 Good morning and welcome to the 20th meeting of the Constitution Europe External Affairs and Culture Committee in 2022. I've received apologies from Morris Golden MSP. Our first agenda item is a decision on taking business in private and members content to take agenda item 4 in private. Thank you. Agenda item 2 is to begin to take evidence as part of a pre-budget scrutiny on the culture spending portfolio. I welcome to the committee this morning, Jim Hollington, chief executive of the dance base, David Avery, negotiation officer for prospect, Kirsty Cumming, chief executive of community leisure UK, Julia Armour, director of festivals Edinburgh, Janet Archer, chief executive of Edinburgh print makers who is attending it on behalf of Scotland's workshops. If I could start with a question on the cost of living crisis, obviously we've received a great deal of evidence that has highlighted significant concerns about increased operating costs facing cultural organisations. It would be useful to hear what impact that has had on your own relative areas of interest. If I could maybe start with asking what the Scottish Government can do in its budget to support the culture sector in this cost of living crisis, and if you can invite Mr Hollington to start, please. Thank you for inviting me. As I mentioned, the evidence has had a pretty serious effect on us, along with many other organisations. I think that I should preface this by saying that we're not arguing that we're different to others. In fact, that this crisis is so universal that I think we're reflecting things that many, many different organisations are feeling. I think that the situation for organisations like ours is almost a perfect storm in many ways of rapidly and unexpectedly increased costs and reduced income. So if we look at the cost side of things, obviously, again, things have moved on and they're moving on literally every day at the moment, but the energy crisis increased for the organisation. So we come out of our energy fix at the end of January. Again, different organisations have different deals with their energy providers. After yesterday's announcement, it actually seems that the announcement is not quite as good as it may have seemed in that the rates that are being talked about are the wholesale rates and still your supplier will be able to add extra costs on top of that. So I think that we're still looking at an energy price increase from about £35,000 a year to probably £90,000 or £100,000 a year. It's better than the £160,000 a year that we were looking at without any support, so absolutely that is a big difference. But if you add that to, let's say, a 9-10% increase in salaries and other bills, that's about £150,000 of unexpected and unplanned costs rapidly coming in for an organisation that has about a £1.2 million turnover. Of course, if you look on the income side of things, there are also real pressures there. So for dance-base, a large part of our income is largely three areas. Our income is core funding, about one-third. It's clear, in fact Creative Scotland are clear who are our major core funder that that core funding for next year will be at current levels while a process has gone through for what happened in 2024. City of Edinburgh similarly has committed to the same level but not more than that next year. In addition to core funding, the second part of our financial model, again about a third, is dance classes and performances. These are not people's core spending. We did put our prices up quite substantially after Covid to reflect increased costs, realistically it's pretty difficult in a market where people's expenditure and people's discretionary spending is really under pressure to imagine that that market is going to be performing particularly well over the next few months and we along with other cultural organisations who run performances, we've seen about a 20% decline on our targets for audiences, participants to dance classes but most cultural organisations I think are looking at similar numbers for paid activity. The third area is all kinds of fundraising whether that's trust and foundations, whether that's individual giving or whether that's project work and again of course it's an area that we are pursuing but it's an area that is being very very actively pursued by many people at the moment. You've also seen many funders including trust and foundations during the Covid period, very much switched their funding to short-term emergency rather than longer-term funding. So I think if we go to the question what can government do, so I think there are perhaps two or three things. I think one thing is to acknowledge that there is a longer term issue underneath this I think that there is on the one hand a really one of the reasons I moved to Scotland is you know after having worked for the British Council in countries around the world is because Scotland is seen and the commitment from government is really clear for the role that culture has to pay in this country not just not just culture's intrinsic role but also how culture can help people live healthy and happy lives but there is a mismatch between that really clear commitment and the way that culture has been supported over the last decade or so. So the reality is that funding hasn't followed that and in fact again along with most cultural institutions our level of core funding from Creative Scotland has been static for 11 years now obviously in real terms that's pretty tough. So I think a realisation or a commitment to say that if we believe in the value of culture then also needs to be an understanding that firstly we need we need to fund that sector properly or if we have an envelope that can't be expanded we need to understand