 Good morning, and a warm welcome to the fifth meeting of the Constitution, Europe External Affairs and Culture Committee. As a result of proposed membership change, this will be Ms Webber's last appearance at the committee, and I would like to thank Ms Webber for her contribution during her time on the committee. I wish her well for your new parliamentary duties. Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Under agenda item 1, members are invited to decide whether to consider our evidence. This should be a private session on agenda item 4. Are we all agreed? Agenda item 2, we are moving to our pre-budget scrutiny work. The committee is currently looking at the continuing impact of Covid-19 on the culture sector and its longer-term future. This will be the committee's third panel on the topic, and this morning we have two panels. We will hear from Lucy Cassett, Chief Executive Officer of the Museums Gallery of Scotland, John McVeigh, Chief Executive Officer of the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television, Alison Reeves, Scotland manager of making music, Fiona Sturgeon-Share, Chief Executive Officer of the Federation of Scottish Theatres, and a warm welcome to our panel this morning. We are tight for time as we do for two panels, so I would be very welcome to sink questions and answers this morning. I am going to move straight to questions. Can I remind members if they have a direct question for a particular witness? If they could name that witness and direct the questions. I would request that the panel please come in only if you have something to add to what has been said by other members as we have considerable time restrictions this morning. I will move to questions from Ms Boyack. It is good to see the witnesses in front of us this morning. I wanted to kick off with a follow-on from last week's evidence. John McVeigh, if you want to give us a bit of information in your evidence to us, you talked about the potential privatisation of Channel 4, potentially having drastic implications for our independent film and TV sector. We have some very good evidence from the BBC about the importance of production in Scotland. I wonder if you wanted to talk about how we avoid the risk of recovery to the indie sector that you have talked about in your report to us. Thank you very much and good morning everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity to meet with you all today and help you in your deliberations, particularly looking forward to the recovery of our cultural industries, which is one of the UK's fastest growing parts of the economy. If you look at the multiples from Channel 4's research into the local economy from spending on TV production in any part of the UK, but we will focus on Scotland, you can see that it has significant ripple effects across all of the cultural industries. We employ writers, actors, directors, designers and musicians. Any decline in spending from Channel 4 will have a further knock-on effect in the creative economy in Scotland. The major worry about Channel 4 will leave the remit to one side, because I think that the remit can be delivered in a number of ways, whether it is in public or private ownership. The major problem for the UK Government's proposals for Channel 4 is that Channel 4 is currently a publisher or broadcaster, which means that it is not allowed to produce its own programming. The proposals for the current Government are that whoever would own Channel 4 going forward would be allowed to produce its own programming. Now, that necessarily and logically means that there will be a decline in commissioning from independent producers. Channel 4 relies on independent producers, it has quotas throughout of London and a significant amount of those quotas are met by Scottish independent producers. If I am the new private owner of Channel 4 and I have my own in-house production, the first thing I do is look at what slots I am not going to commission from external suppliers. Inevitably, that will mean that Scottish companies will not be commissioned where previously they might have. Of course, the scale of that and when that is is quite difficult to be precise about, but we have modelled that and we have some independent research which will show that over 10 years that is a transfer of value from small Scottish SMEs, British SMEs, entrepreneurs, and I know that you have met some of them. That will be a transfer of value of 10 years of £3.7 billion to new private shareholders. That will mean a decline of opportunities. It also means a decline of aspiration because if I am a new small start-up business in Glasgow or Dundee or Edinburgh and I have an idea that I think would work really well for Channel 4, I may no longer have that opportunity because those slots may no longer exist. Of course, Channel 4 has served a critical purpose over its nearly four decades in the TV sector and that is meant to support small SMEs and start-ups. That is part of its primary public purposes. That allows me to aspire to work for Channel 4. If I am successful and I make that programme for Channel 4, I am now a network production company and I now have an opportunity to supply to other broadcasters. The ripple effects on that going downstream are considerable not only in terms of actual reduction in spend on existing companies but also a reduction in the potential aspiration and ambition of new businesses. We think that that is very detrimental. The Westminster Government has tried to reassure us how important the independent sector is but we have no idea what that means in practice. If Channel 4 is allowed to make own and control its own programming, there will be an impact on independent production. That is very helpful. I noticed that there was a comment in your submission about the need for investment in training and new entrants to the sector from the Scottish Government as a response to Covid. We had lots of evidence from freelancers last week. It is to open the question up to the other representatives in front of us today about the change that could potentially be made now. Briefly from PACT and then hopefully from the Federation of Scottish Theatres about potentially how theatres and venues could support freelancers remaining by having longer-term contracts. A brief comment from PACT and then maybe from Fiona from the Federation of Scottish Theatres. Even with my comments about Channel 4, we are experiencing a boom in production across the UK right now. We are short of at least 30,000 jobs and this is an amazing opportunity in terms of the recovery in the UK audio-visual sector because of a number of interventions both by the Scottish Government's agencies and by Westminster has led the UK to recover much quicker than our competitors. That has resulted in an overheating of the market because production is now booming, which means that we have a shortfall of jobs and we would like to work with all administrations and parliaments to see how we can deliver more opportunities. These are high-value careers and jobs and we are currently short of many, many critical grades and we would like to see more focus on that in order to remain competitive and in order to facilitate growth of Scottish businesses. Fiona Sturgeon-Shia. We got evidence last week from Beck to the Musicians Union. We are particularly worried about freelancers and the issue about venues and theatres not being able to have productions on as you have had in the past. I was wondering if you had a comment. It is almost a contrast from Pact or saying that they have lots of job opportunities where in your sector we heard that people were losing out and that there was a need to maybe change how productions were commissioned. I do not know if you had a comment on that. Fiona Sturgeon-Shia. Thank you very much for the question. You will see from our own submission that the freelance workforce is a concern that we have held for a long time. Our membership is now 50-50 individuals and organisations. We are not just representing companies and buildings. Our membership also includes individuals. Many of these are freelance employees as well. I agree that longer-term contracts are one part of the solution, but what we said in our submission was that it is not the only way that the reliance on organisations is not the only way to support freelancers and that they can be supported. The concept of being a freelancer is often something that needs better support in general, so there is a bigger context to that. Certainly, our members would welcome the opportunity to work with more freelancers. My previous job worked for Playwrights Studio Scotland for 10 years, so I was working directly with playwrights and those mutually beneficial relationships that can be built up over time are absolutely something that we worked very closely with the FST and the wider sector on that. I think that the issue comes back to what is within our submission around the complexity of business models and the long-term funding situation. With more funding and more opportunities, we would be able to look at that fuller infrastructure and provide more support for organisations to do that but also individuals. Would your priority be more multi-year funding for the theatre sector? One of the issues that got raised was about community access and about accessing existing facilities. Is that something that you are thinking about in terms of longer funding but also a community impact that would support people to be in employment? Yes, absolutely. We are looking at the full picture, as I said. Our membership is pretty diverse. It is not just theatre buildings, it is right across the infrastructure. What we are trying to do is to show a fuller picture of the infrastructure and how that could be supported long-term. It is every aspect of it, not just prioritising one over the other. It sounds very utopian, I understand. On that last comment from Ms Boyack, I will go to Ms Reeves first. I can remind all the witnesses if they want to come in on a particular issue that has not been detected at the myth that they could put an R in the chat and it will be passed over to Ms Reeves. It is nice to be here with you representing the non-professional arts sector today. As I said in our submission, the staff that we employ, the people that we pay in our sector, are almost always freelancers. There are very few people in full-time contracts in our sector. Those are people who have portfolio careers. A lot of them are employed in the music education sector, so school teachers and college lecturers, or our professional musicians and their own right. To support the people who are working in our sector, we need to make sure that their other work is protected as well. We have done a lot of talking about instrumental music tuition in schools and how those people, during those jobs, need to be protected as well. Of course, all those conversations about professional musicians working in the professional sector are crucial to us as well. We need to make sure that those people are protected in every element of their portfolio careers. Some of that is about how we protect freelance workers overall in society. In our sector, we need to make sure that our groups are returning as quickly as possible so that people can get back to the strand of their work so that they can add it back into their careers. That is why we need to make sure that our groups are able to return as quickly as possible. That is dependent on lots of factors at the moment, which I can talk about at more length if you would like me to, or we can cover that in a different question. It will come as no surprise if I frame my question in this regard. I am moving to the health and social sport committee. At that committee, it was mentioned that every committee should take a health approach to things when they are looking at how they assess things and allocate funding. That is for Fiona Sturgeon-Shea specifically, because in the performance arts section, you speak about health and wellbeing. I am trying to figure out whether you have ever thought about or have you measured that in trying to translate that into a case for more funding if you can demonstrate the health and wellbeing benefit that your sector brings. Can you explain a bit more about some of the tangibles that are being realised in terms of the health and wellbeing sector? I am sure that there will be studies. As a membership organisation, we have not done that specifically, but I am aware of many organisations that are working closely in that area. It began as organisations to work in that area and to evidence that really strongly. More work needs to be done in that area, for sure. If you need more evidence of that, I can obviously survey our members and get some really good case studies for you. That would be helpful. I can provide that in writing. I will go to Ms Reeves for a comment in the wellbeing work. Good morning. Thank you for having me along this morning from the museums and galleries of Scotland. We have done some literature review work around the evidence of the impact of museums and galleries on health and wellbeing. That will be relevant to me. I will certainly be happy to share that with the committee. I have got some nice case studies around that. I think that one of the things in looking at the idea of cross-portfolio working and the aspiration to cross-portfolio resourcing comes from some of these really strong exemplar projects that have run. They tend to run a short-term project that tries to explore a particular area, but there is one example that gives us an indication of what might be possible. That is the Football Memories project. I am not sure whether you are aware of that project that has been run by the Football Museum that originated. It is a project that is in partnership with Alzheimer's Scotland. It has been running for over 10 years now. That is one area where museum collections have been demonstrated to have really beneficial health outcomes for people suffering from dementia. The research study shows that the project is really beneficial and works. The one example is probably where there is now some money coming in from health boards, so the Greater Glasgow Health and Climate has put money into that project, which has now been running for a long time. There are lots of examples of projects where museums and galleries are offered programming in support of autism in support of a range of different health issues. We know that that works and there is research to show that it works. What would be great to see is if we could start to mainstream some of those projects, rather than seeing those short-term funded opportunities. That is something that we have presented to the National Partnership for Culture on. We would hope that there might be some recommendations coming out around that later on at the end of the year. