communities. The only metric that we really have for cultured collective that involves numbers is the number of freelancers or creative practitioners employed by cultured collective. The reporting that we have is fairly extensive and the organisations want to tell us the story. The co-ordinators want to tell us the story of what the funding is doing, how it is supporting artists and communities, how it is changing, how it is developing, how they are learning from each other and how they are changing as organisations or as individuals and how they are developing what they are doing in the future. Through the cultured collective programme and the place partnership programme we are particularly flexible about how we define and report on what we expect because very much partnership working is about that long-term approach. It is about understanding and flexing where the need is, which is what we can do when we have a targeted fund, when we have a model like that. When there is extreme pressure on budgets, when budgets are at standstill and there are a lot of applications and very hard decisions to make, it is not quite as easy as having those very open, flexible ways of working. For any applications or awards that we make, if people need to make changes to budgets, if they need to change what they are doing halfway through a project, they can always come and talk to us. They will have a named contact who they can get in touch with. We are very open to changing things to suit what they need to do for that project, as long as it is not completely changing what it was funded for, because that would be a bigger issue. On your final point, which I realise I have not answered fully on, eligibility for multi-year funding, absolutely organisations whose work might be described as more community focused are eligible. The processes will be built to ensure that there is no bias towards any organisational type. There are many organisations, as you know, within the current RFO portfolio whose work is focused in this way, whether it is Stove or Timespan or Wigtown, that are completely embedded within their communities, and it is absolutely what they do. I suppose that building on what Mark Ruskell was asking there, it is about responsiveness to local communities' needs, and specifically the fact that not all culture takes place within a theatre or within a traditional cultural venue. I think that a traditional culture could apply to all sorts of local culture. On how you approach things nationally, how do you recognise that fact? We do absolutely recognise that fact, and a useful illustration of that is the Scottish household survey, which asks the population about how they engage with cultural assets, be that a theatre or a gallery. That is very useful data for us, but we also run our own population survey, where we ask people about how they conceive themselves of their cultural lives, and they consistently tell us not only about going to theatres and art galleries, but about the gardening that they do and the baking that they do and the DIY that they do. There is a very strong sense of everyday participation. You spoke with Andrew Miles here. We part funded that project looking at everyday participation, and the conclusion of that, which we would agree with, is that people engage culturally in their doorstep or in their homes and on their doorstep. We are mindful of that in everything that we fund and making sure that people can engage at a local level. Part of that everyday participation study looked at when we became involved in it. It looked at Coulter in Aberdeen and also at Stornoway, because we were keen to put forward examples into that UK-wide study that included different languages, different cultural ways of taking part in culture, and an island location and places that were maybe not. In the centre of an urban environment, we looked at how people take part in cultural and creative activities in different places with different approaches. Through some of the work that we do in place partnerships and communities team, which covers Gaelic Arts, Scottish traditional arts and partnerships with local authorities, we get to see how different organisations and different people in different places want to take part in things. It is key to say that we do not only fund organisations and work with organisations that would typically be described as cultural organisations. There are community organisations that support cultural activity because they see it as a core thing that they do and want to do for their community. Especially when you are looking at rural or smaller parts of the country, a lot of the organisations that are going to be delivering things for communities are also going to be delivering leisure activities or community-focused support. There are lots of different things when we understand what a cultural opportunity or how people take part in culture in different communities across Scotland is as wide and varied as the different opportunities across Scotland. Can I ask about venues, please? During our inquiry, we have heard a lot about the importance of local venues, cultural venues and, as the convener said, the committee has taken visits in Edinburgh last week and then in Dumfries and Orkney this week and the following weeks. We have heard that many venues are under threat. I am sure that that is no surprise to you. There are lots of reasons for that. Local authority closures, funding issues and the rationalisation of the Church of Scotland estate has also been mentioned. We have also heard that many community groups themselves feel under pressure to rescue the local venue, whatever that might be, and that there is a huge responsibility on them for running them as assets. Can I ask what work is Creative Scotland doing to help communities in that particular endeavour? One of the things that I would