that we might need to be a bit more we might need to have ambition of slightly fewer ambitions that we have currently in order to make sure that we have a sector that works properly. I think the second one and this is again a lot of the evidence has been about this is actually how we support arts and culture to deliver health and wellbeing benefits for people. There's been an enormous amount of evidence and an enormous amount of discussion about how arts and cultural interventions at an early stage are really effective not just in preventing but also actually in taking people out of medicalised environments after they've had treatment but the reality is I think that both sides of the equation are looking to the other for funding so the cultural sector seeing health and social social care funding is being potential support for doing more meaningful work health and social care is saying this is a way of relieving some of our budgets that without an end there are a lot of really positive words but I think we feel we've yet to see a way of both health and social care and the cultural sector working together to be able to exit support. I want to start just by name checking the other Scotland's workshops if I may very briefly so Peacock Visual Arts Edinburgh sculpture workshops Scottish sculpture workshop in Lomstead Aberdeenshire Glasgow sculpture studios I don't know there's us there's Glasgow print studios stills in Edinburgh street level photo works in Glasgow Highland print studio in Inverness Dundee contemporary arts in Dundee and Northland creative which is in Caithness and just for your reference Edinburgh print makers now works in meanwhile spaces in Aberdeen Lanarkshire Dumfries Livingston Grangemouth Kilmarnock Folkirk Paisley five and we're looking at Glasgow so we're a very strong network of organisations which provide cultural services across the country and I'd also like to thank the committee and the Scottish Government for the support that you have given us over this last period which has been tremendous and very welcome and I think underpinning our survival at the moment because things are tough so I think there are lots of ideas in the papers that you have had for this meeting the things that sprung to mind in terms of things to really look at are the tourist levy which I think Wales is now piloting and I think it is definitely something that Scotland should look at and pilot if it can. I think percent for art on developments at Edinburgh print makers as some of you may know is based in Phantom Bridge in we're an island at the moment in the middle of a wasteland which is being developed into a new community for the city and if we had benefited from that development in some which way more than the sponsorship which the developers have offered us privately I think that would have helped hugely over this this period and then my third point relates to the idea of whole systems approach and what does that really mean and I think the papers of all of the submissions have said that it's really complex to try to get different bits of government to work together particularly in a competitive environment where everybody's trying to defend their own case however I would say within culture there is a system at present where some bits of the money come directly from government some bits come through creative Scotland the bits come through local authorities and at least if a whole system approach that established a sort of matrix that looked at the cultural provision across local areas across the country on a regular basis and took headline themes like quality of work or quality of engagement or reach or even need looking at accounts in relation to where individual organisations are then perhaps we might get to a better place in relation to utilising the money as it stands so those would be my point. Thank you very much and you mentioned can I just say a thank you for all of the written submissions to the committee they were very very helpful I could invite David Avery next please. Yes and also my thanks for inviting us to this committee. The prospect of members working a range of areas in culture so I think it would be fair to say experience for members in the theatre and performing at the supporting centre sectors and back to experience more of what Jim has said and described if I can focus more on the areas which are directly funded by government the national collections as I think they're probably not going to be covered elsewhere they're having a particularly difficult issue with their budgets at the moment the budget sets grant and age fixed for the next year at the same time we have pressures around changing pay policy changing costs around the utility bills and trying to square that circle with government of the cost your budget income is fixed your ability to fundraise is very limited because you're a government body with under significant restrictions ministers are understandably not wanting to reduce service levels squaring that against those increasing costs and indeed pressures around fair work around delivering a 35 hour week around delivering a fair pay rise even something even close to inflation those pay talks are still ongoing that is becoming more and more difficult and not just for this year but in future years these are organisations which as well as being public bodies are charities and have legal duties upon their boards not to sign off to costs they cannot afford in future years and you know without some certainty about what the funding will look like in future years it's very difficult for them to make decisions around cost of living around fair work and so on without imperiling staff numbers or delivery and I think it's an ongoing discussion