 Welcome to the 19th meeting of the committee in 2019. I'd like to remind members in the public to turn off mobile phones, and any members who are using electronic devices to access committee papers should please ensure that they're turned to silent. We've received apologies today from Tavish Scott MSP. Tavish has announced this week that he is standing down as an MSP. Tavish has been widely recognised as a champion of his constituency, the Shetland Isles, which he has represented, I believe, since 1999, and for his role as minister in the Labour-Lib Dem Coalition in the past. We've certainly benefited from his constituency knowledge of fishing matters, particularly in our inquiries into Brexit, and I would like to thank Tavish on behalf of all the members for his contribution to the committee and to wish him well in the future. Our first item on the agenda today is an evidence session as part of the committee's arts funding inquiry, and I would like to welcome our panel of witnesses, Leonie Bell, who is strategic lead with the Paisley partnership of Renfrewshire Council. Gary Cameron, the head of Pais partnerships and communities with Creative Scotland. David Macdonald, the arts development director of DG Unlimited, and Stuart Murdoch, the director of leisure and culture in Dundee. Thank you all for coming today. The overarching theme of our session today is the relationship, the very important role and relationship that the local authorities have with culture. You all come from different perspectives, of course, and perhaps you could briefly explain the role of your organisations. We could maybe start with Gary and work along. Good morning. I'm Gary Cameron, the head of Pais partnerships and communities with Creative Scotland. Creative Scotland is the national organisation that supports arts, green and creative industries. My specific role is to lead our engagement with local authorities. I oversee the Pais partnership programme, which is operating across 12 different areas in Scotland. In addition to that, we work closely with community groups and voluntary groups, attending funding fairs, community events, providing advice and guidance, whether that be on how to apply directly to Creative Scotland or how to develop a project or seek funding from elsewhere. Prior to joining Creative Scotland, I worked in local government as an arts officer and then arts official for around 10 years, so I reflect on our perspective from a national and my experience at the local level. I'm in a relatively new role at Renfrewshire Council, so my job is called to strategically lead Paisley partnership, but it's very much born from the UK city of culture bidding process, which Paisley didn't win but still deem as a success in that it's given us an understanding as a local authority in how important culture is to the future of Paisley and wider Renfrewshire. My job is to position culture strategically within a council context and to develop wider local community partnerships, national partnerships and international partnerships. Good morning. I'm coming from Dundee, where I've been on the management team since it was set up previously as a director for communities and parks and now in the role of leisure and culture. In 2011-12, Dundee set up the first skew, which is an allio, delivering our leisure arts and cultural provision in the city. I have the twin role of being part of the city council's management team and advising the council on policy relating to leisure arts and culture, but also the managing director for the arm length body, the allio, leisure and culture, Dundee. I'm David McDonnell, the arts development director of DG Unlimited. We're a small organisation. We have three part-time freelance staff and we're a membership organisation that works with and provides a voice for the cultural sector of Dumfries and Galloway. We seek to create Scotland's leading rural arts network by supporting creative practitioners and organisations to help themselves and help each other, providing a collective voice and celebrating a nurturing talent and growing the next generation of artists. We have a network of over 440 members and our membership consists of predominantly practitioners, cultural administrators and some people that are a small minority that are called supporters of the arts. We were established in 2012 and we're a legacy of Great Scotland's Place Partnership programme. My understanding is that the way that you operate is quite unique in Scotland. It's always a grand claim, isn't it, unique? I think that we are a little bit different or hopefully bring something different to the cultural ecology of Dumfries and Galloway. We're the result of what you could call a perfect storm. Back in 2011, the DG Arts Association ceased trading and at the time they were the only regularly funded organisation south of the central belt in Scotland. That coincided with a period of restructuring within the local authority and there was no one at a strategic level or management level making decisions on arts development. That coincided at a time when Great Scotland was launching their Place Partnership programme across Scotland and Dumfries and Galloway was one of the first cohorts. Great Scotland started to engage in conversations with the local authority within this sort of strategic hiatus that was currently existing at the time. Through funding from leader, the council and Great Scotland, there was quite an extensive and intensive engagement process that took place with the cultural sector that led to a report called Fresh Start for the Arts. One of the recommendations from that report was the establishment of an organisation that we know now as DG Unlimited or DGU. We are a membership organisation and our board comes from our membership. We have a service level agreement with the local authority. Effectively, we provide advice and guidance on arts development for the local authority and we also support them in the delivery of a fund called the regional arts fund across the region. It is a way that the local authority can capture the voice of the sector in some decision making around arts and culture in the region. That is interesting for our committee, given that we are looking at one of the themes of how we can do more to support practitioners and cultural freelancers. Obviously, the approaches right across Scotland have been variable in terms of how cultures supported, variable both in the way that different areas approach but also the funding that goes into arts right across Scotland. Do you think that that variety and the fact that some local areas are spending a lot less than others is a result of arts funding not being a statutory requirement for local authorities? Yes, absolutely. We now have a national outcome for creativity culture, which is really welcome. There is a worry that perhaps that may be too late. There are some local authorities who have had the difficult position to make decisions on their budgets and sometimes the arts has been the one that is cut. Obviously, I would say that what we have got to look at is the contribution that the arts makes across a wider society in terms of impact and social renewal, individuals, communities, cohesion, community development, learning, confidence, health, preventive spend in terms of criminal justice. Perhaps it is about what we perhaps need to do is make the case stronger, find a way to make the case stronger. Great Scotland has, to some extent, lost its powers of research. We, as a sector, would benefit from more strategic positioning papers on culture and arts and its impact and its reach across wider society. If our national body for the arts is unable to lead on a research function, I wonder who else might do that. Does anyone else want to come in on the issue of arts that is not being a statutory requirement? What impact has that steered? I have always said that it is statutory, not mandatory. The distinction is that we could not do it as a local authority if it was not statutory, but it is not mandatory. The issue for us is ring ffencing, particularly for education and other aspects of Scottish Government policy, as it impacts locally. What is left for investment in arts and culture and quality of life expenditure has definitely been under pressure for the past five years. For five years, the data locally in Dundee is horrible to look at in a city that really values it. There has never been any dispute about the impact, interestingly, while research is absolutely needed. In our case, it is purely the mechanism of budget setting that mitigates against funding for the arts. That is in a city that has put culture-led regeneration right at the centre of its strategic policies, such as the V&A and Dundee investment that you all know about. I am fortunate to work in a place that really values it at a community level, at a neighbourhood level, at a cross-party level. That does not protect it. My argument would be that if there is to be ring ffencing, and I do not know if there should be, but if there is and there is, then there should be within that ring funding for arts as part of the wider portfolio of Scottish Government outcomes. We are outside the ring and that is where we are disadvantaged. I am not sure if the word adequate is in current documents. What does adequate provision of libraries of culture mean? There are bigger questions that we need to ask ourselves about the role that culture and creativity have more broadly in trying to get us to the sort of country we want to be, the communities we want to have, the places we want to have. Very much like Dundee, Paisley is using culture to define its future through cultural regeneration. We are finding a framework in which we can inhabit and then leave our other funding by doing that. It is about getting our vision and our collective ambition right first. We are doing that locally, but nationally that is where we need to be doing it as well. I think that there are other issues with the ideas around statutory and mandatory, which are the way people may be listening to this that won't want me to get anywhere close to definitions of culture so early on a sunny day. How do you then define what it is that you are making mandatory and whose culture is that and where does it happen and all those sorts of things? I think that there are very real and serious questions for us. The more rules you put around it, the more you can freeze it in a way. How do we get to a country, a place of policies and strategies in a country where we are not thinking about how to be greener, how to respond to climate change, how to think about a progressive education system, an inclusive economy without having culture at the heart of that? That is where we need to be looking. We need to stop looking at siloed budgets and thinking broadly and in an intersectional way across the budgets that we have and in terms of policy development. I think that it has to start with the ambition, the strategy, the policy, then you look at the budget mechanisms. Otherwise, I think that we will just be moving bits of the same problems around within the existing system and we possibly need to start extending our view to a societal view when we are thinking about culture and not just within the cultural sector, if that makes sense. Gary, you have seen it. Obviously, not every local authority has signed up for the place partnerships with making culture a statutory requirement. Change that, do you think? I think that it would be helpful. I agree with the semantic around statutory. What is absent is the active consideration of culture and how it can contribute, so the positive aspects that have been touched on to people's lives, to bringing people together or to the economy. It is not a statutory consideration. For example, within community planning, Creative Scotland is not a statutory partner in that, in my opinion, should be. The points at which different groups are getting together to consider what are the priorities for that region, developing their local outcome improvement plans, it is variable where culture is even represented in those discussions, so the ability for culture to be even considered as a potential priority is not a statutory. One of the things that we have done as part of this inquiry is to commission research from Drew Wiley into how things work in other parts of Europe. One of the things that struck us from the research was quite often in other parts of Europe that is a structure put in place, an agreement put in place between central and local government in terms of how arts and culture is delivered across those countries. I know that that is something that Creative Scotland has been exploring and Governments have been exploring. Do you think that that would help to have some kind of formal arrangement in place? I think that it could be helpful. I think that we would need to develop a solution that was correct for Scotland, but you are right. We have looked at it. The Irish Arts Council visited and it was a session with different local authorities to explain how it does in Ireland. We are aware of the Swedish model. The first step would be to get the principle in place to invite local authorities to be mandated to plan for culture to articulate what their priorities are. That is the first step in other countries to make sure that there is a requirement for them to have a cultural strategy to show how they are considering culture. Then, to consider how Creative Scotland and other national bodies can collaborate to help deliver that. That is the first step that has been taken in other countries. If we can get to that, then certainly closer and more formal arrangements between local and national could be very helpful. David was saying that it is about using what we already have, so we have an outcome for culture now. That is positive, but it could be that we are not doing enough around it. There is the national performance framework. I do not think that anybody would argue with anything in it. It clearly sets out how to be a better Scotland across a number of cross-cutting areas. As far as I am aware, sitting within the local authority that I am in, we bear it in mind, but there is not necessarily a structure around how we report on it. We are very interested in culture and what it can bring to us as a local authority. I think that it is more that local government is bearing those outcomes in mind. It cannot be expected to necessarily be delivering fully across all of them. Maybe there is a bit of work around that outcome and how you then develop the relationships or the framework around that. Rather than creating another system and set of agreements and structures, because we are all quite