say is that it is not Creative Scotland's role to provide support and advice around community asset transfer and things like that. There are other people out there that are much better qualified and much more experienced than us to do things like that. Particularly when people are approaching us for advice, quite often that can be around. There is a church where there is a well of building at the end of our street and it is likely to be sold off to developers and we think that it should be a cultural space. We have colleagues inside Creative Scotland who can give advice and support. We do not have a capital programme, particularly if a building needs that refurbishment, but we can highlight other funders or other organisations that can provide that advice and play that connecting role as a national body where it is either pointing to examples of when people have taken on assets, the challenges and opportunities that that brings. Or pointing them to other bodies or other people that can help and advise. What I would say is that very often, particularly if it comes to people divesting themselves of these assets, they have a challenge of themselves in managing assets. Passing that challenge on to community groups and particularly where those community groups may be volunteer led, it can be extremely challenging for them to take that on without further funding, advice, support, information on how to manage a building and then that future on-going support there. There are instances where we have supported programmes that run in some of those assets or some of those places that have been taken over by communities or by creative groups. However, it has to be about the programme that they are running rather than just that retention of an asset. It is unfortunate in some places where communities lose key community assets because they are brought up by developers or are developed into housing. That is one of the things that, as Alistair said earlier, we find civic space where communities find space to take part in things, to come together. There is a lot of that being lost due to the changes in the states and things that you mentioned. However, it is key to make sure that when people are thinking about taking on assets and taking control of those buildings, they understand what they are letting themselves in for essentially. In our Aberdeen place partnership, one of the things that was developed through that was a programme for individuals who were thinking about taking on assets. It took them through, very tailored, what they might need to do, the challenges, the legal responsibilities, how they might form into a kick or into a charity, et cetera. At the start of that, there were quite a few people interested in taking on specific assets in Aberdeen and at the end there was only one, because it is a massive challenge and it will change what those individuals and groups are doing. It can take them away, particularly if they have come together, like the Stove and Dumfries, when they came together as individual artists because they were concerned about losing that high street property. It took them away from their individual day-to-day roles as artists and as developers. As people who are developing their own creative practice, there is only so long that some people can change from being a maker and an artist into managing a capital development when it might not be what you want to do with your life, but you definitely want to make sure that your community does not lose it. I entirely take the point about taking on a building or whatever and it depends on what is going on, what you are using it for, but in terms of what Creative Scotland likes to see prioritised, do you have any criteria that you particularly like communities taking on venues to progress? I think that that would be entirely up to that community. If they were applying to us for funding, which is quite often how we engage with people, although we do support development, we do advise and support. If they are applying to us for funding, our funding criteria are on the site and it would be about the type of work that they are putting on, how they have understood the demand for that, but quite often people might want to test and try different things to see what their audience or participants might want, especially if it is a new space. Instead of coming in for large programmes of work, trying and testing different things to see what sticks and see what communities might want to do, looking at what other people have developed in places, but anyone who is applying for us, we would not expect different things from different people when it comes to our criteria. It is all down to that local context and how they express that in an application and how they have understood what the need is locally. I am very glad to hear that answer. Can I move on to a slightly different topic? I just wanted to build on some of those very important points around assets. I just wondered if there is any more that you may want to add about how, together, we will be benefitted by urging developers and organisations with space to consider the creative community. As a new group of tenants or a different utilisation for properties that they have, I represent Edinburgh Northern and Leith. That is something that I do on a regular basis and we have seen the benefit of such entities in Edinburgh Northern and Leith, whether it is out of the blue or initiatives that wasps and Edinburgh pallet have undertaken, for example. The reason that I emphasise that is that, clearly, it has been highlighted to us by Professor Stevenson in evidence that he gave that a key issue is meeting overheads. The more that those core costs can be shared, how beneficial is that to the creative community and how together can we potentially do more to urge private sector developers and, indeed, the public