but there absolutely needs to be a look at how these organisations deliver that work how they are able to plan for the future and either be given more freedom to be able to do fundraising to be able to act as so in some ways like the museums and galleries and so on in England do under the museum freedoms or to be treated more as a public body and then be given greater funding funded at a higher level than they currently are and then allow to so they can react to changes such as this I mean they're not allowed to keep reserves year to year as an example which will be very different to the experience of our members working in the charitable sector within that charitable sector with our charity sector we're seeing real challenges around pay real challenges around utilities your challenges around costs and you know if I take the national trust for Scotland as one of the examples an organisation which lost a lot of staff over the pandemic this was widely reported it's still coming out of that it's still struggling with staff numbers and has now had these very large unexpected costs and has the similar concerns Jim has raised about fundraising it is they've had a very successful fundraising campaign during the pandemic around save our Scotland they're now concerned about quite rightly about whether or not similar fundraising campaigns will be so as successful with the freeze on squeeze on household budgets I think the final part would make about this is that the pay within the sector has never been great it's an area to which our members work in because it's a vocation in so many cases it's their life's ambition to work with these collections and what members are saying to us now is it is becoming harder and harder to do it is it becoming harder and harder to be able to afford to do the thing you want to do the thing you love to do when salaries are getting worse and worse and costs are going up and up and I absolutely understand why these organisations positions these organizations are in they can't afford inflationary pay rises because their budgets simply don't afford it but how many years is that going to continue before people say they simply can't afford to work in the sector thank you for the invitation to be here this morning I think a lot of the points that the previous speakers have made probably echo very closely you know our perspective and the perspective of our members across scotland but I guess just to highlight a couple of areas one is obviously the utilities and operating costs which for our members have just soared you know beyond any previously expected levels as is the case across you know a number of sectors we're very aware of that but really for our members you know they're all charities they're all delivering public services throughout the pandemic a lot of the reserves that they had were used in order to stay and solvents there was very limited supports and for leisure and culture trusts throughout the pandemic other than local authority support which I would say was was excellent and those relationships were very very strong but in terms of any kind of national funding there was very limited pockets that were very targeted in terms of performing arts venues through creative scotland that some of our members were able to access funding but across the piece really very much kind of left to local authority and reserves to stay afloat so we were coming out of the pandemic in an already fragile position for our members and now faced with utilities and with you know cost of living salaries which has already been mentioned it simply becomes unaffordable I mean this is actually very timely meeting for us we had a our members meeting of our Scottish members yesterday and the word there was really crisis you know this is a crisis point you know far beyond anything that they saw during the pandemic where there was always some lights at the end of the tunnel and some hope of a turn to normality and similar to to other colleagues here the return rates for our members you know have stagnated around you know 70 to 80% of pre covid's football and that includes for free to access cultural facilities as well that's not purely on paid access so really in terms of the income the model for our members was a lot of the income particularly on the cultural side which is predominantly free to access was through trading you know cafes secondary spend really supported that model that spend is essentially gone you know people don't have the disposable income people aren't returning in the same numbers so there's not that lifeline in terms of financial support so the the kind of essence of the model is essentially quite broken for where our members are at I think this all kind of goes against as well that you know the context of of wanting to do more you know we know that there's the refresh of the culture strategy action plan and obviously very supportive of everything that's in that but actually the reality on the ground is very much one of firefighting at the moment and just trying to stay afloat so we're at the position where difficult decisions are starting to be made and we also know that from projections from going forward for our members you know a core part of their funding is management fees from local authorities those are continuing to decrease year on year and we had confirmation yesterday that some of our members will be moving towards zero so they've been given a timeline of moving towards zero local authority funding for leisure and culture at a local level which obviously will radically change the entire delivery of those services it'll become a commercial model and a lot of the outreach to health and wellbeing work a lot of the free activities will have to be cut