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to say that Mother Wolf Football Club is an excellent example of this project. It was one of the pilots. I know this project very well. I can speak highly in a full foot, Ms Cassett. I will bring it in, Ms Reeves. As Lucy was saying, there is lots of published research on the impact of arts on health. Definitely on music in health, it is a very well-established idea. We can point you to some studies if you would like to look at them. We see groups now that are specifically targeting elements of health that we know that music is most beneficial for. There is a big growth in choirs specifically for dementia. People with dementia and their families are part of the dementia-inclusive singing network. That is a well-established idea that singing is very beneficial for lung health. That is really relevant. Here we have a group called the chain gang who support people with poor lung health. They are doing some work on long Covid and looking into how singing can benefit that. It is a well-researched and understood idea that is beneficial. To be able to monitor that specifically across our sector would be difficult and possible. That is why we are always asking for music to be considered under different national performance outcomes than just culture. If it is considered under music, if it is considered under communities, we can start to see some monitoring of the impact across the country of music making on health. It was an observation. It was great to hear some of those examples, but they were all at the elder part of the generation in terms of dementia. What I am trying to get to is that health and wellbeing and trying to really level up the agenda with those people that are in the depravate and provide. That provides a springboard for people to leave and give them the confidence if they have been in an abusive environment. That is the sort of thing in terms of longer-term rescuing them when they are at the earlier part of their life rather than trying to treat the diseases at the end. It was great to hear some of those examples specifically around dementia. Thank you very much. How does that materialise in terms of funding and discussions with, for example, health and social care partnerships? Are there music projects that are going to the NHS locally and there is a discussion about social prescribing and they are getting funding to do that kind of work? That is just a useful add-on that the NHS GPs may be aware of that has voluntary projects happening locally, but there is no actual direct funding. I am particularly present for the non-professional sector today. It is something that we are very mindful of with the conversations around social prescribing and how we might engage with that. It is an occasional occurrence where you might get a project that has the funding to speak directly to healthcare, but in our experience, it is usually at the moment that the projects themselves within the communities decide that they want to have those conversations. We are not experiencing the health services approaching the art sector to ask for those partnerships. We do not have a clear view of how social prescribing might work for our sector. We have concerns over the resources that our sector might be expected to provide that we do not have. It is not clearly shown to us how those people who are coming from the health sector would be supported to move into our groups. We are open to those conversations, but we cannot see a clear model yet that would not rely on our groups making a lot of effort at the moment. We are not resourced and not skilled enough to do that. Where we are open to having those conversations, we are certainly not seeing a model that we could engage with at the moment. It is probably worth saying that, although this is our last formal committee taking evidence, we are having a round table tomorrow and at the round table are a number of third sector organisations that are working with younger people using music and arts in that. I am going to move now to questions from Dr Allan. Following on from some of the themes that have been mentioned, I suppose we have a general question followed by a couple of very specific ones. I am possibly initially a question for perhaps Alison Reeves and Lucy Cassett, given what you have said about the importance of the arts and music and museums in the community. Since we are going to be talking about a budget, do you feel that budgeting recognises the importance of mainstreaming the arts? I am not going to be the person who goes on record and says that in the middle of a Covid crisis we should be talking about what the NHS spends on the arts, but everybody recognises, as you have said, that the arts have a benefit in health, they have a benefit in town planning, they have a benefit in business. Do you feel that we budget in a way that is joined up enough to recognise those things? I was just going to come back and give a couple of examples in relation to the previous question, which were organisations that I was talking about that have a long-term commitment in the arts. I know that you have had a submission from the arts and education recovery group, and I think that that might be particularly interesting to look at in terms of some of that. Organisations such as star catchers and clown doctors and elderflowers who absolutely work in those areas, so that could be interesting for the committee to have a look at. I am sorry, but you will need to repeat the question just in brief for me. My question is really, do we budget as a country that recognises the need to have joined up working between the arts and different sectors, or does the expenditure always fall on the arts sector to do that exercise? I think that individual organisations work extremely hard to diversify their income. There are organisations that are receiving funding from a whole broad range, but it is difficult. I think that, certainly within our submission, our members were calling for a kind of unity of all of those bodies and policymakers to look at that in concert, I suppose, so absolutely. I think that it is difficult, although the culture spend has been at stand still, it has been extremely essential and welcome, but it has been at stand still for a long time, so to be able to maximise those opportunities is what you are saying is absolutely right. I am going to go to Mr McVeam, then to Ms Casart and then to Ms Reeves, just on those questions. I think that it is a very interesting question. I think that it is one that the pandemic has thrown into relief as well, is that, once the Churchill said that it is not about culture and what we are fighting for, culture lies at the very heart of our health as a society, a civil society that generates ideas, innovation, excitement and also generates business. As I said earlier, we are experiencing a boom in TV production and film production across the UK. These are significant opportunities. We should be doing everything we can to find talented young people, get them into these industries. That can often be through third sector and local community groups. That is where I started in my initial experiences. I think that it is right and proper that all Governments and Administrations consider how culture and the arts play a more significant role than they are often credited for in the overall welfare of the population. I am not just in mental health and physical health, but in terms of creativity. We have seen a trend for too long in education moving towards what is often called STEM. I think that it should be steam because the arts and creativity are what we need in the 21st century. I remind the committee that, for two years running, if it had not been for film and TV production in the UK, UK GDP would have been negative. The economics of that are significant. I commend all my other colleagues and witnesses for the work that they do to make sure that people can get access to the arts and culture for a variety of reasons. There is a broader, more philosophical issue for all Parliamentarians and MSPs to consider why it is always separated into a bunker. It is a very good question. I have given evidence to many Administrations over the years. No one seems to want to grasp that this is a critical issue that should be embedded across everything. It is an excellent question. We do not recognise it enough. One of the things that is really important at the moment is to understand the pressure that there is on organisations. I am thinking about civic museums. It is a fantastic practice that local authority museums in particular have led in this area in additional programming that they have run for young people at risk, fantastic programmes that they have run, but they have run through culture budgets. What we are seeing and what we are particularly concerned about is the pressure on local authority and civic museums that apply across the piece. These are the programmes that are easily lost because the core purpose of music is that they have to care for their collections, they have to open their collections up to visitors. The fantastic programme that we know works and has the benefits that have been proven through research are the things that are first to be cut. You could say that we need more money coming from the culture budget to do that, but is there an opportunity to look across portfolios to say if those benefits are really going to young people at risk or if those benefits are really going to people with dementia, are there other ways that we could join that up to think about how that is funded on a moralistic basis? I think that the reliance on those individual institutions to identify those opportunities and develop those programmes. There has been a huge amount of work and really ambitious and fantastic work that has gone on, but with a more co-ordinated approach we might be able to grow that and otherwise I think we are going to start to lose it and go backwards and that would be a huge loss. I want to make a very quick plug on something that, with a different hat on, I am a trustee of the arts, culture, health and wellbeing Scotland, which is a new charity that is trying to do a lot of this work of bringing together the practice between health and social care and between the arts. We have run a series of events and I would be happy to provide some information to the committee on that if that would be helpful. That particularly answers some of the social prescribing questions as well. Alison Reaves. I declare an interest in someone who, for obvious reasons, is not very active at the moment, is a participant in a Gallic Choir. Can I ask about community music in terms of some of the problems that have faced the making of music in the community over lockdown and how you are now working to overcome that? Perhaps related to that, an issue that has been brought to this Parliament's attention in the past has been about making sure that we have a supply of music teachers in schools. Given that, at the moment, the majority of those are essential, as I understand it, someone will correct me coming through the private sector rather than the state sector. I would be interested to hear about those two issues. What is happening to music in the community and what is happening to music in schools? It is great to hear that even... I think that I have lost the feed. Sorry, Ms Reaves, we lost your feed for a second there. Am I back on? I was just saying that it's really good to hear that Alistair is continuing occasionally to sing as so many people continue to do as adults sing and play musical instruments. It's such a massive, vibrant and often unnoticed element of our culture society. Before I explain the problems to returning to your previous question about investment, investment in community music making and non-professional sector, it's interesting because it doesn't all come from culture funding, in fact hardly any of it comes from culture funding. Some of the investment is in performing arts venues, which our members use and also, as I said, those freelancers who are also professional musicians. A lot of it comes from investment in communities. It's the community hall that chooses the school buildings and the halls that we currently can't access, public transport, all those things that enable people to move around in their communities and use community spaces. They crop up our groups and that's one of the things that's causing us the most challenges, returning actually, is that infrastructure. The biggest, most common challenge at the moment is accessing suitable venues. When I say a suitable venue, I mean one that is often bigger than the venue that people were previously using, because they're still feeling the need to physical distance. We're seeing groups having to move from a smaller hall into a bigger, for example, church space to accommodate physical distancing. They're very worried about ventilation and the infrastructure in this country is designed to keep heat in, in small Scottish rural halls. Ventilation is very problematic and having access to those spaces is really worrisome at the moment, especially with the school estate being largely closed to external lets at the moment. That is our biggest challenge and if we can move that forward, the investment in public buildings in those arts venues that the theatre sector has talked about using, that's really going to