sector to utilise space to provide areas for creative businesses and organisations where they can potentially have somebody else manage those core costs and or share them. I think that it is a perennial problem there around when you have an asset and people want to be able to have an income from it or to sell it or to raise money from it. You mentioned wasps there and quite often wasps have had in the past a challenge in explaining to people where there is an empty space or an empty building. If we had access to that, we could take it on and bring artists in and that will have a beneficial impact. As time has gone on and that model has proven itself, it has become a lot clearer to people that the potential benefits of having a creative community developing and bringing people together in one place. Edward Palat is a really good example of a space that was a meanwhile space. It was a waiting development and then came in and bringing everyone together in one place where there was demand. That is the key point. If there is demand from a creative community in order to access things, how we negotiate those relationships between businesses or organisations that own property in order to bring people in and explain that benefit. It is a challenge for us, it is a challenge for the creative community, it is a challenge for local authorities and for other people. One of the key things I think are the places that have been helpful in negotiating those relationships have been things like local authority arts development officers or people in local areas who can actually be that conduit between businesses or owners or local authority landlords and the creative sector where they want to come in and do things and they can help to translate and explain the benefits of that. That is one of the impacts of the loss of arts development officers in many parts of Scotland is that there is not that conduit between the landlords and the owners and then the creative communities to be able to explain that benefit there. It is something that we have looked at, many of our place partnerships have looked at particularly in places like Inverclyde where there are large spaces where creative communities do want to have ownership and go into some of those spaces. It has been successful in some places but there is also the fact that those are quite often temporary spaces that then may be lost once the opportunity planning permission comes through for a developer to develop. I would be really interested in further discussion about that. I think that there is work that we have done in certain parts of the organisation particularly in visual arts around what artists need and what spaces they need that would potentially be interesting to try and see what we can do together. There is a more general point here about the profile of culture in the local planning landscape. As you will know, the definition of local authority requirement for adequate cultural provision means that sometimes we do not, as a culture sector, have the profile that we would like. It is great that Scotland is not a statutory consultancy in community planning partnerships. Sometimes it feels like we need to be knocking the door from the outside to get into some of those conversations at a local level and economic developments being part of that and ensuring that we are in those conversations. Our creative industries team are adept at getting themselves into those conversations where they can. I think that that wider point is salient here as well. Thank you for coming to the panel. In response to Mr Cameron, Ms Dickie said that we do not have a capital programme. I hear what you are saying about other funding sources available for capital funds, but given the scale of the challenges that there are as outlined by Mr Cameron, in terms of cultural venues, should Creative Scotland not have a cultural programme, is that something that has been done? Is being considered or will be considered? From the advent of lottery in the 90s, our capital investment has been significant at over £150 million, but that has leveraged in more than double that. We have evaluated or reviewed the extent of that investment. It is somewhere in the region of 140 projects around Scotland that we have invested in, so it is absolutely significant. We do not have a capital programme at the moment, so the options for those looking for capital support would be into the Scottish Government. Heritage Lottery, levelling up at a UK level, has capital funds. There are routes, but the eligibility for some of those schemes and the competitive nature of them means that it is extremely difficult to get capital funding. Our funding mix at the moment does not allow for that. We do not have restricted capital funds from the Scottish Government. Our national lottery funding is now very much focused on our open project funds for individuals and organisations, which are heavily oversubscribed. It is a concern that we have on a few levels, so it is certainly the fabric of the building of the asset base around Scotland. That is not just Victorian theatres but much newer buildings as well. There is a need for repair and renovation for small capital and equipment funds. We are doing some further work to quantify that. It will not be a small number, as I am sure you will appreciate. The focus at the moment is on net zero, so not only do we have an estate that is looking for investment but also needs to adapt to meet net zero for 2045 and 2030 for the targets that you will know for Glasgow and Edinburgh. We are beginning to work on that. We have appointed officers who are looking specifically at the climate emergency and working with partner organisations to try to understand more about what building adaptation needs to take place. Can I move on to the issues of mapping and collaboration? I know that you have already