because there's no possible way to finance those going forward so we're looking at quite a different reality if that comes to fruition you know and the timeline is looking at five years is what our members are being told for that cut to come into force and that will be a very very different landscape across scotland we're also very concerned in terms of the understanding it's already been touched on around the connection between culture health and wellbeing you know what will be the impact if services close but i think we're going to see some of that this winter we know that libraries are under particular pressure and there's been reviews of library opening hours because there's no income from those services and there's just not the funding to support operations at full capacity throughout the winter and for us that's really a bit of an alarm bell because those are obviously safe warm spaces that people can access free of charge in their communities if those are going to restrict hours or close temporarily it's going to have a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of communities we've already seen in the news some of our swimming pools as an example in scotland or choose into close because of energy costs over the winter and we think that that's going to continue across into some of the cultural facilities as well i think coupled with that i think my colleague here talked about a perfect storm and that's exactly the phrase that we would use you know we've got the staffing crisis recruitment retention and obviously as as david mentioned you know wages in the sector have never been great and we're seeing a loss of skill and expertise from the sector as well and obviously when there's all this talk of you know the uncertainty around cultural facilities it's not encouraging the workforce it's not creating an environment that people feel secure that people feel valued and so there's a bit of a loss to other sectors complete loss of expertise skills training that possibly will never return to the culture sector and there's no immediate pathway for future talent to come up and come through and for the sector to be seen as an attractive place to work we're already seeing theatres we've got a couple of theatres within our membership and they're saying they just don't have the technical staff so actually this winter that they are not putting on as many shows purely because of a lack of technical staff they may have the audience demand but they're just simply not able to get the staff and the skills across scotland to support that so it is really quite a challenging environment in terms of coming back to the question around what Scottish Government can do I guess for us it's looking at supporting the investment that's already been made into these cultural facilities not just during the pandemic but you know a lot of our members are custodians of significant cultural assets across scotland and it's about protecting preserving the cultural base that we have enabling that to thrive there's also making sure that local authorities are adequately resourced and encouraged to support culture at a local level we know that local authority budgets are under significant pressure culture is obviously not statutory in terms of the services there's some adequate provision around libraries but that again is it's fairly flexible in terms of how that's interpreted beyond that there's no statutory service so it becomes a very easy to cut service and I don't mean easy in terms of taking that decision lightly but when faced with the other parts of a local authority budget there's sometimes just no choice other than to cut the non statutory elements and that's what we're seeing begin to happen is a move from local authority thinking to really focus on cost management and not focusing on public service delivery and the wider impact of that which I think is a danger I think the other things that could be looked at and again these have already been raised and we popped these into our written evidence is around a transient visitor levy so understanding culture's role in attracting people to come and visit tourists you know from the UK and wider so actually supporting culture and to be able to continue to provide you know some of the world-class attractions that we have here in scotland also again it's been touched on the percentage for culture and you know being able to provide a ring fence pod of funding that can go back into cultural services and support I suppose that the decreasing local authority budget that's coupled with that okay thank you and finally I'm going to go to Julia Amour director of festivals in Edinburgh and then I will look into colleagues to come up with supplementary questions Julia. Thank you convener thanks for inviting me and thank you to colleagues for the pretty sobering testimony of what is like out there at the moment and I know we're not alone in the culture sector is a difficult time but just initially to say a little bit about my role and my members. Festivals Edinburgh is the membership organisation and collective development body for the 11 major international festivals in the city which are obviously also flagship festivals for Scotland from the science festival in the spring time through the major august festival season to the next festival up which is the storytelling festival and Edinburgh's Hogmanay so we're moments of concentrated energy and focus where creatives come together and where audiences come together and as such I think we are at the intersection of a lot of the issues that people have talked about today and I suppose the first thing I would say is that our immediate concern is really for the whole sector at the moment because of the the great