make a big difference to us. Alistair, can I ask you to repeat your question about music teaching specifically? The issue there was really that in the past, I know that other committees in the past have had representations from people in the Royal Conservatoire asking whether there is a sufficient supply of music teachers in schools for the future. We are a member of the music education partnership group and they would be the best people to give evidence on that particular question. I think that with the move to make instrumental music tradition free in schools and the move to make music teachers GTC registered, I think that both of those things are going to hopefully make music teaching in the state sector a more desirable prospect for those people. Those are the people who have the portfolio careers that I'm talking about, who are also our music directors, our choirs as well, so they usually have a fit in that career as well. I declare another interest, not a financial one, of an interest in historic ships, as those who know me well will confirm. I notice that museums galleries Scotland that your evidence pointed specifically to issues facing historic ships and I was just curious to know more about that. I think that one of the things that museums and the challenge at the moment is that the basic running costs that they have, whether they're open or they're closed, and some of these assets are really, really expensive to look after and that does include historic ships, but it is illustrative of the wider point around the challenges that museums and galleries have been facing. We've put some figures in our evidence about the degree of challenge facing at the moment that two years into the pandemic, a third of our museums and galleries haven't opened at all in those two years. I'm facing another winter as the tourist season comes to an end, and yet the running costs that they've faced throughout that time are high for many of them. The challenge that has been in terms of the hit on their reserves, their ability to meet that, particularly those that are independent museums, independent charities that don't have the security of national ownership for those collections, so there's a particular challenge if any of those organisations do fail. That's a real worry for us. The last survey that we did in mid-July suggested that of those museums who responded to our survey, who were open, none of them were running at a profit. It was a loss by being open that they could sell some tickets. The funding that we were able to distribute last year, which we were enormously grateful for, is the essential lifeline to our museums and galleries sector in its survival through so far in the pandemic. That funding ran out in June, whereas some of the wider funding through Creative Scotland to the arts sector has carried organisations through to September. There is a real challenge facing those organisations in getting through to their ability to start earning income again. It's a pretty seasonal, for most of the sector, it's a very seasonal business. What we're really flagging there is the consumption, particularly for independent museums, that there isn't that safety net of public ownership for those collections and some of those assets are really expensive to look after. It's been good hearing about the potential issue of getting more people to access the arts. It was just something in the museum submission about the issue of the commitment to everybody having a right to culture. It was a suggestion in there. I just wondered if you'd like to mention that, Lucy Castle, about the concept of having a minimum acceptable standard of cultural provision that we'd addressed the issue about. We've got lots of fantastic museums, but the focus is on preserving them, not about promoting access. That might be challenging in terms of funding, but do you want to say a bit about that? It's quite an interesting idea that might do the joining up across portfolios that we've just been talking about. We've been quite a lot of thought to this question of what sort of change might be inevitable, which is fundamental to the questions that you put out in the consultation around if changes inevitable are the different ways that we could think about funding. It's such a diverse—even within the museum and gallery sector, it's hugely diverse—and given the culture sector much more so beyond that. The challenges and the opportunities are very different for different parts of the sector. What is facing the civic museums is different to the independent museums. It's different to the challenges facing our national institutions. However, the principle of access to culture seems to us to be a really valuable one starting point. If we establish that as the right as what we're trying to achieve, it might start to point towards not necessarily a blanket solution across different parts of the country, because different parts of the country operate in different ways. In terms of the museum sector, in some places the local authority is really, really strong in delivering in other places. There are really, really strong independence, so saying that the solution be to do a particular thing that addresses that through either one of those seems to be something that we certainly want to look at and perhaps tease out. However, if we can start from thinking about what we're trying to achieve here, what we're trying to achieve is public access to public day-owned collections or the collections that tell the story of our country, then that perhaps provides the structure around which we could consider the options for how best to achieve that. Because what we don't want to see is unmanaged change that just sees us, some organisation, failing and then trying to fill in the gaps. If we can think strategically now about what we're trying to achieve with the sector and then look at what the specific challenges are and the fact that, say, there's a probably different in the Highlands and Islands and they might be in the city of Glasgow. One-size-fits-all solutions to that might not be easy to achieve, but if we're very clear that everyone should have access to the collections that are relevant to their area, then that would be a principle that we could then explore with the sector the best way to achieve that. There's lots of really helpful signposting from the Scottish Government of creating that right to culture, but there's a duty to report on how that is achieved in different parts of Scotland. It could be something that we think is worthy of further investigation. To go back to Lucy's points about assets and managing those assets over time, particularly in relation to future proofing, reducing energy costs, investing in buildings and making them climate resilient. I used to sit on a trustee board of the Smith Art Gallery in Stirling and we're going through a period of expansion and changing the business model a bit. It's challenging in terms of getting advice and support and bespoke funding. I'm wondering what that landscape looks like. Is there bespoke funding that's available now for museums and galleries and other organisations to be investing in these changes? Are you looking to build that into your mainstream funding if you're going to heritage lottery fund or whatever to fund that sort of work? There isn't bespoke funding for us at the moment. It's clearly one of the major challenges that we face, that we all face, but specifically with my responsibilities in trying to support the museums and galleries sector to do this. We are seeing an increasing number of applications to our open fund. Our open fund, we've got £1.1 million a year to distribute from Scottish Government, which doesn't go very far across 430 museums. We are seeing the desire from the museums to make those changes, because they make sense for them for all sorts of reasons, such as reducing their own running costs by insulating their buildings properly. A lot of our museums and galleries are in historic buildings, great in relation to embodied carbon. It's really important that those buildings are looked after, but put some particular challenges around adapting those to meet the obligations that we all have. There will absolutely be a requirement for funding to come through to support museums and galleries to meet those, as there will be across the cultural estate. We would very much welcome a discussion about that, and we are actively looking at where that funding might come from. We talked to the National Lottery Heritage Fund about that as well, but it's a huge challenge. Museums and galleries not only need to get in relation to their own estate, but the other thing that museums and galleries can do is to help with the public debate and the discussion. There are trusted venues that deal with complex subjects that can help in informing and opening discussions with the public around that. That's something that we've been trying to do in relation to some of the work that we're doing around COP and COP Conversations, which is again across the culture portfolio and climate beacons, in trying to identify those projects that can inspire action and really trying to tease out what that might look like. But there's no question that it's going to need investment, so I'm very keen to identify the best way of doing that. I think that we have another question regarding museums, but if I could just remind people if they want to comment if they could put an R in the chat, but I'll go to Ms Minto again for Ms Cassett, I think. Thank you, convener. It's actually slightly wider, and before I start I should refer everyone to my register of interests and the fact that I'm a trustee of a small independent museum on Islay. What I wanted to widen out the conversation around was really looking at the impact of the pandemic on the whole area of arts and culture and the way that funding came to each of your organisations. Basically what you have learnt from that funding in that it was a far quicker process in some respects to get funding out to people that needed it. But also from the staycation perspective and the importance of not just investing in the central belt, more people are coming out to the wider parts of Scotland and how your areas are supporting that shift of visitors from a culture perspective and telling the story of the areas that people are visiting. I don't know, Ms Cassett, if you want to start there or should we give you a bit of a rest? Well, I'm happy to start and to be, I suppose, using your briefs. I think that we've covered some of it in our submission as well, but one of the things... I mean, we distributed £9 million last year in contrast to our usual £1 million and we were enormously grateful for the support that enabled us to be able to do that from Scottish Government. One of the decisions that we took early on in that was to support... We are funding normally just goes to accredited museums, so that's museums that meet the established professional standards for the museum sector, but about a third of our museums are not accredited, but are enormously important in their communities as community assets. And as you said, it's telling that story of Scotland and they're not all in more remote places, but many of them are and many of them are run by volunteers. So we thought that that was such an important part of the wider museum sector and the museum estate that we extended our funding to them and we continue to do that this year as well, because they've been essential parts of that. And in terms of the volunteering, the wellbeing benefits that comes from that volunteering and as they were symbols in their communities, in some cases running the only cafe on an island or the importance of those as venues, not just as museums, but as parts of community life has been really important. So we've changed the way we do that funding. Our ability to continue to do that depends on whether we would continue to have the resource to be able to do that, but we certainly would hope to be able to do that. And once we've got that wider network of organisations, we can then support them to work towards those standards where that's appropriate for them to do so. So that's been a really important piece of learning for us, but we've been astonished by the response from the sector and the creativity with which people have met those challenges. And the generosity in many cases in which organisations have collaborated and worked together in shifting to digital and all the rest. And there's loads more I could say, but I should probably let others come in, but I'm happy to answer any follow-ups on that if that's helpful. Mr McVeigh, sorry. Thank you very much. I don't know much about funding for museums in Scotland, but I would like to commend Screen Scotland, the screen agency for funding for museums in Scotland. Screen Scotland, the screen agency for film and TV, who reacted very quickly and you'll be hearing evidence from Isabel Davis in your next session. I would really commend the quick response that they did to the Covid pandemic and the impact on Scottish film and TV producers, where they were able to make significant resources available to maintain development, maintain companies, actually developing ideas for when the market reopened, which it thankfully did. I think that it was an exemplar to many other agencies across the UK who perhaps didn't do as much. I think that it was a very welcome response, and I know from my members in Scotland that they really felt that they were being supported through the light switch for quite a long time. I think that it's a good example. We worked very closely with Isabel and David Smith on that, and they were both very responsive and active very quickly. Hi there. It was just to really echo the other two speakers just to say about the resilience of the sector and the reach that was extraordinary. In the middle of a pandemic, we were able to pivot so quickly to digital and all the other kinds of work that was happening that couldn't have happened face to face. In terms of the place question that you were asking about what work was happening in different places across