a burden of those at the moment within local government and certainly within the wider cultural sector, nobody wants to add to that. I would look at what we have already got. Outcome is a positive thing, but let us make more of that. It also gets us what we want in terms of very long-term, strategic outcome-focused working across policy and across sectors, which should be good. Dundee has maintained a cultural strategy since there was Government guidance about putting in place a cultural strategy. That has helped us. The point of reporting for the cultural strategy is to the Dundee partnership, the local community planning partnership for the city. For an excess of 15 years, we have been reporting to the community planning partnership on the strategic decisions and with an action plan. There is no security for that, and that is why it is not common across Scotland. I think that it has been really helpful to have that focus, which is really important. Gary Simpson has pointed out the location of Crata Scotland. We have all been here when it comes to the local community planning partnership, and we have been here in Scotland as a first-year adviser to the community planning partnership. Gary Simpson has pointed out the location and location of Crata Scotland. The location is crucial, particularly as we have been working with other departments to provide new information information. Garry's point about the location of Creative Scotland, we would really welcome that. We've always had Creative Scotland as an advisor and a partner, but I think to have them as a strategic partner and there, as of right, would be helpful. Donfries and Galloway Council are just in the process of creating a cultural strategy, and we're on part of that project team, so we're bringing the voice of the region's creative sector into that process, so that's going to kick off in a couple of weeks' time. I'm just more broadly speaking, I wonder if there's a way to look at things completely differently, perhaps. I mean, Creative Scotland, partly due to its legislation, that has formed the organisation, it's in that really difficult position where it's maybe perhaps trying to be all things to all people, you know, sort of public benefit, artistic excellence. I just wonder whether this is the time, as part of this process, to explore. There are various avenues for funding and interests in culture broadly, not just from the national body of the arts, not just from local authorities, but perhaps what focus does local authorities focus on their citizens and visitors of the region, allowing Creative Scotland to look at international export of our talent and growing excellence at home. Is there a different way to a different lens to look at funding of culture through? Okay, thank you. Stuart, was your supplementary on this topic. Yes, please. Thank you. It's just one question for Mr Cameron that you mentioned a few moments ago regarding wanting Creative Scotland to be a statutory consultee. Does Creative Scotland actually have the capacity to be a statutory consultee across all 32 local authority areas? Yes, I think that it would be a challenge. It would require us to think about how we work, but I personally think that it's very important, and I think that considering how we can develop that capacity, so yes. Okay, thank you. Bold, good. Thank you, convener. I suppose there's two ways to approach this. There was a supplementary question answered in spring this year about the amount of funding that goes to local authorities, the amount that local authorities spend on culture. Over the whole of Scotland, we see a 2.7 per cent reduction from 2016 through to 2018. That would be bigger in real terms. I only have the net figures, I don't have the real-time figures. There are some variations between local authorities, but ones that are spending more, it's not a significant amount more. Again, once you interpret it into real terms, I'd imagine it's either a very small increase or there's a reduction there again. We've already talked a bit about the pressures on local government funding and culture not being statutory, so it's not getting the level of protection that other areas are. A solution to that is to increase the amount of money that goes to local authorities, or to give local authorities more power to raise more revenue themselves. There's then a question that we're going to be doing through the tourist tax. If local authorities decide to take that up and the committee's already looked at that, there's the debate around workplace parking. There's other areas opening up for local authorities, but does the intention of that money go to culture with that prior area? I suppose that the other way that you approach it is what you've talked about already this morning. You look at a cultural strategy, you look at putting a structure in place that emphasises the importance of culture, and local authorities don't have a choice but to invest in it. I want to reflect a bit on how we might resolve some of the larger funding issues, just about the amount that goes to local authorities and whether it is about trying to increase that amount or is it about the way in which they distribute the money that they have. You can also comment on the draft cultural strategy. That has been going on for a wee while now. We're not clear when the strategy will be published. I'd be interested to know if you think that the strategy will be able to address some of those issues and provide that level of direction or commitment to the arts and provide an expectation that there needs to be delivery on this policy area. That's quite a lot of questions. Leonie, I'm looking at you. I didn't say in my introduction about my job that my previous experience is obviously working as head of culture strategy within the Scottish Government and as director of arts at Creative Scotland, so I've got lots of reference points and experiences that I can bring to this. I'll maybe go backwards if it's okay with your questions, so the draft culture strategy. I think what we wanted to do with it is encourage a society-wide national debate about the importance of culture to our future as a country. I think it did do that. I think it was complicated. I have to be very honest about that. When you start to think about things societally and not within the structure of their own sector, it becomes complicated, but I think that's still where we need to keep pursuing the draft culture strategy. To be brief, if society is flourishing, I think that the culture sector flourishes too. As the chair was saying earlier, if there's things like universal basic income that are being introduced in Scotland, they will make a really big difference to artists and creative freelancers as well, so it's not the answers that aren't just within the sector that we're talking about, it's a broader thing. I agree that I don't know when the draft culture strategy is coming out. I've not been there for six months, but I do think that taking time with it is okay. It might be frustrating, but I don't think that the work will be done nationally around it. I think that it's maybe okay to pause with it because of the important work that you're doing here. I know that Creative Scotland is out and about having lots of conversations about the role of funding and not just the mechanisms of funding, but what public funding means as a strategic lever that we have. I do think that we have to have a hope that the cultural strategy will carry some of the work that the committee is doing and other work forward. I think that we have to make a bold move around what you cannot become the green or fairer, inclusive, economic, progressive, open to the world country unless we place culture and creativity at the heart of that. If that's an ideological aim, you then have to think about the structures that we've got by which we can work towards that, and everything is very siloed. The more that we're under fiscal and financial pressures, the more siloed we become because you retreat into your own territories. We all do that. It's human nature, so you've got to have a collective society-wide ambition to carry people forward. When I was doing the strategy work, we spent a lot of time looking for answers in other places internationally. There are some amazing things that happen around the UK, Scotland and in closer UK neighbours. You come back to Scotland as a peculiar devolved position around welfare and tax leavers. You still have to find your way forward. There are things to be learning from other places. Germany, for example, is a really simple thing. Within their welfare system, if you're applying for public funding as an artist, you can use that application process as job-seeking points. In effect, you're not being penalised. You can retain your welfare, but Scotland can't do that. That's a UK power still, so we're looking at all of those things. Finland was interesting to us. We looked at how people budget and the values and principles that they apply to their budgeting processes. When you look at a country like Finland, we would all expect to see a culture budget that's high nationally and locally. I can't remember the exact figures, so forgive me for not having them, but it's not as high as we thought compared to Scandinavia neighbours. You look beneath the surface a little bit, and what you see is that culture budgets sit in all budgets within the Finnish Government. It's in environment and climate change in early years. It's not just in how they budget, but in how they think about the communities in the country that they're supporting and developing. I still think that's where we need to put our long-term energy. It doesn't maybe fix the immediate problems. That's where the strategy was trying to go. Are there questions you raised there again that are really complicated about how do you get councils to raise more money alloys? We're brought in as a means to do that as well. Some of it works, some of it is quite challenging for us. I think that the tourism tax will work for some places potentially. It might not work for Paisley yet, maybe one day, but we're not in that place yet. I have a feeling that the heat around a tourism tax in a city like Edinburgh, there will be so many people after that. How do we do what Gary was saying? You were talking about Paisley and Cakes last time and going back to the food metaphor. We're still always on the menu. We need to be at a really high-level strategic table so that we're informing how the earliest decisions are made and the earliest policies are being developed to make sure that if a tourism tax does come in embedded within that, the ability for it to then support culture in the places where the tourism tax is going to work. I think that it's really about trying to work out what the levers we have as a national government and local government, how we bring them together to look at how you get more money. I think that nobody is sitting on this panel thinking that there's more money coming quick. I still think that it would be a good ambition for us to work towards getting more money into the culture budget overall because it is such an efficient way of getting so much for this country. I agree about making the case, but I think that we make it to the same people again and again and we've got to start making it to different people. Sorry, that was quite a long answer, but you've got a lot of complicated questions there, so forgive me. I think that at the heart of this is how the cake is cut. I think that the debate that Leonie refers to about embedding it across public sector delivery as opposed to having a discrete ring-fence budget for a culture is really interesting. In a city like Dundee, the percentage of our local authority expenditure on culture is less than 3 per cent and yet it's our silver bullet. More was invested by government in the pupil equity fund in one year than is invested in culture. If the Government took a decision to go in this direction, it could do it and has done it. I think that's the question. For me, we will all face the tail end of austerity, the kind of financial pressures that we face in a local authority where money is ring-fenced, where political direction and focus is on private areas and less culture is protected in some way either by the way in which it's embedded across or by ring-fencing it. There's not enough, I don't think, being invested. If we ask people in the city how much they think of their taxation or their public pound is spent on culture, they're pretty shocked when they hear it's less than 3 per cent. They're assuming in a city like Dundee with the V&A and with the rep and with the leisure and culture facilities. If you ask people in the street, they will say, what must be about it, is it 10 per cent? It's not, it's a third of that. The level of investment that is currently counted and visible is quite small. If I was confident that by reinvesting it across other areas it would be a return to the development of artists and artistic production and the creative and cultural sector, I'd be relaxed about that. Where I'm less relaxed is the finished model. They've embedded it, they believe in it, they're committed to it, it's transversal and it delivers. In my experience, the money that's going into other sectors because of the very pressures that Leon is referring to that they're under, it tends to be siphoned into what they see as their first priority and the cultural investment tends to drop down. So, while education could choose through people equity fund or mainstream funding to invest more in its cultural partners, its very focus on the attainment and achievement agenda of course drives them back to what is what they're primarily judged against. We're judging people against measures that I think that this panel would probably question are the right measures. The final question is about the national outcome, which was referred to a bit already. The indicators and the performance indicators that we have for local authorities. Do you think that those are the right ones? From what I've heard this morning it seems that I don't know how effective they are in driving the work at local authority level. I think that Leonie and the Institute have both made arguments for the recognition of culture within other budgets and I think that is partly what Fiona Hyslop is trying to do with the cultural strategy, though we don't know when that's going to appear. I just have a bit of concern, we're quite far away from that. It's a message that we've heard from other panels. We're quite far away from getting to the stage where that becomes any kind of reality or becomes meaningful. We've heard about pockets of