energy shock in particular about the perfect storm that Jim talked about and you referenced Jim the fact that people are facing those issues with their hundreds of percentage points increase in their utility bills at different times. Some people are having to make decisions in the next week because the change is coming in October and I really think that there's going to be some canaries in the coal mine very soon so that's a situation that we're all going to find ourselves actually living and dealing with extremely extremely quickly. So I guess I've got a few observations that I hope are complementary and build on what's been said before that are about the immediate term and then about conditions for reset if you like. The first is about whether there can be a sort of emergency review of those RFOs who've got those early cliff edges because I'm lighting on RFOs not because the whole sector is not important but just because that is a way of determining that nationally they have been identified as organisations that are strategic and should be supported in the long term. Some of the measures that are mentioned in various people's evidence include things like waving of conditions, simplifying of metrics and reporting, multi-year long-term commitments, those will all be useful in due course but obviously there will be some cliff edges and crisis points coming sooner than that. So all the learning and adaptation that happened through the crisis funding in the Covid lockdowns I think should help the national organisations to see what we can draw from that. Secondly, we've heard a lot about the way that we need to have a whole system thinking. Collaboration has an overhead, we're all doing more of it, we all want to do more of it but it does cost more because you have to understand your partners and adapt your ways of working and innovation needs investment and so for budget discussions I think I've read it in Kirsty's evidence but you know taking more of a spend to save approach and whether I don't know enough about how the streams have to be divided but whether in the longer term there's something that could be a capital spend that is kind of like a restructuring fund for the organisation because many people's evidence, many more people than are around this table today have been pointing to that kind of deeper issue of needing to create the headroom and the space to not be in survival mode but to be able to kind of re-plumb and rewire the system. And thirdly the work that other people have spoken about on Transient Visitor Levy and percentage for the arts I think needs to be accelerated. I know that it's been difficult to find time for civil servants I think to work on the manifesto commitment of the SNP for the public percentage for the arts for understandable, completely understandable reasons but if those measures are not going to be helping to find new revenue streams before say 2026 which is a year that I've heard of that's you know that's quite a time to bridge and that's also a horizon that we need to have in our minds. Finally when we talk about a mismatch between our how we value culture and how we fund culture I think we do need to think about the benchmark with continental Europe where there's a gap of about a third between the levels of funding on average across the EU and the levels of funding in Scotland and the UK and that's hundreds of millions of pounds a year now you know that would be a stretch target to address that but you know I think that these all need to be features in the conversation about how we have a realistic rebasing between funding levels and expected outputs. Thank you I'm looking to members to see Dr John's hand up first. Thank you convener for checking it. Thank you convener and thank you for people being here with such interesting comments. I have a great deal of sympathy with what's being said obviously about the predicament of many people who have described their situation and written evidence and without trying to begin with an excuse obviously government finds itself in a similar position to many of your own organisations fixed budgets lack of flexibilities and so on. I'm just curious to know what you feel we can do to ensure working better more imaginative working together between government local government cultural institutions to make real some of the things that you've talked about for instance the benefit of culture for health for benefit of culture working together with the NHS and all these things that we've raised in meetings previously on these subjects I just wonder I'm just looking for ideas about what can be done to make those things real that we all believe in but take a long time to achieve could I speak yes certainly oh no please please do come in on it first I mean I would say work with the networks and there are several in the room because we can draw run expertise experience and hopefully provide succinct thoughts and ideas in relation to what might be able to be done as well as illustrating the bleak circumstances that we're all facing at this point. And I suppose I would always say champion the arts spend on arts I think is still in the region of 0.5% of total spend that's not very much if you cut the arts you're not necessarily going to gain very much in relation to reinvesting into other things that have need those would be my points and I suppose you look hard at policy and regulations one point that I didn't flag was rates relief which obviously local authorities looking at closely for charities and cultural organisations it would be great if if the ongoing premise of rates relief for charitable organisations even in the instance where we're not occupying 100% of the space because we're still building back