touched on mapping, but one of the actions in the culture strategy for Scotland was to work with Creative Scotland to map local authorities' support for culture and to explore future models of collaboration between national and local bodies. I do not think that you mentioned that in your written submission to this inquiry. I just wondered if you could take the opportunity now to make any observations on that particular sentence in the strategy. I think that Alasdair mentioned just at the beginning that we had been working on the research and the report pre-pandemic. In March 2020, we had a completed report from the consultants who had spoken to local authorities and discussed that. We had in the diary a meeting with local authorities in order to discuss the findings and then publish it. What we wanted to do was publish it alongside an action plan, which said what we were going to do going forward alongside the Scottish Government. Unfortunately, that was in March 2020. We became fully focused on delivering the emergency funding support through Creative Scotland. There has been significant pressure on local authorities and alleles, the cultural trust. There was not really a gap between then and now when we could sit down with our local authority partners and start to map out why they want to work with us. Things have also considerably changed in the financial context. The report covers the finances of local authorities and staffing. We were asking local authorities and alleles how they wanted to work with us in the future and what the different things they wanted us to do where. Things have now changed. It is in our work plan for this year to revisit that and look at what the next steps are there. We can do that with colleagues in COSLA, in local and community leisure UK and in solace, alongside the Scottish Government. It is one of those things that had to be put aside because of the pandemic. We recognise that the context in local authorities has significantly changed. The data that we have there is potentially no longer relevant. At the point that we had a draft report, we were looking at a decrease of around £16 million in local authority culture budgets. That was over a five-year period. Those figures are very difficult to get at. Forensic Accounting needs to be undertaken to understand that. We would expect, unfortunately, that position to be even more challenging at this point. We need to return to that and understand it. Another point that is worth picking up is that we are waiting to see a revised culture strategy action plan from the culture team in the Scottish Government. We are hoping that that will set out the responsibilities and the delivery mechanisms and the monitoring, etc. On the culture strategy, we believe that that will be published shortly. That is important because it will absolutely set out the context that this piece of mapping work will progress from. I wonder if, on what you have just said, you look at the example of Sport Scotland and the strategy position that it has for being involved in community plan partnerships. It is quite similar in that it also has a responsibility for elite sport, which could be seen as the national performing companies and the other work that you do, but also grassroots areas at the bottom. Are you a wee bit jealous of their position in local authorities and do you think that it would help if Creative Scotland was in the same footing in terms of the wellbeing society and where we want to move forward? I think that we are on record as saying that we would be positive about being a statutory partner in community planning. Sport Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland and others are more engaged on that level. It does not stop us, I do not think, working very effectively with all local authorities and helping them to develop their strategies and plans, but it does give rise to the potential for uneven strategic locus across the country, which would be our concern. The briefing that Spice provided to you for this meeting highlighted that the local outcome improvement plans do not always mention culture. They may have cultural plans and cultural strategies that sit to the side of that, but we would want to see them being absolutely there and central. The more central we can be to local planning protocols, the better. I would like to explore two separate questions. First of all, in your submission you mentioned an example of place-based partnerships is the development of the Angus cultural strategy. Just this week it was revealed the degree to which Creative Scotland is funding Scotland's cities over smaller rural areas. It was highlighted that Creative Scotland was spending £50.85 per resident on projects in Edinburgh, while in Angus spending was only £4.09 per resident. I just wondered whether Creative Scotland recognised that as a major issue, and how would you propose to adopt a place-based approach to culture when funding is so skewed away from rural areas such as Angus? I think that we both have perspectives on that. We appreciate that this is an issue that comes up with us often. Part of it relates to the data and what is available in how we publish it, so we can talk about that. There are some assumptions that are made about how we fund and the landscape that we fund into that is also worth picking up, but we do recognise that we do not fund by formula, whether that is per head or across an equitable amount to the 32 local authorities or by any other formula. There are structural barriers in place, so we fund against the ask of us from across the country. A lot of the development work that we do is about improving the numbers and rates of people who feel comfortable applying into our funds from small grants right through to our RFOs. If I can pick up on the data, we do not feel that our investment is skewed across the country. We