activity and we've heard some funding of NHS money goes to a particular project, but it doesn't seem quite far away from having anything more substantial when it comes to the way in which money is spent and done by departments and the amount that goes to culture. I want to comment briefly on the national outcome performance indicators, whether they're strong enough and how they need to be improved. Sorry, I'll give it a go. I think that they're good and strong enough. I think that's what we then do with them. I've only been in local government a few months, so I forget the wrong apologies to colleagues. As far as I understand it, we're aware of the national outcomes across all areas and the indicators that sit under them. The community planning and the local planning groups that we've got set up around that are the means by which we do it. You can't deliver any of those national outcomes without massively mobilising local government to deliver them. That's going to be the main mechanism by which those outcomes are achieved for this country through local government action. What I don't think currently exists is any formalised structure around how we all report on that, and how you get a complete aggregated national view of what those outcomes and performance indicators are achieving, if that makes sense. I think that trying to achieve that aggregated big picture view of all of them is important. I'm not yet sure how we get that. I think that probably through work with COSLA and others, there's still something to be done about work. We'll bear a lot of attention to the culture one because we're setting our stall by it as a local government. We're like Dundee and a few others. We've been hugely ambitious around culture for Paisley and wider Renfrewshire, but I don't think there's a structure to support it. We will do it because we've already identified it as a strategic priority. If you haven't done that, you could just not report on the culture one. I think that's the situation at the moment. I don't think it's formalised and structured. I think it's just what you choose to do around it. Is that right? That's probably similar. We used to have it as one of the strategic themes of the Dundee partnership, and the advice from government, which I think was very sound, was to try and have fewer themes. Economic children services, community safety came to the fore as the strategic themes, and culture became a cross-cutting theme as did environment. You could argue that both of those are really, really important, but the way that you cut the cake, the way that you divide the strategic with the transversal is really challenging. I think that it's been downgraded. In recent years, in my experience, the profile given to reporting on cultural sectors' impact on national outcomes, not just the specific one but across the board, has become less high profile. That's something that the committee, the Government, could make more demands on. I would welcome that. At a local level, what I would say, which is interesting, is the way that funded organisations, whether they're funded by Greater Scotland or the partnership funding with the local authority, the allio, we all will report on the national outcomes. If you go into the theatre, the contemporary art centre or the library service, they are mindful of the reporting on and looking at the national outcomes as a frame of reference against which they should judge their performance locally. I wonder whether the current performance indicators on the outcome would match the ambition of the draft culture strategy for Scotland. Obviously, I'm horizon scanning here. None of us know what that will look like. If the ambition that's described in the draft now about seeking a step change in how society values and views culture and the transformational power of culture has, I think maybe the current indicators are more empirical, so they'll measure stats and numbers, which is of value and of use. However, I wonder whether it would get into the real texture and meaning of culture and the impact it can have across wider society. We've been taking part in the South of Scotland's economic partnership, as you will know, doing the consultation ahead of the agency being formed next April. Some of the feedback that's come through that process is that the agency will be open to different ways of measuring arts and culture and its contribution to the economy. That's yet to be determined what that might look like. However, in terms of the conversation that's going on out of that process, they recognise that culture has another offer to society in that respect. It's all officers who are here this morning. How important is political leadership? How important is it that you have a councillor who understands the importance of culture? Sometimes you see that. You see a council that has a champion, someone who understands how important culture is and can argue for that. Although you might have strategies put in place and it's all officer-led, it's still ultimately a political decision. You might not want to comment on that, but how... I can draw on my own experience. I think that it's very important. It's also important that it's not just one individual, that culture has a voice within the committee structure at a local authority level, so that issues are given due discussion and due consideration. Some local authorities, for example, have a culture and sport sub-committee, which will specifically focus on those issues. I think that that's really important. The point on officers is that it's equally important that there's a value and a discussion with those who are not engaged in the cultural activity, so it's discussion with colleagues whether they work in health, planning, in addition to creating structures that allow that to happen. It's about having that discussion and changing ways of working. I know that colleagues here work extensively to engage colleagues in different departments, so politically and across officer level are both important in my opinion. Can I go on to the place programme itself and the funding that you have? As a number of organisations, you have been recipients of some of that. Can I maybe ask about what your experiences have been of that? Is it working as you anticipated it to? Have there been some difficulties? Are there any ways that it could be improved and what your views are on it going forward? We were one of the early ones. I would say that it was, almost without question, one of the most flexible, helpful and developmental funding programmes that I've been associated with. I would give it straight aces, but it was excellent. We were able to form a partnership at the time that Dundee had been bidding to become the UK capital of culture. We formed a partnership at that time. We didn't become the UK capital of culture, as you know, but the legacy of that was a strong basis, a revised and refreshed cultural strategy. We had no obvious funding mechanism for delivering that, for driving it forward. Place partnership was that mechanism. Had we not had that funding source, I hate to think what would have happened in Dundee as a legacy of a failed bid. Place partnership allowed the University of Dundee to sustain a level of funding and a significant investment in a secondment. The University of Abertau to have a secondment and some funding. The City Council and the Legend Culture Trust. We had four partners that matched the £250,000 that was put up by Greater Scotland. We immediately doubled it, and then we doubled it again through the programmes that they delivered. It delivered for us over the last four years a cultural strategy. Where I'm going with this is that it was great, but it stops. It's a hard landing. We've worked really hard to try and keep the partners' commitment to place partnership. That City Council under its financial pressures, the Legend Culture Trust, which ran a deficit of the last two years, its financial pressures, the universities under financial pressures. So they're saying, well, if we're not getting anything back from government, why should we put in our bid? And we've managed to persuade them for another three years to stick with the level of investment that they put in during the place partnership. But I think there's a real question there about the incentivising of investment in culture led regeneration. It's been great. A similar bit different in that we're just kind of starting out. Although we've had the agreement with Creative Scotland for a while, it's taken us a little bit of time to get it right. So it became part of the bid process again, which we didn't become UK City of Culture either, but that doesn't stop any of us with this. The place partnership has been really, really important. Again, from what we're calling our bid legacy money, we've put £200k in. It's matched by Creative Scotland. What it's enabling us to do really importantly, following the work of this committee, is so interesting because there's so much chat about national and local. But when you get down to local level, you get local and local chat as well. Their real challenges for local government and what the place partnership is enabling us to do is to work really locally within neighbourhoods and communities and towns and villages, as well as Paisley across Renfrewshire. It's run by Renfrewshire Leisure, our alleo, with responsibility for leisure and culture in the area. The other thing that's really important is that it sits within your overarching place partnership programme is something called VACMA, which is visual arts and craft and makers awards. It's run for a number of years and it's not by any stretch of the imagination the biggest funding pot within Creative Scotland, but it is so important. It's awards of around £500 to £1500. It's again partnered from Creative Scotland and local authority and it's a swift and efficient and transparent funding programme that gets money directly into the hands of makers and artists living in the area, some of which aren't visible to big national funding programmes because they just can't get into them. That's really important, so it's that really specific low-level detailed work that is so important for us in Renfrewshire, which means that we can work comprehensively across the whole local authority area. Learn from Creative Scotland as we do it. I think that they learn from us as we do it. Absolutely, it echoes Stuart's points about ring fence funds generally. There's a national trend at the moment around ring fence funds across everything in education culture. They're everywhere, they can be great, they can be exciting, but they also can be really short term. So they leave you with like, oh, what do we do now? Actually, I think it's the match funding, it's the partnership of both bringing to the table or multiple bringing to the table that matters. We maybe need to think about the phase 2 of place partnerships, what happens when you're on your last year of it and those such things, but overall it's a really, really good programme. It just needs to maybe evolve a little bit, I would say. I would echo both what Leonie and Stuart have said. For us, it came at a real critical time, a strategic across the region, so it actually gave the council officers the evidence that they needed to take to committee to secure the strategic arts budget at a time, which has been secured at the same level up until last year where there was a small cut. So that's a really big success. The process itself has been really flexible, really open. For me, one of the most significant initiatives coming out of the National Body for the Arts for quite some time, the place partnership programme is a really exciting programme because it creates a different type of conversation with local authorities. It is about getting that conversation right though, because in our example we had actually been able to lock in some local authority money as well, but if that conversation wasn't right then the local authority could potentially use that as an excuse to not fund the arts because there's other money coming in. Phase 2 is really important because there is a sudden stop that Stuart has said. I feel, actually, that I was quite, sort of, Gary made a bubble-stank like staff. Yes, we can absolutely have that capacity to have those relationships across the country. I just wonder whether Crate of Scotland really has that capacity. I think, actually, what the place partnerships is creates a different relationship where Crate of Scotland can establish a network of partners where, as those partners working locally can help Crate of Scotland achieve its ambitions for the country. You've identified that there's real potential here, but not every local authority has got involved. In previous evidence we did hear that there was some criticism of Crate of Scotland not being sufficiently resourced our capacity to achieve and support all local authorities. It would be good to get a view on that because, as I said, that has been a genuine criticism about the organisation not having that. We've already heard that others who are getting that opportunity see that as a real benefit, but it only goes so far and they need the link between Crate of Scotland to make it work. If that's not available or not resourced appropriately, there are potential difficulties going forward. That's a fair comment, just on the reaching out across 32 in response to Mr McVill. That was a statutory consultee for community planning. I think that, as a national organisation, we do have a responsibility to work across all 32 regions. I think that we do. I think that looking beyond the place partnership programme, whether it's target funds, youth music initiative, cash back for creativity, visual arts and craft makers, as well as our open and regular funding, we can do more. Colleagues who have sat before you have acknowledged that, so we can do more. It's not just about Crate of Scotland, but it's about how we work collaboratively. A way of working that we need to develop is how we work collaboratively. You've heard very positive examples today through the place partnership programme, but the principle there is that it's a partnership. It's not beholden on Crate of Scotland to imply that they know what's best for that locality. It comes from the local, and that's a way of working. It's challenging. You've heard very positive cases here today, but I'm sure that each would tell you some of the difficulties in bringing people together. Other parts of Scotland has been challenging, but we can do more. I'm sure that, as we work through our organisation with Vellant, we'll think about different ways. That principle of working in partnership with local partners