Scotland, I was aware of innovative projects happening in the Highlands and Islands, in indeed, in Freeson, Galloway, Perthshire, the Airgate, ran some really extraordinary both community projects but also digital. I think that the reach has been extraordinary and the access that was provided and that kind of extreme localism that happened but also that was also available worldwide. I was certainly aware of individual artists who were putting their work out there and getting audiences that were beyond their wildest dreams by being able to do that. I think that there will definitely be lessons and they will be thinking within those organisations and individuals about how the lessons that can be learned and how those connections can be maintained in the future. That is certainly something that we have been keeping an eye on and are helping people to expand on as much as we possibly can. The youth theatre sector responded extremely well as well. That was, in part, with the availability of funding from Great Scotland to anywhere that you are going to hear from. I have given some examples of the bursaries that were available to freelancers that were hugely appreciated and very quickly turned around so I would echo some of what John was saying. In terms of what we learned about the funding of our sector during the pandemic, we had about 18 months when our groups could not make music together in person and the funding benefits were really there for propping up freelancers for continuing to enable them to work. They were able to move to a digital model where possible, so that was excellent. All the emergency funding that was available through Creative Scotland and the other ways that those people were continuing to be paid meant that they could continue to work for us. You will all remember the incredible digital response that we saw from choirs and bands and orchestras, making stitched videos and virtual performances and so on. That was crucial, still having those people being able to do those quick turnarounds and the phenomenal response and the huge amounts of learning that they needed to do. Having the availability of small, quick-to-access funding was crucial for us. Those little pots of money did not take much to apply for, which enabled people to run small digital projects and upskill themselves and buy new software and so on. At the moment, that is really beneficial. People are using funds, for example, to buy face coverings for the whole choir so that they can sing safely. That has been useful. We are now noticing that funding for the venues infrastructure, as I have mentioned, is absolutely crucial. We are making sure that those performing arts venues are open and well ventilated. Also, as Lucy mentioned, the museums and galleries are spaces that our members benefit from, including libraries and community spaces. That is crucial that the funding for those venues is there, but not just to open but to adapt and change ventilation systems, new hygiene systems and all those things that we need to move forward. In terms of communities and staycations, music making is everywhere, right across the country. The benefit of having a rich and vibrant community music making culture is that when tourists visit those areas, they have a lovely access to our local culture. The choir singing on the Galaday is what they are looking for. It is what they want to see. We missed our Galaday so much this year and our festivals. We would really need to see them coming back next year so that the staycationers can enjoy their own culture and these beautiful environments. Thank you. Good to move to questions from Mr Cameron. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. You have covered this in some of the answers that you have just given in relation to emergency funding that you have received. I think that I am comforted and reassured that it is reaching, filtering down to your members and staff and individuals as well as organisations. If I can, could we look beyond Covid and that is not to diminish the challenges that the pandemic currently poses, but if we can look beyond Covid to the next year or so and hopefully we emerge from it, what do you think the sector will look like and how should it be funded and perhaps we could touch on the question of multi-year funding, which is also important? Can I start with Mr McVay, please? Thank you very much. As I said in my opening reply to an earlier question, we are experiencing a boom right now. We are, I would say, we are post-pandemic, but certainly for film and TV production in the UK, we are at higher levels of production than we are pre-pandemic. There are a number of things that underpin that. One is the extensive safety protocols that the industry develops with the health authorities across the UK, which have proven to be very effective. Two is a UK Government-backed indemnity fund for production insurance, which we hope will be extended and will lead to further recovery. Three is the role of your local agencies, the Screen Agency, so Screen Scotland, being able to continue to support and invest in growing Scottish companies that will create employment, which will create ripple effects in the broader creative economy. I think we can carefully at how Screen Scotland, our resource going forward through multi-annual support for the film and TV sector in Scotland, would be very welcome. One of the other opportunities, which I know has been considered by local authorities and the Scottish Government, is film and TV studios in Scotland. Currently, we have a shortfall of studios in the UK due to the boom. That is leading to cost inflation, which can often be detrimental to smaller domestic producers who cannot afford the rates that those studios may charge, which is what we are experiencing in the south-east of England. In order to maintain growth for the audio-visual economy in Scotland, those are critical structural issues that need to be looked at. They are long-term, not things that can be delivered through single-year funding. Those are long-term investments, they facilitate cultural activity, training and education, and they facilitate skills and growth in local economies. Those are precisely long-term issues that I would encourage the Scottish Government to look at. I hope that that would echo with my colleagues from the other sectors here that we have seen too many short-term funding for culture and arts under successive administrations across the UK when we are the fastest-growing part of the UK economy, so we should have long-term support and planning. It allows people to become more innovative, to take broader investment decisions and to plan for growth going forward, rather than continually run short-term projects. I would absolutely concur. The big thing to say is that it is going to be incredibly challenging and it is still not over. I think that we are still in crisis. The emergency funding that was provided was an absolute lifeline. There is an important point that we make in our submission, which is about the ability to plan for the future, the ability to have resources for the future that has not been able to be replaced by emergency funding. The headlines from our submission were about the possible necessity of additional relief and recovery funding. We do not have workable, affordable insurance or confirmed emergency funding if the situation worsens. Investment in restart and renewal goes back to that point, which many of our members made of the fact that there has been lots of investment in emergency but not in storing up for the future and that reserves are very much at risk at the moment. The question that we began with that Ms Boyack asked me about freelance support and investment in skills development can be really important. To echo what John John just said, there is that long-term increased support to achieve maximum impact. Definitely long-term rather than short-term projects. I definitely agree with Fiona that we are very much in the middle of this crisis in the non-professional music sector. Our members are really struggling with the amount of additional work that they are having to do, mostly volunteers to get their groups running again and the increased costs. When we did our renewals last January, we had lost very few members last year. We are expecting that to increase this year because reserves are being eaten up. All of our groups do not make a profit, they break even. I hope that, as we may see some growth, there has been a real interest in music making at something that people took up or revisited in their lockdown periods. The high profile of those Irish orchestras and bands working digitally really increased the need to take part in music. I hope that we may see some new groups as well as some increase in existing groups jumping up. The groups are very vulnerable. What will benefit us is the funding of that infrastructure that I keep talking about. Multi-year funding, absolutely. That will help to perform arts venues that we use and those freelancers in their professional careers. We would always want that professional sector to benefit from that multi-year, sustained investment, so that that knock-on effect for those people making music in their leisure time is crucial. I agree with all that about the tale from this situation. There will be a long tale for those who are reliant on international tourism for a bulk of their visitors, because some of these things will take longer to recover than others. We will have organisations going into the next few years with very low reserves and a lack of ability to invest in maintenance and so on. There has also been quite a lot of learning from that and new ways of working, new ways of collaborating and new opportunities in relation to reaching audiences in different ways that have come from that. The opportunity of multi-year funding is to get away from the short-term funding equals short-term thinking. I think that one of the things that it would allow is to look more at collaborative working. There have been some great examples of that. For example, a museum heritage island that has done joint exhibitions digitally through this period and actually using the resources in a smarter way, which is going to be something that is going to be essential as everything is just going to be tight over the years to come. With the ability to think longer, collaborative working and partnership working becomes a much more realistic possibility because the investment in time in developing a collaborative approach to something is much easier to take if you know you are in a three-year funding deal than if you are just trying to get through the next 12 months. I would very much welcome the opportunity to do that. To make the most of the opportunities of the new ways of working and trying to smooth out any adaptation that we are able to make collectively as a sector, but at the same time, the ability to invest in the venues and the adaptations that are required will still take some additional support to get through to the survival element of this to be able to thrive on the other side of it is essential. I can ask a final question. It's really for Mr McVeigh. I suppose the news from the screen industry is very positive, which is something that we don't hear a lot of right now, post Covid in recovery in terms of the economy, but it's time to understand some of the challenges around that 30,000, I think you said, gap in jobs in the sector. I'm thinking of, obviously, that that could never be fulfilled from purely people who are living and studying and working in Scotland at the moment. Has there been any impact to the Brexit situation in terms of people, do you have people coming from Europe and from out with Europe and wider to work on these productions and has that been a challenge for you? What we've also heard is that many, many people have left industries where there's a reliance on short-term contracts and freelance-type contracts because of lack of job security and whether the sector is remodelling how it might work in the future in terms of job security. Okay. Okay. Quite a lot of issues bundled there. Clearly, during the pandemic, it was difficult to bring in non-UK workers because of various criteria around quarantining, etc. We did have an exemption, which was brought in, which was then suspended and has just been reintroduced, which means that we can bring in talent. Particularly if we, you know, if there are lead actors from America, we can bring them in without having to go through the full quarantine process because they can immediately, they can arrive and go into our COVID bubble protocols for production because production is effectively a closed environment generally. So, pre-Brexit, we did bring in crew from other European countries, which was very easy, but not a lot. It was never a big thing. We're not getting a lot of feedback from the members that that is currently a big problem. The real issue is how do we, as an industry and others, invest in the skills and the talents that we have in order to fulfil those 30,000 jobs? We did a survey of our members across the UK and 80 per cent of all of our members furloughed freelancers, even if they didn't have to. They went through the process of having freelancers furloughed. As I said, given the boomer experience, I would imagine that the vast majority of those people are back working, which is what we wanted to do when we set up the restart fund, which was the indemnity fund for insurance, because we explained to the chancellor that much better to get people back to work while they were sitting on furlough and not being productive. That's led to unprecedented levels of production right now. Rates have gone up, so I can't imagine anyone leaving the industry right now, where we're seeing, in some cases, for some jobs a 70 per cent premium on pay rates, because everyone's tried to get back to work and put money back in their bank accounts quite understandably. My colleagues from the theatre sector have also seen production in Yorkshire. We trained people from the theatre sector who were furloughed because they couldn't get back to