post or during pandemic it would be great to have a really clearly defined national policy in terms of rates relief for charitable organisations. Yeah please come in yeah um particularly in the health and well-being one I mean actually it doesn't need to be new money but I think I think ring-fenced money that people can see that they are able to apply to in collaborative projects with arts and healthcare sector is is a really way of unlocking interesting way of unlocking things I'll give you one quick example actually recently for for us we're working at the moment on a pilot project in the Asli Ainsley hospital here in Edinburgh which is a hospital that provides rehabilitation services for adults now that's a pilot with tonic arts which is which is NHS loathins healthcare charity but it's a £5,000 project you know and took quite a lot of time to get that money together between us to go let's just try something to see what can happen what was interesting though in talking to uh the team there and a lot of these projects start with people who can really see the benefits they said one of their real challenges at the moment is actually moving people on from being medicalised that there are lots of people who are coming to Asli Ainsley for physiotherapy every week not because they need physiotherapy in a hospital setting they need to be moving every week and getting out into the community and having some kind of social activity we could easily and do provide that but there isn't a way at the moment of of them diverting money into that or of us having a model that says actually we could absolutely provide this kind of social exercise activity that involves dance that could happen in different locations around the city but somewhere there needs to be a way of harnessing some resource to do that you know we had but we have a programme supporting people living with Parkinson's at the moment which has been running for a number of years previously in a partnership with Scottish Ballet and again that's really demonstrated the success of taking people out of a medicalised environment they don't come the people that the people living with Parkinson's don't come for treatment to our studios every Wednesday or to the eight different places around Scotland that now do this they come because they meet they meet their friends they do something social and they do have a physical activity which is really useful for them so we know it can work we can see medical health care professionals that see things can work it's just there is there is no if it involves people giving up funding for things that they have to do already it's really not it's really not going to unlock it that's really interesting to hear that i i've seen the Parkinson's project i think it came from new york as well the dance company and it's about the confidence that gives the Parkinson's patients to be able to move freely again it's quite quite profound when you see it in action um sorry um i'll bring you back in janet myring julia and then kirstian thank you um i wanted to talk about the role of community workers in all of that because we've had great experiences over the last four years working on a long range program partnership program called place and one of the things that has been abundantly clear is that we need to have that strong relationship with the community hubs and the community workers and the way that their funding as kirstie described has has dissipated over the last decade has you know left them in a very difficult position to be able to pick up the opportunities that are available to engage with culture and there's some great tools around in scotland the the local information system for scotland which you were recommending that everybody get their work on to i think could be a very powerful tool but you need those intermediaries to be able to because we are not in a good position to identify who could most benefit from the things that we can offer you need those local experts on the ground to be to be able to do that so it's again it's that system approach and making sure that it all works and frankly it's not very efficient asking festivals that exist partly to bring the world to scotland and scotland to the world to also become community cultural workers but we have created some fantastic relationships with those community cultural workers that allow us to bring those wider perspectives and local national international out we're facing opportunities to to very localised hyper local communities kirstie thank you yes i think there's um i mean picking up on julia's point there around community workers obviously social prescribing is is a key avenue for enabling people to find activities that can support their health and wellbeing but it is a bit of a a pick and mix across scotland in terms of how that works or indeed if it's available in every community across scotland so there's something there around really embedding social prescribing much better within communities and having really clear pathways and opportunities i think part of the problem as well is that there may be social prescribing but actually the activities run at three p.m. on a Tuesday you know so that doesn't suit a lot of people it's actually having activities and opportunities available for people when they want to access those and also encouraging and embedding that and really recognising there's been a lot of evidence around social prescribing but it's never really fully been embedded so there's a real opportunity there i think also there's there's an opportunity to learn from best practice you know from other sectors as well so the other part of our being meant is sport and leisure you know and we know for example in the last couple of