has to be central. The political champion within the organisation is quite critical, if there is an individual within the organisation that has that capacity, but also making sure that the players who are in the partnership are the ones who can bring something to the table. You've talked about today some of the big players that you have within your communities that make a massive impact and have the opportunity to develop that potential and bring things forward. However, if you don't have that capacity, it must be very difficult to break through, because if you don't have them sitting at the table and bringing that resource and that support mechanism, then it must be very, very difficult. That's maybe why some local authorities have found it a challenge to achieve their goal. I think that what we're heading towards is where does the leadership for culture reside. I think that we've been very fortunate. I'm absolutely aware of that, having worked other parts of Scotland. In Dundee, we've had a consensus political leadership over a number of administrations over many years and decades. We've also had a consistency of officer support at chief executive and senior officer level. When I have contact with other colleagues and other parts of Scotland, if you don't have that, the point that you're making is that it's very difficult to kickstart it. What I wonder in terms of Creative Scotland's presence, and I'm referring now to our experience of working with Sport Scotland where they have original presence. It may be not every local authority, but perhaps some sense, and I hope that Gary and his colleagues will forgive me for suggesting it, but having some sense of original presence, which, in effect, we've had, but not as a kind of conscious structural decision in Dundee. So we've had good links with Creative Scotland because of the people who live there and who we've worked with. That has been powerful and it's been helpful. If that could be extended, even to the point of having original presence as Sport Scotland is doing through its sports partnerships, I think that would help. You're not the first person to see that in the course of this inquiry. Particularly when we were out and about, people said why doesn't Creative Scotland have a regional presence. That's definitely a strong theme that's coming through. Kenneth Gibson. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. A lot of the discussion has been about local authorities because of the £560 million that went into the sector of 2017-18. It's obviously fundamental to culture, but what I'm interested in looking at is the huge disparity in funding across Scotland. If we look at the figures from 2017-18, there was a 2.75 per cent decrease across the sector, but what that masked, if we look at the figures for the 32 authorities, was that while West Lothian had a shocking 19.8 per cent decrease in funding, Stirlings went up by 11.72 per cent, to over 10 million in Stirlings's case. Looking down into the figures, I noticed that seven councils had above inflation increases, 25 below inflation increases, but if we look at it on a per capita basis, Glasgow's is three times that of Edinburgh's, which is the lowest per capita in Scotland. Clackmann ensure is 50 per cent higher per capita than Edinburgh, for example. Maybe Edinburgh can attract private funding and so on. What I'm getting at here is that you're looking to perhaps have culture embedded in local government in Scotland or possibly ring fencing. The issue with that is what kind of baseline would we start from. If we're talking about some local authorities, the baseline would be quite small, whereas others would be significant. Therefore, what we would have is a possible uneven level of development. The issue about ring fencing is that if you were to ring fencing, councillors would stick within that box. Councils, by the way, don't like ring fencing. They're against it, full stop. How do we restore a balance across Scotland, given what I've said in terms of cultural funding? There's a hugely varying picture across the country. I'm not sure that there's ever been a balance. We need to really think about what we want for the whole of the country, and thinking about it entirely through local authority boundaries is quite tricky, because not everybody entirely lives within local authority. This is a fascinating table that we've all seen. There are specific stories that underpin each one. The reason Glasgow is so high in Edinburgh so low is because of national funding directly into national institutions. Looking at the dynamics in Glasgow and Edinburgh, there's a whole session just on that, potentially, because Glasgow has a responsibility for what are in effect organisations like Kelvin Grove that are operating nationally but not funded as such. There's not just the Creative Scotland funding, there's not just the local authority funding, there's also the directly funded national organisations, the performance companies and those that hold collections. It's really complex. I don't know how you get to the balance position, because if we're talking in terms of a budget that is finite, I don't think you want to slice it more and more because then you start getting into a position where you're funding such small amounts to fail. You're not funding anybody enough to thrive and to develop and evolve in the way that we want, nor do I think anybody wants to rewind 70 years of investment that's gone in to certain places. You've got infrastructure set up, you've got phenomenal expertise in certain places. If that's the context in which we're working, how do we then try to be more equitable across the geography of Scotland bearing in mind that it's so complex and dynamic within that? Even in a city like Edinburgh, you'll have a conversation around festival and city centre focus. Urban neighbourhoods on the periphery of the city centre feeling they don't get their fair share. You'll have the same in all the major cities. I'm sure Dundee's the same and Renfrewshire. We've got it between Paisley and the other towns and villages, so there's layers and layers and layers of how you balance it. It's not as simple as just the national and the local authority area. Do you know what I mean? Do we have a baseline? How do we have minimum cultural provision if you like? The moment it's described as adequate provision, so libraries are described as how do you provide adequately a library service for an area and there's so much you can interpret around that. I wonder if it is about adequate provision or whether it is about the conversations that have come through the current draft culture strategy and certainly we're quite a powerful part of the 2005 cultural commission which we're around the concept of rights and entitlement. What as a citizen, a resident of this country do you expect to have culturally and looking at things like the UN sustainable development goals? I know that Mr Murdoch wants to come in, but I want specifically Mr Murdoch to talk about the pupil equity fund, the £120 million relative to the £90 million that Creative Scotland gets. Some of that peff money, although it might be an encouragement from government to spend it on STEM subjects, which it clearly is. You're obviously the director of religion, culture and the daily lobby, for example, head teachers to invest in drama teachers or music teachers or musical instruments or other creative arts. How does that happen in terms of ensuring some of that peff money in the private areas because it's into cultural pursuits? Of course it does. There is a lobbying for that. I meet all my colleagues who are head teachers or primary and secondary schools. I think that the message they get, however, is directed much more to what you would see as conventional educational attainment rather than proving the whole confidence-based, qualitative life, self-esteem that participation in arts, music, drama and culture can create for young people. To date, it may change, but to date, the level of investment that's come through attainment challenge or peff that's been reinvested into the cultural sector is very, very small. Do you speak for Dundee? I don't think that it's something that is, in any sense, there's no sense of a negativity towards what arts and culture can do. It's more of the reverse. It's more of the priority that is perceived by the teaching professions, by the head teachers, by those who are judging them about where they should invest that money and where they will get returns. That might change over time, but for me it was an interesting example of when Government makes a strategic investment in one area, which has the potential, as Leonie said, to be cross-cutting or transversal. Unless it comes with guidance or support or a mechanism to make sure that happens, it won't flow into other creative practices. It will be kind of replicating what we know because that's what we teach and that's what we've been judged against. Mr Cameron, in creative Scotland submission, you talk about what individual artists earn. You say that within Scotland 80 per cent of artists earn less than £10,000 a year through their artistic output, two thirds earn less than £5,000 and only 2 per cent generate earnings over £20,000, while in 2017 median earnings were £28,354. How many people define themselves as artists in Scotland do you know? Obviously you must have an idea otherwise you wouldn't be able to generate these figures. How are people defined as artists? If someone is only earning a few ball by year as an artist but they are working as a teacher or bus driver or whatever it happens to be, how is someone defined as an artist in Scotland? How do we get a grip of that? That's a very complex question. I think Professor Richard DeMarco before he talked about everyone as an artist and if someone is like him, we wouldn't wish to define what an artist is. I take the question as clear as those figures are stark. They've been discussed at length. I think it's a question for creative Scotland but it's a question for us as a country in terms of how opportunities are afforded to artists. Opportunities that allow them to deliver their creative practice to work with communities to engage. That's a big question for us as a country. I think that Leonie pointed towards some examples in other countries including Germany and I believe Ireland have got an official status attached to specific qualifications. Perhaps no more of the detail around that but I think that it's a more progressive way of thinking about how an artist can position themselves as a profession in inverted commas. On a broader point, I think that we are all creative. We are artists in our own way but there is a way for us to think about how we could have a clearer status for the role of an artist. Creative Scotland commissioned a report that said that in terms of EU funding, a minimum of £23 million was invested in Scotland's creative sectors over the decade to 2016. It said that the proposed UK shared prosperity fund will be needed to support development. That will be particularly felt by rural areas of Scotland where EU funding has been critical. Obviously, nothing is actually happening on that. It was supposed to be consulted on at the end of last year and it's effectively in paralysis, like the whole Brexit issue. What is the gearing effect of that £23 million? What does it actually lever in in terms of additional funding? Are there any contingencies in place in Creative Scotland or are you working with the Scottish Government to try and create contingencies should that source of funding effect be cut off without a replacement? We have responded to the particular call for opinion on that and we have made the case that any future funds that come should prioritise culture is a minimum to the same level. In relation to leader funding in particular is correct that David made the point earlier that it was included in the match funding for the place partnership and that is in the case in other place partnerships we have. It is a very important source of support but looking beyond the funding it is about connecting us to the world. It is about building those partnerships and relationships. It is about really important opportunities from artists in Scotland to export their talent and build relationships equally to bring artists into Scotland to help create the vibrant cultural life that we want, one that is truly international. Beyond the funding it is about relationships and how Scotland connects with the rest of the world. As I said, you said that it is particularly felt by rural areas of Scotland where EU funding has been critical. What kind of artistic projects would be threatened without that kind of funding and what kind of areas would be impacted? Leader funding, in particular, which is the one that has had a specific emphasis, has supported whether it is capital developments for specific cultural projects or whether it has been support for place partnerships and initiatives. There is a requirement for that to be, there will be a gap there, that is evident. Those projects and initiatives will have to be supported in a different way. The word threat, I think, we just have to think differently about how we could support those but our key point is that the resource that currently comes in through those should be replaced, whether that is through new mechanisms that come in or thinking about differently about existing resources but it is important. I think that we have been having a very interesting discussion. Picking up on a point that was made earlier about regional presence, a regional presence for creative Scotland and really getting into that kind of area, a point that has been made to us when we have been out and about. For example, recently in Firmland fire station creative venue, which is a fantastic venue, we had an outreach workshop and the point was consistently made that people felt. The perception anyway was that the focus of creative Scotland was on the central belt and in that regard I understand that research has been prioritised into looking at culture in Scotland cities. That adds to that perception. As the MSP for Cowdenbeath, I am here to represent my constituents and I need to be assured that the mindset, I think that that is the key thing, that everything comes from what the mindset of the organisation is and the people who are involved in wider culture in Scotland in terms of facilitating, promoting and allocating spending to. What do we do to ensure that everybody gets a shot in Scotland? Or do you not share the concerns that have been expressed to us? I can answer that. I myself come from a rural community. My role, if you were to see my carbon