work, and they have now re-trained to work in film and TV. I think that this is a first world problem that we've got, which is that we need a lot of talented, skilled people. It's a huge opportunity for audio-visual economies across the UK to meet and that will lead to further growth and development, and that would be a good thing. I didn't think anyone wanted to come in on that, but I wonder if Ms Sturgeon-Shane wants to make a comment about the possibilities of cross-cooperation, or would it worry you if a lot of people in the theatre were leaving to work in the screen industry at this time? I think that it's already started happening. I know that you've had evidence from my colleague Beck. It's a massive issue for us, and it's in our submission about the skills gap that's potentially going to be left. It's not a competition, and it's great that freelancers are being supported in other ways. We've always worked in different areas, either adjacent to theatre or in completely different areas in those portfolio careers that Alison has talked about. Definitely that's where the skills development side of our submission is very much focused on. We need to retain that, but we also need to attract new talent as well and support that talent. I think that it must have been a really difficult time to be leaving education or trying to enter an industry that was effectively closed for nearly two years. We do have a massive challenge ahead for us in that regard. Thank you for that. I think that the concerns from the different areas of the sector have been well voiced this morning. Thank you very much for your contribution. I'm not seeing anyone else indicating they want to come in, so I'm going to suspend the session for five minutes while we change over panel. Welcome back. We now have our second panel this morning. If I could introduce Ian Monroe, chief executive of Creative Scotland, and Isabel Davis, executive director of Screen Scotland. Remind everybody please try and be succinct as we want to get through as many opportunities for questions as possible. I'm going to invite Mr Cameron to start. Thank you, convener, and good morning to our two panel members. I'm going to ask a question to Creative Scotland, to Mr Monroe, about the funding awards to local authorities. We've been provided with a very useful table of all the local authorities in Scotland and the awards, and it's quite hard to draw out any patterns from it. It seems to be clear that Edinburgh and Glasgow take a large amount of funding. It also appears that the five local authorities with the lowest per capita funding from Creative Scotland all share a boundary with either Edinburgh or Glasgow. I wonder if you have any comments about the spread of funding across Scotland by local authorities. Any observations, I'd be very welcome to hear. Good morning to the committee. Thank you very much for inviting us to give evidence. Good to have the conversation this morning. On local authorities, there are a number of dimensions to this. If I start with the overall context, it's important to recognise that we, as Creative Scotland, work right across the geography of the 32 local authorities across Scotland in a variety of different ways. Sometimes that is at policy and strategic level, sometimes that is through funding interventions and so on. The other bit of context is that the patterns of what we call the ecology of support that exists across the country do see a predominance of organisations working in the creative sector and centred around the higher population centres, so that the main cities, particularly Edinburgh and Glasgow, but not exclusively. One important dimension to this to recognise is that that does not mean that they limit themselves to only operating and delivering programmes of activity in those particular areas. For example, just as a simple illustration, the 121 organisations that are supported through our regular funding programme currently, three quarters of them work beyond the geographic base location in other and old parts of Scotland in some cases. I think that the pure arithmetic analysis of the data on tables only tells part of the picture of where the impact on the reach is actually felt. The other thing is that audiences themselves do not operate within local authority boundaries. They will go to where there is activity or work that they want to see and experience and be part of. They will travel across geographic locations to be able to do that. We also know that there are some areas of the country where we want to see more progress in terms of local opportunities for activity to happen. We work in a very targeted way beyond open application processes, such as the emergency funds of operated, which naturally generate applications from the local areas. We look at all that data and identify where we might want to do more targeted activity, be a bit more active in terms of being on the ground in those areas, attending funding fairs, working with local authorities and local groups, as well as some strategic programmes around things such as our place partnership work, where we have worked with a variety of areas, including the local authorities themselves, but with cultural organisations in those areas, to try to move on and build their capacity to be more confident in their communities about what they want to see and do. We also find ways of strategically enabling that. That leads to subsequent project-based activity or the growth of local activity that we can find various ways of supporting. It is a complex equation, but we do our very best to understand what that landscape looks like and work as hard as we can to try to enable access and spread the benefits of the funding support. That is the development role that we have to work with and through people in the local area to do what they want to do. If I can drill down a bit more into the detail, I fully accept what you are saying about being wary or reading too much into this, but one point I noted was that in terms of the percentage of successful awards, over half of the local authorities come below the 50 per cent mark, and I just wondered why that was. Is there a reason for that? Sometimes, but not always, it is down to volume of applications in the first place coming forward, which arises from capacity challenges and confidence in the local area to have people coming forward to be able to make those applications. I will go back to my previous answer to refer to why we would understand that a local area and intervene directly in terms of our presence in the area, as well as where appropriate intervening with funding. We can talk with people at a local area about funding opportunities that we can make available alongside others, as well as bring some local areas forward into a strategic programme like the place programme, or the recent, through the emergency funds, cultural collective programme, where it is investing in local communities, particularly those that are hardest to reach or have been served less well in terms of their funding pattern. One example of that, which I was very struck by, was Aberdeen City, which is one of our major cities in Scotland, and yet its funding per capita is £4.67 compared to Edinburgh at £51, Glasgow at £34 and Dundee at £21. That strikes me as an example. If you look across, the amount of applications made is relatively small in proportion to the others. That strikes me as a bit of anomaly, but is the issue because fewer applications are made from one of our major cities? Is that the reason? Yes, it has been our experience for a number of areas where the volume of applications is actually low, but the success rate on those applications tends to be high. There are a few applications coming in that tend to be successful in securing resource. The other point that I would note here is that we are only part of the ecology of support for organisations in local areas. Local government in particular has a key role to play in working alongside any resources that come from us as the national body into different local areas. I will give you another illustration. Our average intervention rate across the 121 regularly funded organisations in the current programme is a quarter of turnover of those organisations. That varies according to the different kinds of organisations that are funded there through the 121. On average, it is a quarter, which means that three quarters are coming from a combination of public and private sources and income through ticket sales, barocater and retail participation and so on. Local support is as important as the national support. It is the picture together that becomes important. Thank you very much. My final question is to step away from that and to look at the issue of multi-year funding. Time and time again, organisations that have appeared before us in the last few weeks have talked about the need for stability and security and long-term planning, particularly because of the pandemic. I would be interested to hear your views, both you and Screen Scotland, if possible, on the issue of multi-year funding. Is it feasible and would you support it? I definitely would support it. I am definitely encouraged by the programme for government commitment around this and the manifesto commitment in the election. I can expand further in other questions if there is time around our budget construct just to explain it a wee bit more because it also involves national lottery, but in terms of Scottish Government, we too are on annual budget cycles like many other public bodies and, indeed, more than we would like in terms of the life of Creative Scotland so far. The move towards multi-year funding enables all of us to look forward with more confidence to enable the kind of work and ambitions that we have all got to be able to support the sectors that we work with to deliver for the public of Scotland to be delivered to better effect than simple annual funding cycles that we are on at the moment. Lucy Cassack, from Museums Gallery Scotland, submission our evidence session earlier, makes the point about short-term budgets that can lead to short-term thinking, and I think that that is the unfortunate reality. The longer-term commitment will enable us to translate that, assuming that that is what comes through the budget setting process. That will enable us to translate that into the hands of the sector and the people and the organisations that we work with. Thank you very much for the question, Deputy convener. I wholly concur for screen as well in terms of companies in this space to unpack that a little if we start with cinemas. Of course, that is absolutely the case that multi-year funding allows for multi-year strategy. What we have seen acutely during the pandemic is the need for innovation around business models, and that need to build an audience. The upside of the pandemic, in the sense of needing to go digital, is the ability to reach out across file 1. We have a problem with the connection. I wonder if we could switch Ms Davis' camera off and hopefully we will be able to hear. Sorry for that. Sorry, Ms Davis. Are you still with us? We lost you for a while there. My video goes, I am sorry about that. For certain, cinemas would benefit from multi-year funding, as some currently do under the regular funding organisation mechanism that we currently have. As John McVay has highlighted, another acute issue for the school industry is training and skills. Again, there is absolutely the need for some long-term thinking from a very strong local community of training providers in Scotland. I want to ask a question that follows on about the multi-year funding, but it is also about the level of funding. It is a question to Creative Scotland. The evidence that we have got from other written evidence from Oscar and the Accounts Commission highlights the extent to which culture has been cut. The large number of charities that operate at a local level to deliver cultural services is very badly hit during the pandemic. The Accounts Commission highlights the extent to which culture has borne the brunt of service cuts in recent years. Are we really underfunding the culture sector because we have had lots of great evidence of jobs, impact on the community, cultural wellbeing? The Festival Scotland told us that its members have had an effect of a 25 per cent cut over the last decade. Are we underfunding the sector generally even before the pandemic? I think that your budget is 0.2 per cent of the total Scottish budget. Have you got any comments about not just multi-year funding but just the level of funding? Are we at the races here? Is it too low? The value that is delivered is enormous, but it is on relatively modest levels of funding compared to what we could achieve where more funding to be available. We know that we have a supportive Scottish Government and what flows into us from direct culture budgets is 0.2 per cent. I know that we could do so much more that would be transformational in terms of a relatively modest uplift in proportionate terms compared to that 0.2 per cent for us in how that would not just stabilise the very fragile sector that existed pre-pandemic and has been writ large through the pandemic. I, too, would share worries about looking to the future. I doubt that there will be questions on that as part of this session. I will certainly be happy to talk about it. We have to take care of the core foundations here. I think that the core foundations are very fragile. We all do our very best as a public development body handling and passing on public funding for public benefit. The businesses and companies that we support as well as the individual freelancers and artists directly are all in very fragile financial situations and would undoubtedly benefit from more stable funding. From that foundation to create a springboard to deliver and unlock even more potential in terms of where we see opportunities beyond culture itself but social value, economic value, unlocking those opportunities in the wider policy context around health and wellbeing, the environment, education and creative learning skills. There are many touch