years sport scotland has created a strategic partnership with public health scotland really around working much closer together across health sport and leisure we don't have something similar on the cultural side which i think is a missed opportunity again if we look at kind of sport and leisure and apologize that's the only other sector that can really reference with any knowledge but there's a there's a document produced again during the pandemic about the positive contribution of physical activity which was aligning physical activity across all of causals priority areas really making the case at local government level around how big the contribution is and we've had this discussion we facilitate a group of what we call culture partners for scotland so community leisure is a facilitator of a monthly meeting of some of the cultural bodies across scotland and there's definitely an appetite to look at a resource like that for culture and you know to really have a one-page infographic document that can be going to local authorities to actually show the wider benefits across health and wellbeing and really make the case of that cross portfolio working but again at the moment we don't really have that really kind of clear snappy document so it's much harder to make the case when everybody's under pressure and headspace is limited to make those connections and strengthen them thank you Janet you wanted to come back in briefly just to pick up on points that others have made across scotland's workshops artists who work with us consistently say this is what keeps us well and communities say the same thing it there's a lot of really good socially engaged practice community engaged practice in in in scotland led by individual artists supported by organisations i think there's a lot of evidence in as we've heard in terms of health benefits of arts practice i think the scotland's government published a report just before i came to scotland in 2010 um which i read with great interest um i'm not sure how much research there is on prevention um so if taking part in the arts stops you from getting ill in some instances not every instance obviously um but if if participation in the arts keeps you steady it would be great to be able to have a more pithy argument to be able to make um and i wonder whether that's an area that could be looked at in conjunction with um the health service um just to see whether those who participate regularly in arts practice of all of its forms um do actually go to the doctor less in if we had if we had a sense of that um we might be able to make a better case thank you um donald would you like to thank you thanks claire um i i think julia used the word sobering and i think that's uh very much um what i feel after hearing very striking evidence from everyone here so thank you thank you for that um i'd just like to explore two issues um one is clarity of funding i mean i wonder if panel witnesses feel that they have that clarity of funding from creator scotland from Scottish Government and i said that in light of um the issue raised a few weeks ago about the youth music initiative where there was some uncertainty about funding and i think it was to be fair to create Scotland was clarified that it was a pause rather than a cessation but do witnesses think clarity of funding is important uh and going forward um you know what what could the committee do what could government do to help you with that uh my second issue that i'm quite keen to explore is bills on something that allister raised which is flexibility and we we've heard this a lot um and especially you know year ago we were the we were talking about Covid and the post pandemic effects on the culture sector but um strikes me that given the current pressures very serious pressures now is a real opportunity to think quite radically and quickly about flexibility whether that's issues around um reserves using being able to use reserve in a bill that reserves over the years multi of funding spend to save very struck with that point about rewiring the system and what sort of if you if you had a shop in this it's three things that would give you additional flexibility what would they be and could i start please with uh julia for things your next week if you've got any any views um yes i think that when budgets are tighter and they have been tighter for the best part of 15 years now the tendency is to become more specific and directive and to say well i can't fund everything so i'm going to make sure that i can identify that i'm making a difference to that thing but actually i think that tendency has misled us as a country supporting our cultural sector because it just pulls people in multiple different directions so so the maximum amount of flexibility in order to enable people to do what they do best and innovate rather than chase the money i think is something that we feel we feel very passionately about and that operates at all levels it operates for our major international festivals and it operates for the community cultural organisations there's some very good work that's been done by whale arts in Edinburgh the chief executive there about kind of utopian funding what does funding look like when flexibilities are maximised and we saw some of that during the pandemic so i think that that waving of original conditions on it or streamlining the conditions as much as possible the metrics and reporting many of our organisations in mine membership are funded by the local authority creative scotland maybe event scotland and Scottish government funds voted directly and and all of the conditions are different for those for those areas i mean sometimes when we have that conversation with them they obviously say that