footprint, I wouldn't be too proud of it but we are physically present as much as possible. We attend funding events so that we can talk to as many people as possible in one sitting. We attend a different network meetings. As much as we are possible, we are physically present and my team and other teams do get there. I think that it is a wider question around Stuart touched on regional presence. For me, it is about how we work. The resource is a challenge for Creative Scotland. It is difficult for us to be physically present in all 32 local authority areas, even more difficult when you zoom in on those local authority areas and go to different towns and different places. Each would have a case for wishing creative scot, but it is about how we work. Back to my earlier point about keeping with our partnerships and developing those a little bit further, alongside thinking about how we can make sure that we are accessible and physically present as much as possible. I do accept that you do not want to be spending a lot of money just taking a box by having a wee office or something. That is not really the point that I was trying to make, rather the point that I was trying to make was that that leads to a perception in terms of spend and spend on cultural activities that Creative Scotland is really focused on central belt and cities. That is where all the money goes. An example yet again to feed that narrative is that the research that is currently being prioritised is looking at what can be done more in cities, where the majority of the investment is already in any event. How do we, as a committee, assure people who have raised that concern with us that that is not the case? How do we give them that assurance that they are seeking? I have got the experience of working in Creative Scotland now in a place that is not, I mean we are close to central but we are not Glasgow or Edinburgh. The responsibility sits in not all of us a wee bit. There is something about networks that is really, really important. I was thinking about it when I was listening to the place partnership conversation that what we have developed through the place partnerships is almost like a network that has got no formality around it. There are people who have experienced that. There are epicenters developing of really good practice that aren't cities that are towns and villages and some of them are cities that maybe we could actually learn from. There are some really active networks that are brilliant, such as the Creative Learning Network that operates around Scotland underneath the Creative Learning Plan supported by Creative Scotland and Education Scotland and others. There used to be something called cultural connectors in that network. They were really, really important and they almost did the work out of all of us. They represented national and local interests and created a forum that wasn't reliant on one set of officers in one organisation. I wonder if we need to be thinking a little bit about that as well as maybe looking at new partnership models and shared posts and secondments and all those things. I have been the beneficiary of being able to work in lots of different organisational national and local contexts in one being a secondment. They are really, really valuable because you only learn from genuinely experiencing the different perspectives you get by other working national and local. I think that there are other things that we can do as well as thinking about how the regional outlook of Creative Scotland has enhanced because I think that everybody would totally agree with your question. The creative Scotland wants to be national. Sometimes when you are in that organisation, to be really honest, because of the dominance of the funding programmes and the work that you do, which is right because they are the most important thing that the organisation does, that you see the world through those funding programmes. Your word outlook is one that is so important to all of us. How do you step back from that and just make sure that your outlook is broad enough and that you are able to see what is not in the funding programmes as well as what is in them? I think that we all need to help with that by working with Creative Scotland to try to get that bigger view within Creative Scotland. Also, when you are working locally, there is an attitude sometimes that provides local working, which is that you just work locally and that you do not invest in your colleagues and your staff teams to also pursue national networks and conversations. Local authorities have to have a wee think about that, I would suggest, because you want to be thinking locally and internationally. We all want that, but we all need to do that. I would agree about networks. I think that there is an opportunity for Creative Scotland to make more use of the networks that currently exist. We are a network of 440 plus artis and arts organisations, Dumfries and Galloway. There are other networks in the Stove that have a really big network, and DGRsFest will have a network, a promoters network. We convene a group called a partners group of representatives from all these bodies. There is a lot of intelligence and resource that, having a closer relationship with Creative Scotland, we would be able to help each other. There is a perception that, when the regular funding decisions were made, there was chat locally. We have only got an X per cent of the budget, but for the flip side of that, we had a 100 per cent success rate. We had two organisations apply and they were both successful. We did a piece of work around that conversation to try and figure out what is behind that. The people who have established relationships with Crote Scotland felt really well supported. They felt that they listened and where they could connect. However, there was a perception that those people were coming from practitioners. If you did not have an established relationship with Crote Scotland, it was difficult to find a way in perhaps because of an organisational structure and capacity. It is a really complex area, but we have a richness across the country where, working in a different way, we could help each other. I am not close to that, but Dundee is in the central belt. If Dundee was in the central belt, it is a city. Our commitment is to working very closely with Angus, North Fife and Perth Gynros. In fact, Gary Kim spoke about it. There has been a regional collaboration of local authorities to look at the way that the cultural sector can work together to try and make sure that what they do is both integrated, that there is a pathway for skills development, that programmes are as far as possible co-ordinated to avoid the audience division. Within that kind of collaboration that has happened within the sector without any kind of instruction, it has happened because the sector wants to collaborate and can see the benefit for cultural tourism, for staff development, etc. The RFO organisations are based in the cities, but they have within that the commitment to outreach. They take their product and they are very open. If you look at the travel to work area for a city like Dundee, it is quite large. 70 to 80 miles of people will commute into Dundee and audiences will commute in if the programme is good. If you divided that relationship right down per capita to every local authority, you would never sustain quality. It is about that relationship between rural, urban and stuff, but I am not taking any away from the perception that will always exist at the cities where the central belt is getting a bigger slice of the cake. Thank you very much for your comments. It is an issue that we should all reflect on. We have all got responsibility. I take the point that, for example, at the workshop in Firmland, many of the organisations represented public 5 college, private sector or bodies recognised that they need to perhaps be working together better, pan fife, the brand and get organised themselves. I think that that is something that each area would have to take responsibility for. I take the point about quality and if you subdivide and subdivide and the point that Leonie made earlier about the need for something to thrive as opposed to just getting a bit of money with a box ticked and not being able to thrive going forward. I still think that work can be done and I think that it is a mindset. I think that we all need to have a slightly different mindset. On the other area of question, if I may, it is looking at cities and just wondering what impact you are seeing thus far in terms of city region deals. Last week we had a federation of Scottish Theatre here and they were able to say that Putlachry Festival Theatre had secured substantial funding under the city region deal. That is a potential bit of good news, just to hear what is happening in other parts of Scotland. We have both got them for our areas and I am sure that it can be much better, but we are obviously part of the Glasgow region city deal, but culture does not feature in the way that it does in the Tayside one, which is more similar. The wider Edinburgh one as well, where culture does not feature in the way that, largely, it is the release of capital money, which Putlachry has benefited from. Where it features for us is around tourism, because tourism is a collective ambition of the city deal for the wider area. There is now more coming together, there is groups, there is both operational and strategic thinking about culture's role within tourism. For Glasgow and for Paisley and Renfrewshire, cultural tourism is a massive growth area, so it is one of our main areas of focus for Paisley. It is not just about what money it unlocks, which can be significant capital. You are absolutely right. We will see what happens with the next, if there is going to be a next iteration of these deals. Maybe we all need to make a greater play for where culture features within it. They are another opportunity, and it is about money but ways of working. Again, it is about the perception of culture within what economic interventions are, and it is about stepping up to that economic mark from a cultural perspective and saying that we need to be part of this for all of these reasons and being ready to do that. I think that the Tayside city deals are really doing that. You mentioned that, for some city region deals, culture is not directly a part thereof, but for the Tay deal it is. Why is that? Why is it not a part of everybody's… I cannot speak for any others. I know that in Tayside or in Duned, the Tay city is not Tayside. The Tay city is one. It is very much there as cultural tourism, so it has to have that economic impact. It is not cultural development, it is not artist development. It is linked absolutely to building on the back of the investment that Perth Gynros and Dundee in particular have put into culture-led regeneration and to try and make sure that that is fully exploited and developed. The challenges, as I am sure you heard, from others is the timescale for implementation and for the flow through in the money. The announcement of the £350 million was celebrated and people are really excited about it. What was not profiled was that it is a 15-year programme, so there is an expectation of the £350 million being there now. Managing that and working out how much of that will flow out and when is a huge challenge for those who are closer to that programme than I am. It is fantastic to have it, to make no mistake, and it has energised again both artists, the governance bodies of arts organisations and the collaboration between the different local authorities in the Tay city deal. There is opportunity within it as well, even if it is not directly set out about being cultural development. For our area there is a new bridge that is going to connect communities across the Clyde for the first time and give access to public transport to a community that they have not had before. There are exciting cultural opportunities within it as well. It is about thinking about the direct and indirect opportunities of initiatives such as the city deal, of which there is a bounty, to be honest. That is some good news then. Can I come back on your city research as well? I do not think that either of us answered you in that. I am thinking that you are referring to something called the Corset is Cultural Inquiry, UK-wide. Is that the research that you are doing? I think that Creative Scotland is a research partner and I was a wee bit involved in it when I was in government. It is unfortunate if it is created a perception that that is Creative Scotland's sole interest because my understanding being in government and then local government and being interested in it was that it was a UK-wide thing. There was an interesting learning opportunity there from what cities like Manchester and Birmingham were doing around things that we were talking about in terms of tax levies, but it presented quite an interesting idea called cultural compacts, which I think is what we are talking about here, which is where leadership sits, where ownership sits and how you create a framework where you bring national multi-agency and communities together. That was in that. We then, under Creative Scotland's facilitation, had a kind of session around it held in Perth and we were there not as a city. We were there totally championing for the towns and the villages and actually there was a colleague from Perth there who said, what we are talking about here is not necessarily just cities. In Scotland we are slightly different from England, maybe what we are talking about is epicenters of where culture is being used as a catalyst for change to support things like community empowerment and all the other kind of really good things that are kind of around and kind of public policy discourse at the moment. Although its name was maybe cities, I think that it has the potential to have greater influence in some of the areas that you have been talking about at this committee. OK, that is helpful. Again, it is back to perception and language. We should always be working to change perception if it is negative. Just a brief supplementary. Stuart Murdoch talked about the situation in Dundee, and there used to be a debate around Dundee's tax base being quite low, but people from North East Fife and other areas round about, they come into the city, get all the advantages of it but don't contribute to the tax base. Is that so an act of other cities and areas have similar? You look at something like Clackmannan, which has had huge cuts to its culture budget but is a tiny council and has big financial challenges. Just because Clackmannan is cutting back on its cultural