recognise that Glasgow and Edinburgh have high levels of funding from us, but there are a lot of national organisations that have their base there. There are places where artists congregate and collect and networks from those areas will come into us. There are organisations such as Tracks based in Edinburgh and Tracks working in traditional arts across Scotland. There are quirks in the data, so Aberdeenshire appears within Aberdeen postcodes. A lot of grants into island communities appear as inverness, for example. We recognise that we are in the process of digitising a lot of our operational systems, so we recognise that we can be better at explaining where the areas of benefit are rather than just the postcode location of where the grant is made. When analysis is like the example that you were giving about Fife and Angus, that is drawn from our website and relates to the postcode of the applicant. There is quite a lot in there, and as I said, we can improve it, but I think that there are some assumptions about how we effectively fund the landscape that we are funding into. It is important to note that Creative Scotland is not the only funder or supporter of culture or cultural activity. The local authority, third sector, commercial businesses and other funders, such as Museums Gallery Scotland, the National Heritage Fund and Community Fund, all make an example of what happens in a place. The types of cultural activity, the opportunities for people in a place. I think that, particularly if we use Angus as an example, one of the reasons that we developed the Angus Place Partnership was to have an opportunity, which is often a route into place partnerships, but it also recognises perhaps where we might have less applications from, where there might no longer be an arts development function within a local authority. Those are some of the criteria for our place partnership targeted programme, where there is an opportunity for us to be part of something, to help bring people together across an area to look at what the challenges are and how they can address them. For Angus, it was the celebration of the declaration of our growth. That was a route in where we could support with our funding and alongside other partners a sort of more raising of the visibility of culture within that place, particularly the delivery of a small grants scheme, which then can quite often give people their first opportunity to apply for funding. Quite often people might look at Creative Scotland and think, that's not for me, that's for somebody else. I would never have a chance or they wouldn't support my type of project. By having small grants in those areas and particularly focused at that first step and encouraging people and having that development wrap around that quite often can only happen when people are able to connect locally, then we can actually build that capacity. We can support more applications to come from that area. In Angus, we are also working with Angus Alive, the cultural trust that has now brought in people's focus on developing culture and are continuing to deliver and support the delivery of the cultural heritage strategy. I think that there are differences across the country. We wouldn't ever say that there isn't. We don't fund on a per capita basis. We don't analyse our funding on a per capita basis. I much prefer to look at success rates because that tells me how people are applying, whether we have with any interventions, whether it's going out to funding fairs and being in solcotes and answering questions from anyone that comes into that building along with other funders. Have we helped to change things? Are we getting more applications from an area? Are we getting more successful applications from an area? Because then you can actually see things change and develop. However, as with anything, the case of Scotland's budget has not increased. When we are going out and doing that development work and encouraging people to apply, are we essentially setting them up to then be unsuccessful because we can't support everything? When we are encouraging and supporting people to raise applications from a place, we are very aware that our funding is not increasing. The challenge that we have to support as much as we want to support is very difficult. I appreciate the point that you are making that some of the funding for the big cities reflects the fact that people come into the big cities to access stuff. However, when you are measuring the success rates, do you also take account of the fact that there are some parts of the country, and I represent the western Isles, where there is a lot of funding? Visiting those places would involve an overnight stay and, therefore, it is just out of people's reach. That is not a case against the centres of excellence that we have in the Burrell collection or the National Museum of Scotland. Are we measuring success in terms of allowing people to access those national assets when they come from places that are so far away that an overnight stay is involved? It would be interesting to see what we think about success, but I would also point to things such as the travelling gallery and the things that we fund because we do not fund the Burrell collection or the museums, but the travelling gallery, which we do fund, which takes amazing art out in the back of a lorry in the same way that the screen machine does for cinema and is one of my favourite things ever because it is a cinema in a lorry. I have seen Star Wars in Barra. I saw brave at Endorney and also the Constant Gardner when it was covering for the Edencourt redevelopment a very long time ago, the screen machine one. Those types of activity are really key in doing that and it does recognise that for some places. The committee is thinking about things like 20-minute neighbourhoods, etc. Quite often, my response