points here where the value can be unlocked exponentially with further financial investment, but we have to take care at the moment because of the pandemic is on going. We know that the culture sector more broadly has been one of the most immediately hit, the deepest hit and will be for the longest period. The pandemic is on going, but recovery is going to be slow. I think that there are lots of challenges in that, but what I am saying is that I am also interested in concepts of renewal, the opportunity, despite the adversity and the challenges that we must of course take care of, the opportunity here is to understand the extent to which culture and creativity has been turned to and valued in the everyday lives of people during the period of the pandemic. Our research is telling us that 96 per cent of the population of valued culture and creativity. How do we harness that as an opportunity and place it into the heart of the future looking forward as part of a wellbeing economy? That goes beyond cultural value into those other social and economic value policy spaces. It would genuinely be transformational. It is probably a point at this point to talk about Screen Scotland as an exemplar of what I think I am illustrating. I think that Screen Scotland, as part of Creative Scotland, was launched just over three years ago in August 2018. There was a lot that led up to that moment, but the journey of success for that part of Creative Scotland is enormous and should be celebrated. I use that as an illustration of what can be achieved with a combination of a set of factors that have unlocked that potential. One is overt, direct political will and backing and a determination to make a difference. The second is the right people with the right knowledge and expertise and expert focus, which we have got right across Creative Scotland, but in this example, particularly Screen. The third is modest financial enhancement. There is an additional £8.5 million from Scottish Government on top of the £10 million that Creative Scotland contributes to enabling the unlocking of the potential for the Screen industry. There is an additional element in Screen at the moment, which is around the favourable global market conditions for streaming platforms and high-end filming TV. Screen illustrates with that combination of overt political will and backing, the right people with skills, knowledge and expertise and focus and a modest financial uplift could be replicated across wider parts of the portfolio of sectors that Creative Scotland works with in order to achieve the exponential growth that we are currently seeing in Screen. It is an important example to illustrate the opportunity that I think I am talking about, but we have to take care of the on-going and long-term challenges of the pandemic. There is a concept that I speak of, which is the risk of cultural long Covid, where the extent of which the ramifications of the pandemic on the sectors that we work with will take a long time to recover from. We have to take care of the core as well as think about how we can support through additional resources change to adapt a new and different kind of future. On the point about Screen Scotland, I would agree that our ability to bring in people from the sector into Screen Scotland, who have been, over the past two and a half years, three years, highly dedicated to their particular field, has been a great opportunity for us to bring in people from the sector into Screen Scotland. To their particular fields, they come with very strong relationships into the sector, and we have been able to create a range of initiatives and bandwidth that have seen us support the industry. John McFay was kind enough to point to the speed at which we were able to get emergency funding and subsequent funding rounds out of the door at the start of the pandemic, compared with our cousins across the nations. That is certainly due to both the in-house expertise and bandwidth, but the broader creative Scotland body corporate, which has huge expertise across funding. One thing that I would say is that, in terms of skills and training, that bandwidth has allowed us to work incredibly quickly throughout the pandemic, including on that retraining of workers from theatre. For example, working with Skills Development Scotland through the National Transition Training Fund, we have been able to work with the Lyceum, for example, to put theatre workers on to shows like The Brig. I think that there is a benefit to anyone's skillset if they can work across both areas, and I think that that mobility of workforce, be that across performing arts and live events, gaming, is going to be a feature of our workforce for the future in any case. Broadly, I think that it has been a real positive, as I am sure others can go. A follow-up question that I had for Mr Munro about what would actually be the transformational difference, because it is getting through the Covid, as you say. The submission that you have put in is really powerful, that Scotland's creative industries contribute £4.6 billion to the Scottish economy every year, supporting 90,000 jobs. What is the priority in terms of upping the investment that you can put in? We have heard a lot about training, there have been issues about investment in buildings, not just to get through Covid, but because a lot of our venues and theatres are quite old. What is the kind of additional funding that we need to keep things going, but also to invest to make sure that the sex is with us in the future, with the buildings and the people that we need in our communities? The context for this is to try and be sure food is the best that we can in a world that is still quite foggy in terms of how we can find our way through the on-going pandemic, recovery is slow and so on. If I can do a bit of context to answer that question properly, because I think that this juncture in September, there is a confluence of a number of pressure points that I am really concerned about and the implications of them to enable us to move forward in a confident way into the future without seeing major parts of the sectors that we work with collapse. There is still a very distinct risk of that and I think that this is because people have depleted all their financial resilience reserves and so on, as well as having accessed a lot of the support. We write from the offer very clear that we swung into action and delivery on this essentially from day one. I want to thank the staff of Greater Scotland for all their hard work and dedication that is on going to enable this to happen. We knew that we wanted to provide and have provided support for both individual artists and freelancers as well as organising. We wanted to provide a combination of measures that were complete open access as well as strategically targeted measures, as well as the investment in addressing issues of hardship and stabilising the situation, but importantly also about thinking and supporting people to change in looking to a new and different kind of future. That future is uncertain because what we are seeing is the prospect of patterns of cultural production and presentation and distribution and audience engagement potentially changing, none bigger than digital, which only works in certain occasions for some. There is certainly no compensation or alternative to the live arts experience, which remains very important to support. There is a broader context, but there are six things at this point that I am worried about that are adding to the mix. One is the end of furlough. The second is the repayment of business loans commencing. The third is on-going and increasing inflation within the broader economy. The fourth is the retreat of public and private funding. Other sources being local government, other local funders, private business, philanthropy and so on. The fourth is slow to return audience base, which brings with it not just participation and audiences but income streams. There is also a commitment to fair pay, which is absolutely unequivocal that we must address. That adds another dimension into the mix that puts pressure into the core budgets, which are already very thin, no financial resilience left within the budgets that we hold, let alone those that we are able to pass on to the organisations that we work with. It sounds like a sort of heavy cocktail of challenges. The measures that I think need to be on-going include further stabilisation, coupled with support for change and adaptation for the future across five different areas. The one is supporting organisations particularly, but people too, to think about their business models. The second is to build existing and new connections with audiences. The third is the role of digital. We have been doing some work in those areas. The fourth is about capital, which is about Covid adaptations but also climate change. The sixth is about supporting organisations who may fundamentally want to restructure themselves with a different kind of vision or mission for the future or indeed some who may feel that for whatever reasons they are unable to continue. I would rather that that was all supported and managed strategic change with the best outcomes intended than a reactive situation, which has seen some parts of the sector collapse and we are intervening to try to recover some of the lost ground. That is about stabilisation and change, but it is in the context of also thinking about how we can see opportunities to bolster and indeed enhance core culture budgets but also work in that collaborative way across those portfolios and other policy areas to unlock those opportunities. Whether it is a natural benefit to see those portfolio budgets also provide resource into the culture sector. The final thing is that, when I talk about the culture and creative sector, I need to be absolutely clear that we, as Creative Scotland, are not all of the culture sector. I am sure that that is understood by the committee, but just to be absolutely clear about that, we are not working directly with museums and galleries, historical collections or more. I was interested in what you have just talked about, Mr Monroe, about the various challenges. I would be interested to hear more about the work that you hope to do around climate emergency and the sustainability plan. I was really struck that it was in your evidence and it goes against what you have just said about different funding streams. The creatives rebuild New York and the philanthropy that came into that. Is that something that you are looking to explore within creative rebuild Scotland? As Ms Boyack said, the amount of economic benefit that the creative industry has put into Scotland is large. I am interested to hear about those two slightly diverse but all around forward planning and finance. On that second point, and you will need to remind me about the first one when we come to it in a second, but on that second point, I suppose that I am back to my proposition that we need to take care of the core first and foremost, which would merit enhanced additional financial resources to create a confident platform that you would then supplement with other income in order to unlock those wider opportunities. Some of that is about the cross-port fully working that I have talked about, but some of it is also about where there might be new and different financial mechanisms to have a role to play in and alongside core subsidy, which will undoubtedly be a core requirement for the sectors of the world in the large part as we look to the longer term. I am saying that there is an enhanced need for that at the moment, but I think that we have done a lot of work to do our creative industries team in particular to look at new complementary forms of finance that can have a role to play. Crowdfunding would be one, social investment would be another and so on. I think that there are different mechanisms, but you can only get people into that space when they have stopped worrying about survival of the core and channeling that energy into how they can deliver public programmes of public benefit. Your first question was about climate emergency. That is right. I think that one of the things that we have been reflecting on in our strategy is that there are three what I call tectonic plates moving around us at the moment. One is the pandemic that we have been largely focusing on. There is of course EU exit and the implications and ramifications of that are still being unclear and uncertain, but definitely problematic already. The third is not better than climate change. That has all been in our thinking when we have looked at rebuilding a refreshed strategy, which sees four areas of priority. One is around equality, diversity and inclusion. The second is around sustainability, which includes climate emergency and the environment. The third one is around fair work, including fair pay, terms and conditions, skills and employment and so on. The fourth one is international, where there is a very important dimension to thriving cultures globally. They thrive domestically when they are in an international context of export and exchange. Those four are the core things that we are focused on in looking into the future. We can calibrate and recast different programmes, development programmes as well as funding programmes in alignment to all of those with more clarity is our intention. On climate and emergency, it is an elevated priority. We have done a lot of work over the past 10 years with the sectors that we work with in partnership with a key organisation that we helped to establish some years ago called Creative Carbon Scotland, who are working with us at the moment to look towards what our next environmental action plan needs to be from 22 onwards for five years. The work that we have done so far has seen important changes in the sectors that we work with in support in a positive way, but it is what I would call the low-hanging fruit of change. Some of the more thorny issues that we have are the harder ones to tackle. For example, I know that climate finance is going to be one of the major measures, not just the sectors that