offer, which is a really concerning development, people in Clackmannan will go elsewhere. It is a small area. It is that idea of people moving about the area but the local authority having the responsibility of providing it for everybody. It is not just people in Dundee or in Paisley who are providing culture to people who will come in. Has that been overtaken by city deals and other partnership models? I am not sure. If you look at the way in which the boundaries of local government work and the services and the citizens that use the services of local government, the two are out of alignment. A facility like the Olympia leisure centre, probably about 30 to 40 per cent of the users of that will come from the periphery of Dundee, maybe even higher. We are providing services in a city that serves a city region. That is the nature of the beast. The boundaries are very tightly drawn. The question below that is, no one is going to have an appetite for going back into the boundaries. Should we not be looking more equitably at the funding? To some extent, Creator Scotland's RFO funding does that. By funding theatre in Dundee, which is attracting people from a fairly large catchment area, the beneficiaries of that are those who live in North East Wifi and get some further afield. The abiding challenge for a local authority is that it has to work within the costs of the services that it provides and the funding it gets does not always reflect that. It is a real challenge of how you sustain original services in a very small city like Dundee that, for the taxes, is perhaps having to be fun from a very small and impoverished tax base. Stuart McMillan Earlier on, Gary, you said that how we work collaboratively and we need to learn to do more regarding Creator Scotland. Leonie, you highlighted that we all need to work more to engage with Creator Scotland. That struck me that, since 2010, it clearly indicates that Creator Scotland has not been as engaging with all of Scotland and has focused most of its attention on the larger cities, as compared to all of the country. I can speak in the context of the place partnership, which is about building capacity. It is a way of working in an area that allows us not to be passive. For example, we did not receive applications from ex-areas. It is a way of working. It is a way of us, and we have had the unverclied place partnership, which we should be familiar with. We have worked closely with the council to develop the beacon through regards and the Galoshians Festival. We have worked in 16 parts of Scotland to try to build that capacity, and we have been very proactive in trying to do that. We talked about doing more. It is about the phase 2 that is being referred to. Our creative learning networks exist all across Scotland. We are currently having those conversations across different parts of Scotland, thinking about how we can work across Scotland more effectively. The commission research, which seeks to look beneath the figures that you have presented in front of view in relation to local authorities, and to ask the question of all the local authorities, looking forward, how can we work with you? What are the expectations of Creative Scotland and how can we work collaboratively? We are proactively going out there and asking that. That will be difficult. We do not have the resource base to answer what each of the 32 local authorities would ideally like us to do, but we are being proactive and we are continuing to consider how we can work more collaboratively. I will try to reflect on my time in Creative Scotland. I am struck by your question. Does it mean that Creative Scotland has not been engaging with anybody other than the major city since 2010? I honestly do not think that it is true. If there are perceptions around that, we need to really think hard about those. I am sure that Creative Scotland is doing that at the moment, because I know that they are doing an awful lot of deep thinking about what their organisation is and what role it plays in the public sector in Scotland. I wonder if the reality of it is more that, because of existing infrastructure, which is the result of over 70 years of arts funding, means that the majority of the infrastructure is in certain places at the moment. There is a need to have a debate about how do you keep that existing infrastructure going, how do you build on the expertise that it has created? The Edinburgh festivals are part of that. You want to keep that going, because look at what it does for us in terms of our world relations and our position. There is more that they can all be doing locally, and that is now very much part of their thinking strategically across all of those festivals. We also have a powerhouse for production and development across the arts, screening and creative industries. We all know that it has some massive challenges in its formation and how it has got to grips with the breadth of its responsibility across the arts, screening and creative industries. We are seeing now much more attraction around the screen, it has got an identity and it is really going for it. Maybe now when things settle about it, it is time to think again about what is the role of the arts within Creative Scotland and what it does for the art sector, because screening has gone. Certainly it has been making some really impressive developments. If it is about the funding programmes that have been responding to existing infrastructure, how do you then go forward from that? I think that that is probably where I think questions around other sort of towns and villages and how do they get a chance to develop their own infrastructure? I think back to the point about whether it is okay for a local authority, like Clackmannanshire, to be reducing budget in the way that it is because it can access culture in other places. What you want is for people in Scotland to be able to access the bigger epicenters like Edinburgh and Glasgow and also to have access on their doorstep. You want a local library, you want culture to be riven through the curriculum so that every kid going into a nursery or a classroom or a secondary school is having a cultural experience. They are also cultural buildings or nurseries or schools, primary and secondary, so we need to be thinking like that around it as well. I think that there are people in Creative Scotland who work really, really hard, who are specialist experts. I think that sometimes they are trying very, very hard to do everything that you are wanting to do, but there are reasons that they are challenged in that and largely it is around demand of funding programmes. I think that that creates the perception that you are talking about. That is probably where we need to keep coming back to how we all collectively get creative Scotland and to a place where it can have more space to do all the things that we want it to do. At the moment, it is an awful lot of saying no to people and nobody wants to be doing that. Nobody wants to do that. That is a job when you are distributing funding. Everybody is working and they want to do it because they want culture to be thriving across all of Scotland, but I think that they have been responding to existing infrastructure probably. As an additional point, which is related to funding but slightly different, is the landscape in terms of how we can collaborate locally is changing. We have touched on local authority budgets being under pressure, but what that means on the ground is often that the staff, the arts development officers or cultural coordinators that historically have been in place across all of Scotland, either the post is no longer in place or has changed radically. Those are really important on the ground. I have been one of those. You are the conduit between artists, community representatives and you are a connector and you help things to happen. You are also the person that can link them through to Creative Scotland. Those posts are patchwork, they are not uniform across Scotland. Our ability to have that on-the-ground expertise and ability for us to work with communities and with artists locally, where there is not an arts development officer or DJI Unlimited who are fulfilling aspects really well, it is more challenging than what it was ten years ago. In terms of the place partnerships, how do you analyse the outcomes? It is easy to say that we are putting in a quarter of a million in-ears for the match fund, but how do you analyse the outcomes? In particular cases, we have had them independently evaluated, so Education Scotland has undertaken independent evaluation on that. We have a reporting structure, which requires local partners to roll back. Because of the flexibility of the fund and the differences in the activity and the differences in the type of things across the region, there is not a uniform prescribed set of outcomes. What we ask each group is to reflect on and evidence the impact that they have had. In some cases, that may be feedback from artists. In other cases, it may be quantitative information. It is a development fund and there is not a hard and fast we think that we should achieve X, Y and Z by year one, but we are conscious of ensuring that there is a positive set of outcomes, but they vary across the partnerships. I am notwithstanding the research that should be taking place on the ground anyway within those authorities. When the analysis is published, does Creative Scotland send that around to all the other place partnerships so that others can potentially learn from each other? Absolutely. That will be published on our website and circulated around all place partnerships but also around all 32 local authorities. It is our intention to hold a meeting to bring together all those that are interested to learn it. During the year, we also hold two or three sessions. We have had one in Dumfries and Galloway where we bring representatives from across the place partnerships together to learn. Just recently, we had a cohort from the Murray Place Partnership visit Dumfries and Galloway, so we are trying to facilitate that exchange of knowledge across Scotland. We are doing that as much as we can, but it is challenging that the budgets, even for travel, are under huge scrutiny now, but we are actively trying to promote learning. On the question regarding the city deals, there is a hugely important opportunity for all Scotland with the different projects that are there. Annabelle asked some questions about it earlier. My focus will be on the Glasgow city region deal, particularly in Berklyde. How do you see the genuine arts and cultural benefit from the spend that is going to take place? It is certainly for Glasgow, so £1.13 billion. It is not a small money. How do you genuinely see how more people on the ground can be engaged and get involved to have a better economic and social benefit? In broad terms, the city region deal or, in fact, any significant investment in culture can bring economic return. For me, it is about making sure that that is particularly relevant to that region. It is not about replicating a model from Edinburgh or Glasgow. It is about the particular needs of that community. For me, in the context of the city region deals, the same principle applies. It is about leadership and cultural leadership. How is culture and the arts considered? How is it even considered within the economic development of that region? It is about developing the understanding of, although it might not be the primary driver or the immediate thing, that culture can have a positive economic and social and cultural impact, all those three things. I suppose that there is something specific around the greater glass one for our areas of interest. Obviously, there is a lot of investment going into manufacturing and innovation in manufacturing. We stand on the shoulders of innovators that are hundreds of years old. Paisley and wider infrastructure in manufacturing will also be creativity. It is a little bit about perception, too, for us. Paisley is one of the step changes that I worked to radically change the image and reputation of Paisley, which for too long has been one that has been beset by narratives of poverty and post-industrial decline. One of the key ways that we are trying to challenge that is to, by no means, not address the systemic poverty and inequality that comes from that within some of the communities within Renfrewshire, but to use culture and creativity within those communities and the potential within those communities. I am within our town centre and our glorious civic buildings to tell different stories and tell different stories to be told. There is perception within it, and there are jobs that will create jobs within Renfrewshire, and I am sure that Inverclyde as well. I think that there are also symbolic interventions occurring within it, such as the bridge over the Clyde. It will be bringing communities together and there will be cultural repercussions of that. It is important to think about how you bring communities together around all that. Another thing that I worked in my step changes is considering the development of creativity as a new dimension to the economy. The city deal creates fertile territory for us to do that and to be at the cutting edge of innovation. There is a relationship of that to the funded cultural sector. It is how you understand creativity and the arts at school through to what your people are studying. That also fits into creativity and economic development. There is a relationship between all that public funding of the culture sector. Over time, it enables us to have the sorts of communities and the sort of countries with people with innovative skills that can then be at the cutting edge of the things that the city deal and our area are trying to do. There is a relationship across all of it, if we get it all right. Lots and lots of opportunity and tourism and events are a really, really big part of it. All the tourists that are going into Glasgow and looking at the sites are a simple opportunity for us to then collectively all be sharing each other's treasures as well as the communication around it is important too. Ross Greer, I am interested in the thread that the committee of Annabelle Ewing's questions on the economic impact in relation to the city deals. Obviously, the economic impact of culture in Scotland more generally should not be underestimated but at the same time, in the evidence that we have heard so far, as you would expect, many artists would advocate that art for art's sake is a perfectly valid use of public money. In more mundane processes than the city deals, in councils annual budget setting processes, do you find yourselves having to