to things like 20-minute neighbourhoods is that if you are in Thurso and you want to go to the cinema, going to Edencourt can be for some places in the island a four-hour or five-hour drive there, never mind back, so it is an overnight stay. There is a real question to be had about how we support things in communities that are very far away from other places, how we support island communities. There is a recognition that we have that there are additional costs, particularly in bringing things to islands or for people on islands, touring or taking things away because of the costs of travel, because of the costs of overnight stays and also because of the challenges as well in some parts of Scotland of finding accommodation. The barriers that can happen with travel and with weather, etc. All of those things are taken into account when we consider applications but also when we are looking at where funding goes. It is one of the reasons why we do not do per capita spend because that would always skew the small populations to the top of the list even though they may not get a very, very small amount compared to other places. On the back of that, there are particular barriers in terms of scale and capacity of organisations, particularly those in rural areas, which might lend themselves to be quite suited to applying for a small grant scheme but perhaps less suited to applying for a bigger level of project. I am thinking in particular about core funding, so it is easy for organisations to apply for a wee small project but if the core funding is not there for investment in building an asset or management or cleaners or paying for heating and all that, they are never going to get to a point where they can come to you with a bigger, more transformative application to serve their communities. It is a consideration, although many of the organisations that we currently fund through our regular funding portfolio are based in more rural areas. I am the lead officer for timespan up in Helmsdale in the Highlands and they provide a programme of cutting-edge, challenging contemporary art within the Art and Heritage Centre that they are based in. It can take some time and lots of development for people to get to a stage where they apply for bigger grants and quite often the first step is to have a small grant through a more open programme and then have a few of those and then apply for larger scale funding. However, if people have strong plans and strong aims, programmes and engagement with their community, there should not be anything stopping them from applying for that as long as they can demonstrate that they can manage the funding. Do you recognise that the core funding issue is a big issue and perhaps this is not just about rural arts community hubs, it is about urban as well. If the money is not there to employ a manager to employ that core staff, then everybody is running around writing short-term applications for project funding, but is there anybody to run the show? We recognise that we are committed to providing multi-year funding that should include core elements for as many organisations as we can. This autumn, we will open applications to our multi-year funding programme, the current RFOs and others that will want to reapply. It will be inevitably really competitive, we think, in the region of around 350 organisations will be expected to apply for that. We undertook a funding review after the last exercise in 2018 and that was one of the big messages that came out of that. The demand for, exactly as you say, that stability for organisations not to be moving from project to project and be making repeated applications to us and other funders for that. It will be completely dependent on the budget envelope that we have at that point, the extent to which we can make good on that and offer that multi-year funding to as many organisations as possible, but it is absolutely our intention to do so. Geographies are really an important lens in that process and we have been making sure throughout our RFO assessment and the decisions that we have to take to prioritise within it that geography is considered in its current services. Organisations like Northlands glass, for example, would be another one as well as timespand that are remote. We recognise the need for them to access core funding to survive. I think that it is a really strong message that has come through in a lot of our evidence sessions, so at least we put our sessions in Edinburgh on Friday and one of the board members of Will Art has described it as donut funding. Over time it just diminishes the organisation not to have that core element and almost exacerbated if there is a building associated with an organisation. Even for those who do not have responsibility for a building, that key administration management strategy element had to be supported as well. I will bring it in, Mr Bibby, if that is okay. Thank you, convener. Earlier in the session you mentioned about meeting net zero and I just wondered if you could outline what that looks like for Creative Scotland, what costs have been configured to date and perhaps elucidate a bit more on your plans. As I said, we have appointed a lead in this area of our work but it is not entirely new to us. We have worked on this for a significant amount of time. The climate emergency and environmental sustainability is one of our four strategic priorities. A lot of that work has been done with and through Creative Carbons Scotland, which are a key organisation to provide support to the sector. They do a range of development work, policy development, but they also, importantly, manage the process of collecting data from creative organisations in the sector, which, over time, has given us the footprint. The carbon footprint for the sector and other important data around energy. That is part of our strategies for