we work with, but the economy is more widely going to need to have in place in order to effect change. We are determined to support, through the work that we do and the work that we enable, a positive difference in relation to the role that we can play in addressing the challenges of climate. The final thought is that there are three dimensions to that. There is what we as Creative Scotland in the operation and delivery of our core work is for our business model, the improvements that we need to make. That includes our renewables, our energy consumption, our travel and so on. There are those that we work with directly and how we can influence them and their behaviours to change. Again, we have worked hard to get environmental action plans into core organisations that we support, as well as, through them, what they then go on to translate on stages through music, through books and literature, through visual arts programmes and so on, to influence the public at large and opinion and behaviours and so on. It is a three-layered approach for us, those that we can influence directly in the sectors that we work with and through them, how they can go on to influence the public at large. I have a slightly different question, both in your submissions and John McKee of PACT mentioned it as well. Research and development spend, you said how important that was to allow the creative industries to come up with ideas. I suppose that I am interested to know what is the success rate being in that, if that is a fair question. I am sorry, I am not fully on the point. Can we go to Ms Davis first? It is just that I am conscious that you have been talking for a long time. I will bring Ms Davis to go back to Mr Monroe. In John McKee's report, he was talking about the UK Government's R&D tax credits, which sits outside of our purview. The role of R&D in green sectors and film and TV would translate broadly to the development process, which is how ideas come about. In the factual space, there might be lots and lots of ideas coming together quite quickly. In the film space, that is possibly going to be a more cerebral long-term effort. It is absolutely critical to the way that we work. One of the developments now that we have Screen Scotland is to work much more integrally with the production companies on the work coming forward, where that is appropriate and where we are needed, which is typically in the film side of the space. If we are working to support scripted projects that are going to be commissioned by broadcasters or one of the streamers, then we know our place and will allow the commissioners to take that role. If you are asking about conversion, that is a really difficult question to answer, because it varies so much. Deliberately, lots of things get thrown at the wall, certainly in the unscripted space and TV, but that is true also of development. We are seeing things come through faster, and we are also looking at the way in which we can play a much more proactive role as a production financier as well as a development financier in bringing forward work. In fact, this year, in the film space, we have backed, I should say, with BBC film and the BFI, four first feature films, which is pretty unprecedented in given recent years, that volume of numbers. We are looking at how we could more proactively be the first financier into a film. We cannot technically do that now, but I think that the industry needs us to do that more certainly as a national agency to stand behind particular projects. The issue will be that, if we are making financial commitments earlier on in the process, we cannot do it for everyone. Again, it comes back to the question of what is the material or what do we feel should go forward, but I am afraid that it is not a precise science in terms of conversion. That was very helpful. Thank you very much. In the broader art space, research and development is at the heart of artistic development and innovation, and it leads to new creative ideas that are explored across the work of not just individual artists and freelancers and practitioners, but how that then moves into public programmes with audiences. Supporting individuals to unlock the potential of that through research and development is an important dimension to keeping a very thriving artistic and creative culture within the country. Last week, we talked about the Stove and Dumfries supporting culture that is already here, but also supporting culture that is being made and created newly. That was helpful. Thank you very much, Mr Monroe. Can I start with the question for Isabel Davies, please? You might have noticed that in the recent co-operation agreement between the green MSPs and the Scottish Government, it commits to additional resources to Screen Scotland for the purpose of facilitating year-round engagement between the Scottish and international film and television industries with a particular emphasis on the USA. I wonder what your reaction is to that and what you would see as being the priorities there in ensuring that the best of Scottish talent is working internationally, but also that we are starting to bring in some of those productions into Scotland as well? Absolutely. As you can imagine, that was very welcome news for us to see. That particular paragraph on page 7 is very pleasing news indeed. We would say that it is very prescient for international to be seen as such a tool of growth, both for the incoming production into Scotland, which we think has been a real success story during this pandemic. Scotland's fortunes have really changed for the better, I would say, extraordinarily, really, since the reopening of production in July of last year, with the opening of a new major studio in Scotland in Leith, which has already housed the rig. It's now has a Nancy Boys in there who are in prep gearing up for production, but we also have Good Omens. We have a range of major film productions that have shot across Scotland and really across the whole of Scotland over the past months. We see the international focus on the US as being absolutely key to that. Scotland's ability to build on that picture is strengthening the infrastructure side of our offer to the US, but also the skills side, which we talked about. We could talk in far greater detail that it's something that goes across every part of the value chamber for film and TV, right from early doors. If there were time, we could talk about film education as well, even at school level. It's incredibly important. In fact, if I had some hindsight on the previous question, I certainly would have mentioned that innovation has to start with creative thinking in schools, and that's something that we're actively engaged in pursuing as well. To stay on point, certainly attracting production in Scotland and staying competitive around skills is a big part of that, but it's also about building our relationships and building our offer from locally originated content, which is an absolute must as well. That's how we'll build resilience and sustainability, not simply by becoming the very successful service industry for US production, but by enabling our Scottish TV and film production companies to build stronger content themselves. That side of the international picture, I would say, is about taking intellectual property, IP rights, developing them here, having them owned by Scottish companies, but developing them in such a way that they can hit the international market, whether that's by partnering with a streaming platform or by selling those rights territory by territory across international territories for broadcasts or theatrical releases. In a growth model that is successful, we are committed and already engaged with developing material that can travel and develop the relationships through broader resources for producers in terms of the scale of what they can deliver, the amount of times they can travel per year, because relationships really do matter. It's not simply about having personal connections but about truly understanding what a commissioner is looking for and having exposure to that commissioner and having a really good understanding of what your work is, because that is what will determine their confidence in the pit of their stomach about what they believe you can deliver in the future. That's how people get commissioned. There's plenty to do. We're keen to know how much of that resource we might have to play with, but we've already, of course, started to plan for how that might work across what you might broadly call the skills development piece, export, inward investment and co-production as well. I might mention at this point that we are very committed to working with Europe. We see all sorts of opportunities there across broadcasts and film, and indeed in early November we are welcoming to Scotland about 100 independent European producers for their annual conference to meet the Scottish production sector as a show of warmth and strength in Scotland's intentions towards Europe in the future. Great, thanks for that. Can I turn to Ian Monroe now? I'd perhaps reflect on what you said earlier on about the big challenges that we face as a society and how that's reflected in Creative Scotland's objectives. I was reading your annual report, sorry, your annual plan, and it didn't really mention the word regeneration anywhere. I was so curious as to why that is, because you talked earlier about the pandemic and also climate change. One of the consequences that we've seen of the pandemic is that our high streets and our towns are dying. There's lots of empty spaces, yet what I'm seeing is some creative groups coming in and repurposing our high streets and trying to draw more people back into our places. I wonder where that traditionally called regeneration sits within your plan and how much of your projects that you're funding each year are about that urban community-based regeneration. The word that I'm using is renewal. It's in the same territory as it were, but more broadly, the renewal word. It includes what you're describing. I mentioned earlier on that the future is still unclear about how the world has changed, but it has undoubtedly changed. There is no going back to status quo. New, innovative and creative ways of where we've seen the importance of culture and creativity in local communities coming to life in different forms is emerging. I think that we are very interested in how we can support those opportunities in new and innovative ways, because some of that is about audience response to that and what local communities want is more important than ever. Things are changing and those kinds of opportunities that you've talked about in that regeneration space are definitely part of what we imagine will be increasingly part of the new and different future, but it's in addition to some of those core cultural assets that already exist in current form theatres and galleries and workshops and music venues and so on. I think that there are lots of opportunities in that, and some of it you will see coming through in the culture collective programme, which is getting underway, having £6 million from the Scottish Government to kickstart that earlier this year. That's working with 26 different projects and communities right across the geography of Scotland, so that is very much about local community-routed projects. Ms Minto mentioned earlier the stove in Dumfries, where there's a classic example of what you're referring to in terms of local regeneration. As part of that renewal, do you see the creative sector really leading that public participation? Previously we would have seen councils or particular agencies trying to lead that process. How much do you see the creative sector being involved? You've described £6 million from one fund. Is that funding particularly like high street regeneration type work? Is it involving participatory conversations with communities to regenerate areas? It's a key part of it, and what we're doing through that programme is to connect all those different communities together. There are communities of artists as well as communities of the local population to learn and share and exchange their experiences with a view to how that informs other programmes and projects going forward. The culture communities programme isn't explicitly just about community regeneration in local areas, but it's a key component, part of what will be achieved. There's more that can be done around all that area. What we've seen is the importance to local communities to feel like they've got a democratic cultural voice to inform what is happening in their local areas is more important than ever. That's how we can channel that, working with the local community and local artists and cultural institutions in the area to unlock the potential of that. It's so bespoke to the individual communities themselves as to the look and feel of what that ends up being and looking like, but there's an enormous potential in many aspects of the culture collective programme that will be of benefit to understand and then share more widely and see how that goes on to influence other forms of programmes and projects into the future. That's a follow-up. Some of the points that I might ask for now you might have answered in terms of questions from others, but it's relating more to the fact that there's no capital budget for yourself. We've just heard from Mr Ruskell on the renewal programmes that are needed for the industry and the sector. The lack of capital specifically, how is that going to impact any ability to kickstart that renewal? Earlier, I had listed five things where capital was one of the five things that enhanced resources are required in order to adapt and change in that renewal looking towards the future. It includes things like Covid compliance measures for venues and so on, as well as climate change measures, but also in terms of supporting the ambitions to enable. Local communities to have the kinds of spaces and opportunities that they want and need to have the best local cultural offer that not just satisfies them but becomes so vital to their individual wellbeing in communities