justify the cultural spend based on economic impact more than you would otherwise like to? Is there a wider understanding, particularly at senior management level, elected representative level within councils, that looking beyond the economic impact is an appropriate way to make budget decisions on culture spend? I take that from a local authority perspective. Economic impact is certainly there. To try and defend what is the budget that is invested in culture, we have got EcoGen to look at the economic impact of the cultural strategy. The financial year was 2017-18 and did a very interesting study about the economic impact in Dundee. Again, that could be made available if it was of interest to the committee. It is independent research into what is the economic impact of a city council, Greater Scotland and charitable investment in the delivery of a cultural strategy in one city. It surprised us how impactful it was. The one thing that they produced, which we hadn't seen or hadn't anticipated, was the welfare benefits. I'm not sure if that's come up in any of the committee's research, but they looked at the whole-of-life benefits, the benefit to the health service and the benefit to older people in terms of their engagement in the arts. They put an economic measure, which I hadn't seen before, against that. That's all helped to make the case for the investment, but it doesn't protect against the current financial pressures that local authorities are under. I don't think that there's any sense that it's not understood, not valued. I think that you fall back when you're sitting trying to balance a local authority's budget. Where are you going to draw the line? We can't avoid it. We have to measure the economic impact of everything across society. We certainly do that in terms of our conversations with Dumfries and Galloway Council. We measure additional leverage, money coming in from funding. I just want to make it interesting enough in Dumfries. There's a hotel in a hotel on the Crichton campus. They're doing that specifically because of the cultural offer of Dumfries and Galloway as a region. We're a few years away from this, but as part of this change in the campus there, there's potential going to be a new music venue as well. It's something that we don't have in our region. It just shows that, from a business perspective and an economic perspective, someone's identified the opportunities that culture creates. Certainly the local authority in Dumfries and Galloway invest heavily, significantly in its major events and festivals. They, as part of their reporting, require a festival's report back on the economic impact of the money that they've invested. Certainly they've increased that target for this year. I can't remember the numbers, so you'll have to forgive me, but I could get them for the committee if you needed them. It's part of the picture, but just to go back to what I said earlier, there is a potential to measure the impact of culture on our society in other ways, potentially other than empirical data. I think that it is the reality for a lot of people and local authorities that they are having to justify it in the terms that you set out, so jumping back if it's all right to do so to the impending culture strategy. I think that it's another opportunity that that strategy kind of gives us. To get all the benefits and the outcomes that culture can bring across all the other areas that we're talking about, whether it be economic or health inequalities or education, all those sorts of things, you've got to use public funding. It's a mixed funding economy, I suppose, around culture itself. You have to be funding and supporting it within education, artists and organisations, because unless you've got that overall sector thriving, an expert, it can't then do all those things. If you're an artist that's also working in quite difficult contexts, that takes time and it takes money and it takes great, great care for that practitioner to be entering into those kind of social contexts of which many artists work or health ones. So I think it's about maybe trying to make the argument that it's only from the foundation of a flourishing cultural sector as a society can you reap the rewards that culture then gives across all of these other areas. And I think that's what the bed afforded us in Paisley, because we've got political and office attraction and partnership attraction from it. So I now report to six step changes, which include poverty and inequality and health, which include the economy, but include wellbeing as well alongside that. So no one's given greater importance and the heart of those six step changes is one about the development of cultural and creative communities themselves across Paisley and Renfrewshire. So it's at the heart of it, you get that right and then you get the other benefits that come from it. That's maybe where we need to kind of be focusing our thinking nationally and then there'll be local benefits from that. The alloy model is one that's at this point now not particularly new to local authorities and certainly not exclusively to culture. What impact do you think the alloy models hand on cultural spend, particularly in an era of, as we've discussed previously, budgets being squeezed? Has it had any impact on expenditure itself, or has it just been a difference in delivery? Andy's City to make very significant savings, there's no question about that. So we have a very, whereas when the alloy was created, the areas under which we're transferred were 62 per cent funded by local authority and the balance was come from generation to generation. The income from sport, largely small amount from cultural events, that's completely reversed. So it's gone from 6040 to 4060 in terms of the funding model. I think you can get that over three, four, five, six years, then it plateaus. The biggest challenge that the alloy model faces at the moment is, of course, that its aspiration for development is restricted. So development plans which are based on trying to create additional income generating streams which would require capital investment have now been put on hold to some extent because of the rates review. There's no benefit to the local authority or the alloy. So the development of the model, I think, has been compromised, frankly, because of the rates situation that applies just now. That doesn't apply to independent, charitable, arts organisations. So there's a slight unevenness, weirdness in the funding of arts and cultural organisations that some are affected by that and some aren't. I think the definition of the alloy was actually really problematic. We would say that we are a Scottish charity. We're regulated in the same way that other Scottish charities are. So for the board of the alloy, they view themselves as trustees of a Scottish charity accountable in the same way as other funded bodies are to local authority for funding. It has brought more opportunities than challenges. Overall, I would say that the alloy has allowed us to develop things in the last five, six years and I think that it has more potential. I think that it's not the alloy, it's the skill model that I'm talking about. I should be clear about that, not the alloy model. Gary, from your experience of dealing with a range of local authorities, is what Stewart is saying broadly similar across the board or have there been different experiences and how has that model, that change in governance, affected your relationship with local authorities? In terms of impact, it wouldn't be for me to reflect on, but I can certainly address the second point. I think that we have very good work in relationships with alloys across Scotland and they are very important and actually fruitful. For us, it's also important that we maintain a relationship with the local authority and it's also very important that the relationship between the alloy and the local authority is strong. I think that that is the case, but I think that it's mindful that that needs to continue. We have discussed today how culture can be embedded across different budgets. If it has not got a strong relationship with the local authority and a holistic and considered relationship with the local authority, there is a risk that it could sit in isolation. I think that there are good relationships now, but we have to be mindful of making sure that there is continued collaboration moving forward. In terms of the data that is available on national funding of arts organisations across the country, do you feel that there is enough publicly available data, particularly for yourselves, working at local level, for you to be aware of what is being funded nationally in the areas that you are operating in, or are there any particular gaps in that data, any greater level of depth that would be helpful to you? I think that there is a lot of data, and it's not always shared, I suppose, is where your question is getting to. I think that there are organisations that are funded by Creative Scotland and others that spend a disproportionate amount of their time gathering data to share with whatever funder it is that we're talking about. It probably leans too much towards that from the organisation's perspective, and I think that they've got valid points, because I think that it would feel like an okay thing to do for an organisation on the ground, or some of them are tiny organisations, two or three part-time staff, but having to gather huge amounts of information if they were aware of what benefit was coming from it, and then what bigger picture it then got you. I know that Creative Scotland are probably really interested in themselves, because what do they do with the intelligence that they hold, and how do they share it, so we all benefit from it, but it's not just Creative Scotland that hold it. I think that there are universities that hold it as well, and it's really hard to get into research articles that are also doing this sort of thing, so it's not just Creative Scotland Government also holding off a lot of data, which maybe don't always share local government holds data that we also maybe don't share, so there's maybe something we all need to think about in that. You also don't get the full picture when you just look at one organisation's data. We've got an organisation in Paisley that I think is one of the most significant youth theatre organisations in this country with phenomenal participation levels called Pace Theatre. It's never applied to Creative Scotland. That's not a bad thing. We're about to support it through Town Centre Regeneration to create a new home in Paisley, but it wouldn't feature in any of the data from Creative Scotland. It's a really important player in youth theatre locally and nationally, so you just need to watch what story you're telling through it as well, but I agree that there could be greater sharing and bringing together of the data that certain parties hold, but I would suggest it's much more than just Creative Scotland. Can I just ask the supplementary on that point? Our research from Drew Wiley suggested that observatories were a way to go in terms of gathering data together, and that was a model that I'd worked well in other countries. Do you think that's a good idea, or do you think that it would just create another level of bureaucracy? We looked at that a little bit within the culture strategy, because we had a group of academics who are experts in cultural policy working with us. I don't know where it is at the moment, but observatories are quite interesting because they bring together academia, policy and practitioners, but you need to make sure that you're bringing them all together. The view is just not an academic one. The view is also practitioner and organisation led and also policy. In Paisley, we've set up a research centre within the University of West of Scotland to demonstrate the change that we're making through our approach and our investment, because we understand that we need to be able to tell the story. In the way that David is setting out, quantitative and qualitative, and very long-term, I think it's about how you get that long-term view. I suppose people like Systema are doing this with Glasgow Centre for Population Health, and I do wonder if there would be scope for a network model observatory that has a very, very long-term view that also keeps Scotland at the cutting edge of international research in cultural policy. Not just an inward looking thing, but something that's very external. I do think that that would be worth looking at. Would that be a way of pulling all this scattered data together? Yes. Thank you. Jamie. Thank you. Good morning. I've got a few questions, but I want to come back to the allio issue, because I think it's quite an interesting one. I think that one of the things that came out of the Barclay review was really shining a light on the allio model, and one of the things that struck me was how wide-scoping the use of them were becoming. I think that that was probably what spurred the concerns by the review in the sense that some local authorities were using them as means of setting up coffee shops and dance studios and zumba classes and things like that. I think that the idea that if you were trying to encourage people locally to take the initiative and compete in that level, there was no level playing field. My question is given that all those conversations about funding, whether it's coming century from government or via local government, do you think that government has other levers available to it such as tax regime or other forms of incentives to facilitate the growth of culture that's not specifically direct injecting cash into specific projects or organisations? What are the levers at its disposal that it could be using better? I think that there is. I think that I made a reference to this. We looked at this with the culture strategy development as well. There are things that we were looking at having conversations around. A couple of examples. One being that renovating an existing building, where that doesn't exist on a new development. There are lots of reasons why you would want to renovate an existing building. Paisley is sitting itself apart by investing in its heritage in a contemporary way, but you pay 20 per cent that on it. It's cheaper to build a new building, yet you're not always caring for your cultural and heritage infrastructure and environmental challenges within that as well. There are things like that that you probably could be looked at more. Once I got laughed at in a meeting because somebody said, but you're just trying to now fund culture through the carrier bag scheme, but I didn't mean that in the meeting. What