the climate emergency sustainability plan, which was published just over a year ago. It is extremely ambitious. I think that 7 to 80 action points most for us, but there is not really any point in being anything other than hugely ambitious in this space when you look at the time frames. Some of our ambitions are around mitigation, others are around adaptation and others are around the just transition and ensuring that climate justice is being done. I think that the first of those, I am not saying that it is the easiest but it is the one that we have more of a handle on and can be quantified. As I said earlier, we are starting some work to try and understand what building adaptation might look like, the potential of digital and understanding of the travel footprint of the sector. We have huge international ambitions and we want Scotland's diverse culture to be visible all around the world. That has a carbon footprint attached to it, so how can we work smarter in that space as well? We are addressing all those issues, we are not doing it alone, so a lot of what we are doing is bringing people together in cohorts from the sector to look for creative responses to those challenges. The sector is uniquely placed to vision what that would be and to bring the public around some of those ideas. It is not just about our buildings, it is about the content on stage, for example, and the issues that are being raised by our RFOs and many are already in that space. Some of our culture collective projects organisations are really focused on this work, Creative Dundee, for example, on their Cultivate project and Open Road in Aberdeen in Fiti, where quite a lot of their work in their project in Fiti was looking at a community that is on the edge that might be immediately one of the first affected by climate change and by that impact not just on their being a coastal community but the issues with oil and the potential changes to the economic infrastructure of the city that they are a part of. There are a lot of creative organisations that are already engaged in looking at this and trying to vision what the future might be. As we have just discussed, there has been concerns raised about the concerns over the unfairness of funding distribution. One specific concern that I am aware of is about the disparity of funding between the areas that sell the most national lottery tickets and the areas that receive the most national lottery funding. That was something that was reinforced by community organisations in the areas of multiple deprivation last week. I just wanted to ask you, is this something that you recognise, what analysis, if any, have you done of this disparity between areas that sell the most national lottery tickets and get the most national lottery funding? Have you mentioned a number of factors that you take into account when you allocate funding and geography? Do you factor in that? I think that whether we've done the exact analysis between lottery sales and the provision of culture generally or the level of investment by Greater Scotland, we probably haven't done it in that level of detail but the linkage that you've described is there in terms of lottery sales being highest in areas of multiple deprivation and we absolutely do understand the landscape in terms of the index of multiple deprivation and where we fund. It's a concern when we consider where need and opportunity is in everything that we do. We have been partners on numerous regeneration projects, which I appreciate is probably only the tip of the iceberg, but many other initiatives as well that specifically targets private groups. I think that that point around lottery sales versus lottery investment, again, I think that sometimes postcode doesn't necessarily tell the whole story here because we fund the data that we provide as of the postcode of the applicant, not necessarily where activity takes place. When you look at our organisations we fund or the individuals we fund, often they might not exactly be in that, the thing that is the highest on the SIMD map that is in the highest 5 per cent or 10 per cent, but they might be on the street next door. Often we also recognise that some of the postcodes for buildings, particularly cultural buildings, are not necessarily factored into the index in the way that would be represented when we map against that. For example, the Citizen Theatre in Glasgow doesn't seem to show up as being part of the same area around it, however the area around it is fairly high on the index of multiple deprivation. It is something that we recognise. Those communities have the capacity, the social capacity to apply for funding, to have support and that ability to put time aside to apply for funding, or indeed, as we were talking earlier about assets, that ability to protect and keep hold of a community asset, that can be much more challenging in areas where there are other multiple challenges. We are working with colleagues in organisations such as the Cora Foundation, where one of their place-based working involves putting a person into a place and then supporting people to determine what they need to do and what they need to do to support their community development. That's one of the ways that we might tackle that or support people in those areas to be able to achieve what they want for their cultural lives, not just by investing money in things. I think that there's a lot of focus on funding, but that people capacity, the person, the creative spark in a community that can make a difference, is really important in those areas too. I'm looking to see if there are any final questions. It looks a bit exhausted this morning, so thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. No doubt we'll see you again over the course of our deliberations, but thank you very much for this morning. We now move into private session.