across Scotland. We, in previous years, have largely funded capital from our national lottery budgets, but we have no financial headroom, in effect, within our overall budgets to enable capital programmes. We've got residual early years, previous years, capital projects that are a small number now that are finishing, but we have no current financial budget. We have no financial headroom, so we have no plans to provide capital funding. However, it is an important component of the overall ecology of support in order to move forward into the future. In terms of all the other organisations with depleted reserves and no financial resilience, that's often where some small capital investment would have taken place. I don't know if that's relevant at all to Ms Davis in terms of Screen Scotland, if she wants to respond, but there's no ascent. What comes to mind, apart from the role that we've been able to play infrastructurally with regard to bathroads, there's no doubt that, without a modest amount of support, that project would have stumbled because for all of the extraordinary growth that we've seen in the production sector, the studio sector still has a degree of market failure. That was incredibly important. The other example touches more closely on the issue of retail is the redevelopment of the Kelvin hall in Glasgow, right in the city centre. Of course, that's a historic building that has been worthy of public support, not support from Greater Scotland but from Scottish Government. Again, looking at how that project will play out in terms of the redevelopment of its central space as an entertainment shiny floor venue, which is drawing audiences into the centre of Glasgow, it may very well co-host or have approximate to it to the training associations as well. That's something that can bring footfall into that part of town, as well as acting as a shining beacon of creativity right in the heart of Glasgow. I think we'll have those repercussions, those ripple effects that we've talked about this morning elsewhere. I could ask some supplementaries along the back of the theme as well. The wellbeing economy is one of the stated goals of the Scottish Government going forward and how that meets expectations in our local communities. We've also heard a lot of evidence about place making and the importance of the culture being relevant to the community and being in every community in our area. Also, there's the responding to the audience, what people are choosing to spend their leisure time doing, which is important as well. I know that it's not unusual for creative Scotland funding models to be under scrutiny and controversy at the time, but for two particular areas that have been highlighted over Covid, it's what we might call the night time economy, but it's those performance spaces that are in comedy clubs, around music venues, around people. We were hearing that, for the first time ever, they had support, because they were very independent of Government support because of Covid. Also, the fact that the funding model may lead to Cater Scotland grants to be outwith the capacity of a lot of these organisations and let a smaller funding model, a smaller grant, be available to support smaller projects. That's got a rural and geographic element as well. Are those considerations going to be given to how the money is developed and the level of support that can be given to changing that place making in communities? I'll probably go to Mr Davis first. Miss Davis, sorry. Sorry, Miss Davis. Miss Davis? Place making absolutely, and I think that it really is an extremely pertinent concept when it comes to building around centres of production. For example, we have co-commissioned with Scottish Enterprise work that looks at how the economy around a leaf going all the way out to Grantson and the East Coast can be developed as consequence of a film studio and likewise in Glasgow. To look at how we can bring together those elements, how we support local businesses to take advantage of that, looking at the whole supply chain and value chain. That's definitely the case. It's interesting looking at the tension, hopefully a helpful tension between building critical mass across the central belt with a wider effect across Scotland. The screen industry is very alive to this. If I look at the example of Good Omens, which is sighted fully in Scotland, it will be wholly made in Scotland. The showrunner Douglas McKinnon, he deserves huge credit for bringing that show to Scotland, but also the way in which he wants to work with new entrants into the business through traineeships across the whole of Scotland. That's a model that we are extremely supportive of, obviously, in co-funding through various means. Yes, absolutely, there is a benefit to placemaking and strategically working with local authorities, working with the local industry on the range of training that can go on there. Going back to Kelvin Hall for a second, we have set up a format lab, which is a training programme, to ensure that that building, that facility, is employed by shows primarily that have come out of Scotland as far as we can possibly help it. The way in which that will happen is not only having the building but ensuring that the pipeline from Scotland is fully developed and commissionable. Putting resource and expertise into the business of creating new shows that can go on there is one of the key contingencies that will make the place of it flourish and flourish in Scotland's best interests. In some of the earlier answers, on two or three occasions, I have made reference to some examples that I think are in part in response to this question, things like the place partnerships programme, culture collective and so on. I do want to clarify that in some of the emergency funds, certain parts of the night-time economy are not in our traditional bailiwick in terms of our briefest creative Scotland. Things like night clubs, for example, we would not anticipate being in any way part of the longer term support that we would be putting in place. Unless there was a cultural outcome attached to the funds that we were operating that they could address. It is the same for other wider parts of the night-time economy that have previously been able to access support. It is about how we can cast future funding programmes that enable us to do that. I have to be honest, though, in certain instances, particularly where private business enterprises are involved, because this is public funding that needs to be accounted for. There are certain things that we need to do to make sure that we can do that. We need to understand what the outcomes are intended from those programmes and from there understand how they can make a contribution. I have to be honest, though, in certain instances, particularly where private business enterprises are involved, because this is public funding that needs to be accounted for. The fundamentals that we ask for in terms of application material around financials and business plans and so on—some private business enterprises, understandably—are reluctant to share and therefore cannot satisfy the requirements of those funds to be able to come in and make the application. On the broad point about placemaking, I was referring earlier to the importance of seeing communities more empowered to feel they have a stake in what they want to see in their areas and that the cultural sector is in tune with that and able to work with it and enable that to happen. I mentioned earlier that one of our core priorities is around equalities diversity and inclusion. It absolutely is in recognition of the fact that society pre-pandemic was unequal in many ways, unjust before and widened and deepened during the course of the pandemic. Even more than ever, we have a determination and those that we will be supporting to make sure that issues of access and inclusion in communities across Scotland are at the heart of that equation, but it will ultimately, unless there is growth in resources, make it more difficult to deliver against those agendas and make it more likely that we will have to make tough choices that will undoubtedly be sensitive and no doubt controversial. However, it is really important that we, in our commitment to things such as equalities, diversity and inclusion, can see that through with all seriousness and conviction. Dr Allan, on the back of that, I appreciate some of the issues that have been covered, but as Colombo would say, I have one more question. Possible that it is relevant to both of you, you have mentioned there about how there is the potential for deepened inequality coming out of the experience of Covid. I am just curious to know whether that means you have to rethink specifically what you do in terms of your relationship with schools, which is obviously where efforts to overcome inequality usually begin in terms of public policy or preschool, I suppose. I am just curious to know whether you have had to rethink how you work with schools. I have got to Mr Monroe first and then Mr Davis. Thank you. Again, the extent to which the world has changed around us is still to clarify itself, but undoubtedly, I absolutely agree with the point that a lot of work starts with children and young people, not just in school but also in formal education and learning, which we do provide an awful lot of support for. In a variety of different ways, but there is more to be done. We have the time to shine strategy from before. We have a national ethars advisory group who are very clear that the voice of children and young people needs to be more at the heart of policy making and decision making. We absolutely respect and would want to see that. Their ideas and aspirations for the future count more than ever. We have a lot of support that we provide through funding, but we also work in our development role in partnership with Odyslite Education Scotland, for example. To understand how, together, we can support in-school teaching practice in support of the curriculum for excellence, for example. We will continue to understand what more can be done in support of that kind of work to ensure that creativity and creative education are a key part of what we are able to enable through the work that we do. It is a work that will continue to be in progress, but it is undoubtedly a very important dimension to what we want to do and see for the future. We absolutely agree that access and inequality are underpinning a lot of our work. We know that there is more to do, but, for example, working with GMAC and Glasgow, the Glasgow Media Access Centre on bringing diverse applicants into the system through making short films, for example. That is post-school age. Across all our funded projects, we are looking for EDI activity and proactive reach into underrepresented communities, likewise with cinemas. On the school point, it is extremely well-made. Scotland is in the opposition of being the one nation of the UK that does not have a school-level qualification at that five level that deals with film as an expressive art. It seems odd for a country that has such a rich heritage and ambition for innovation in the future. It feels absolutely key that, at school age, young people are switched on not only to the idea of film or TV as a career of some sort but that they are exploring their creativity and expression, which may have manifold applications in later life. If we are thinking about what kind of country we want to be and how we go forward, it feels incredibly key that that should be built into the education system. Referring back to something that John McVeith said earlier about how his desire to see STEM becomes steam, it is about having the arts and creativity taken seriously as not a nice to have but something that underpins the UK's economy and is a growing part of it. Something that Scotland has seen can be asked to with the right investment in infrastructure and skills. We can be part of that and should be part of it after all. We absolutely agree with you that it starts in school and that there is more to be done. I wanted to know, because it is relevant to many of the questions that have been asked today, the new initiative that we launched a couple of weeks ago called Our Creative Voice, which is an important advocacy programme that we have developed in partnership with people from across the sector. It is a central repository where we want to speak to a general public as well as to politicians and the broader sectors and stakeholders that we work with. People can find case studies around what culture and creativity means to the people of Scotland in all the different policy areas and all the different values that it can express. A whole range of materials on their tool gets for people to use, but particularly the storytelling at the heart of it is a powerful body of work that will build over many months and the years ahead. I would point people to be able to see it as that central repository is the go-to place to find out more about the broad diversity and the great things that already happen in the country right across the policy spectrum. It also contains a lot of material and support of the data and the knowledge and research that sometimes comes up. It was in the earlier session this morning about health, for example. There is an awful lot of material that already exists in Our Creative Voice and will build, but it will have a thematic approach to the environment, given cops, nearly upon us in the couple of months. Children and Young People next year will take the opportunity to look at that and engage with it, because it is powerful when you read and hear the work that is currently going on, but it is back to my earlier point about if that is what we can achieve already on levels of resource, imagine what would be possible with just a little bit more and what we could unleash by way of positive contribution to the country, culturally, socially and economically. That is a positive note to end on this morning. Thank you both to Mr Wendell and Ms Davis for attending the committee this morning. We will now move into private session for our final agenda item.