I meant is that there are levers that are growing and changes that are occurring. I wasn't meaning that culture should be funded by the carrier bag scheme, but I was thinking that a lot of good stuff out in communities is being funded by the carrier bag scheme. It's a really good example of how we're responding to environmental change and the reward of it is going back into communities, but culture is not one of the prioritising themes of it. It might come through in communities and it's about how we get around the table of the people making the decisions about those new opportunities. I do think that there are those that exist. There are other levers out there. What it requires to do that from personal experience of working within the civil service and trying so hard to work across department in civil service is you need a team of people to be doing that and to be working in a crosscutting way. You need it at officer level, political level and at senior civil service level to enable that to happen and to support it. Legislation is complex areas that we're talking about here, but if you get the collective will and the support for it, you know, bottom up and top down, then I think there's a big opportunity there. I've just given a couple of low-level examples, but they make a difference. Brief comments on the alio model itself or the skeo model that we use, the skeo alio. For Dundee, it has been hugely productive. Part of that is the culture shift that came by having a board of independent governors looking critically and engaging with staff at a local level. They brought a business perspective and a committee perspective and a youth perspective and a minority ethnic perspective to bear on work that we had not really been able to bring to the same extent. It also opened quite clearly funding routes so we were able as a charity to get access to charitable funds that the local authority would not have got. I'm just looking at the pie chart of the funding. Fees and charges have gone up, facility hires have gone up, sales of goods have gone up, online sales contracting with other third parties, partnerships and contracts with health and external funding from charities. That whole cocktail has meant that we've doubled the level of funding available from that which was in place at the time when the skeo was created, so we've been able to double the percentage of expenditure that comes from independent sources. In that sense, if you take that as a simple metric, it has been a productive model for us. Just off the back of that, does anyone have any concerns about the high levels of reliance on national lottery funding? I appreciate that that's a big chunk of previous Scotland's budget but it also funds many smaller projects in different ways via different funds. It seems to me that we've become culturally very reliant on that as a mechanism that we can't rely on always being there or indeed the levels of funding available currently to always be there in the future. I know that other countries have dealt with this in different ways but how do you think that we could future proof that our resilience towards not relying simply on gambling lottery funding as a means of supporting culture in the arts? It's a massive question and I think that probably we are all worried about it and I don't actually know what the answer is because we're so embedded in the current model and it's obviously changing as we speak and we're seeing that. There are some organisations that are benefiting from the changes. For example, the Edinburgh International Book Festival has a really good relationship with postcode lottery across Renfrewshire. There are phenomenal relationships with the big lottery that are long term but going forward is really challenging and I don't know what the answer is to be honest. I think that I'd be looking to other people who are expert in this to be helping us to find ways through that as well as the answers coming from within the cultural sector and local government. I think that we're concerned. I don't know what the answer is. I shouldn't point out that it's a positive and only a negative. There are positives too. As you said, postcode lottery is the success of that. It has enabled new forms of funding to go into places that other funding models didn't. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a negative. No, I think that we're echoing that there's fluctuations in it and the changes and that people are relying on it for core funding and it's doing incredibly important work of huge value as one aim. That's something completely different and that's around back to local government. We talked about some of the statistics around cuts and reductions and it's clear that the chart that I'm looking at shows a fairly consistent reduction in funding across local authorities at different levels. One of that is about restructuring how they fit culture and arts into their local authority structures. Can I just read out a quote that we had in our briefing paper? It says that another by-product of the reduced funding is that staff are not qualified to support the arts or shoehorn into arts positions as a result of reorganisations. In other words, if cultural and arts functions are being soaked into other bits of the council and run by people who have no experience in the arts at all in some cases, that's clearly having a detrimental effect on their ability to run art services. What can local authorities do when they face that stark choice of having to make cuts and reorganise and amalgamate posts, for example? I touched earlier about arts development officers and cultural co-ordinators as posts that have an outward remit not necessarily for delivering services within the council but are there to support artists, to support the community. I think that having been in a local authority and working with local authorities now, they clearly have really complex challenges but I would personally and Create Scotland would advocate for the importance of those roles. As we have touched on leverage today in a funding sense, leverage in terms of empowering other people and supporting them to do things in their community, having that expertise, having that person that they know they can talk to at the local level. Also, who Create Scotland can work within a local level? We would advocate that it's been really important and it can have a significantly positive impact. The need for that expertise is clear. I agree. I think that that sounds like a horrible snare that that quote is from one of the things. Our culture didn't go into our alleo until 2015, so before that it was a sub-department as part of education. The alleo development in 2015, which was established in 2003 for sport and leisure, has enabled us to create visibility and an identity around cultural services within a Renfrewshire context. The challenges that Stewart has already mentioned, but the development of specialist staff, we are trying really hard to promote that and to get budget for it, so we have just increased our arts development team within Renfrewshire leisure. It had been probably under-invested in over the years. We are now looking at investing in it because specialist support is really, really important. The role of the curator, the role of the arts development officer, the role of their librarian are really critical community roles. It's not just about their expertise in librarianmanship or whatever, it's about their expertise and how they bring that specific set of skills that they've got into a community in a social setting, in the same with collections and curating. I think that that's about us advocating for what those roles bring. The alleo has enabled us to have an identity and a visibility around that that we didn't have pre-2015. The one comment on that would be if the alleo is not represented in the city council's management team, then they're not there at the table when other chief officers are having a discussion about budget setting or priorities or just influence. In Dundee's case and in Glasgow's case, I'm not sure about others, I just know those two fairly well. They are considered and we have the role of being part of the city council management team as well as running the alleo. You can see that tension. The alleo is independent, it's at arm's length. To be there and to be part of that discussion, then to separate yourself for the delivery end of the alleo is a challenging role. If you have an alleo model, that's really important, otherwise there's no one within the city council local authority management team advocating necessarily for investment in culture. I appreciate that you're here to talk about the place programme, but the graph that struck me the most from our briefing paper was the regular funding organisations and the chart that shows the 18 to 21 regular funding. You've got one end of the spectrum, Edinburgh, £41 million and 11 local authorities with a zero in them. Is that because none of them applied or they just haven't been given any funding? It just struck me quite an odd chart. In some cases we didn't receive any applications from particular local authorities. You agree that graph looks stark. I think I'd make two points on that. Regular funding is not our only opportunity for funding and we do support activity across Scotland. I think the second would also be about where, and Stuart touched on this, the regional approach and actually the national approach of lots of organisations that we fund who work across Scotland. I think it's around 70, 75 per cent work across Scotland. Notwithstanding that that isn't a substitute for local development work, but just to make that clear it's not necessarily where they deliver all their activity. We're one of the local authorities that is zero on that. It's the same graph, but it's not entirely, but I think it would say that we're really culturally active and that the RFO analysis isn't the only way of seeing what culture is happening across Scotland. There are stories that need to be told behind those graphs as well. It could be the aspirations of a couple of our organisations to get regular funding, but I think some of them will also have other ways that they want to run their businesses and that kind of thing, which just need to be part of the view even if you're not on that graph. It doesn't mean that culture is not happening. One final small add-on to that is one of our regularly funded organisations in Dumfries and Galloway. They receive 75 per cent of funding that comes from non-Arts Council sources, CREP Scotland sources, so it is really tricky to get an understanding just looking at it through that specific lens. The big lottery and heritage lottery are all part of the picture in terms of arts funding. Thank you very much to all of you for coming to give evidence. It's been quite a long session today, but you've done really well, so thank you very much for coming. I'll now briefly suspend. The next item on our agenda is consideration of a biannual report from the Scottish Government in relation to a range of EU issues. Any observations? I've got a couple of issues that I'd like to obtain further information on, firstly, on horizon 2020. I think that it would be useful to get further information on the implications for Scottish organisations receiving horizon 2020 funding in the context of Brexit, particularly because it's very clear from the letter that we really punch above our weight in getting these funds. It was almost 12 per cent, which is way above our population share, so obviously we have so many unanswered questions in terms of a no deal in particular. I think that we need more information on that. Secondly, on the 2014 to 2020 European social fund programme, I think that it would be useful to get further information on the financial impact of the pre-suspension process and of the in principle agreement that has been reached to understand it from the letter with the European Commission. That's my observations. I don't know if the members have some other observations. Jamie, sorry Jamie. Mines relates to the update from the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education on the 1 plus 2 languages policy, just to put on record thanks to the Cabinet Secretary for his response. To paint a more helpful picture in his responses indicated that 70 per cent of secondary schools are providing the full entitlement to learning the first additional language from S1 to the end of S3. I presume by that a statistic that means that 30 per cent of secondary schools in Scotland are not providing the full entitlement that they should be. I just wondered if that's an improvement or if that's a decrease. It would be nice to put this into context over the last couple of years. I think also, when he goes on to say, according to the 2018 teacher census, there were 1,288 teachers with modern languages as their main subject. Again, to give that some context whether that number is on a trend of going up or down and to put those two together and see that in any way forms of picture as to whether we are making progress or not, I think on its loan the snapshot doesn't paint a picture. I think it would be very useful to follow on from that just to get a break down regarding how many of those teachers are EU nationals and if there has been an increase or decrease in EU nationals coming to work in our education system. That's a useful point to put in. Any other points? To keep pressing on whether there's any contingencies have been placed in terms of the shared prosperity fund, which doesn't seem to be in sight at any point whatsoever. It was promised by the Prime Minister in the fifth of December last year that if she would go out to consultation before Christmas, Christmas 2018, it's now the end of June and nothing has happened. There's real issues about the impact of that across a number of sectors, but particularly those that this committee deals with. Yes, I agree with that absolutely. We need to try to get some clarity there because it's just unacceptable for all these organisations worrying about their future. It's really quite astonishing that the UK Government has failed to make any progress on this issue, it seems at all. Maybe a bit more of the day job might be useful. Could we perhaps agree that we will write to the relevant ministers raising all those issues specifically in the lineages? In terms of the shared prosperity fund, that's really an issue for UK ministers of course, but perhaps it's an opportunity for the committee to write to UK ministers again asking for an update. Can we agree that myself and the deputy convener will sign off those letters? We can now suspend and move into private session.