they are tasked to deliver different outcomes but i know there's been discussion going on with the national partnership for culture about outcomes and a sort of superset of outcomes and an ability to draw on that so that an organisation is not you know spending a lot of its overhead on application and reporting but you know able to agree with its funders a basket of indicators that represent the value the public value that they bring for the public for the public pound would be would be great and i couldn't agree with you more about you know the need to build up reserves and and the need to be supported to have the headroom to change because it's very difficult to you know sort of have a health check while you're running a marathon kind of thing so you know we definitely need to to try and maximise those facilities. Does anyone else want to go in on that? I mean i've already referred to it briefly but within the national collections those which are directly funded by government i think they do have clarity on funding unfortunately it's a flat level and it's then their ability to react to changes in government policy so you know government has set your budget at this level and then said also we want to reduce the working week by two hours and we want you to pay a 5% pay rise which will be consolidated and we want you to pay that again next year next year next year and against a backdrop of doing that while also freezing budgets and as i've already referred to very strong restrictions because their government bodies on how they can raise funds or what they can charge for is presenting them i think with a an unsquarable circle i think you can do maybe two of those things you can have fair work you can free keep services at the current level or you can freeze budgets but i don't think you can do all three i think there are efficiencies they can make but not at the levels we're seeing in terms of inflation costs or energy costs and so on and it's a time to which there is more and more demand for these services more and more demand for access to them free cultural events free whether that's the national lake reserves whether that's the national museums or the historic scotland there is demand for the public to try and access these and it is very easy for these organisations to almost collapse down into doing the absolute core purpose for which they're in and not look about at some of these other work that for example Alasdair was talking about because it's simply not within their core effort to focus on and to an extent you do see the a similar situation in some of the charitable sector where there's uncertainty around funding there uncertainty around fundraising makes them contract down to the the core things they need to do and not to deal with some of the wider problems and not plan for the future i think it's coming into i say those colleagues have referenced a perfect storm in that we were already in for some organisations they'd already cut down to a core and then this has happened to them and it's not being in a position to react to that because they're already on an emergency footing before this you haven't gem you wanted to come in there yeah briefly on those on the clarity of funding at your echo what what david said and when we do we do have clarity in both creative scotland and city redmond council worked really hard in the context of annual funding to scottish government to say actually we want to give as much three years certainty as possible the the challenge with that has been is it has been three years certainty at the same amount and also the challenge has been when i when i joined the organisation in 2020 we had a pretty weak model already and the core funding from creative scotland it was brilliant that it was extended but it also stopped us having any conversation about how what the model of the organisation was so again we ended up with 11 years on the same amount of money which you know it sounds ungrateful but flat funding over a number of years also can be can be problematic if you have to then deal with what happens during those times on flexibility i guess three things you said okay things actually government could do to help bring the cultural sector under its wing to support a lot of the kind of the admin stuff so one interesting thing we found out in the last few weeks and we're actually already talking to neil gray directly about is the scottish government procurement framework for energy purchasing now almost none of our organisations knew about this but there is theoretically the ability to join a scottish for all third sector organisations to be part of a scottish government procurement that would be that should be made available and certain people should know about that better you know i and i'm sure many others are having to learn lots of things about dealing with i'm sure our energy broker is very nice but again i'm not an expert on dealing with energy brokers and buying energy so anything that we can do to for government to take us under the wing of larger schemes will be really beneficial yes the one or not i'd echo what julia said about reporting i think we also need to realise not just the consistency of reporting to different organisations but many of us are very small organisations you know i'm looking to be probably a 12 person organisation and we have to understand you know what is possible within that within that size of organisation finally i think the flexibility for organisations who who have buildings as assets but in many cases our buildings are still there is still there is still a hold on our buildings from those who originally who were originally paid for them more flexibility on what we might be able to do with our assets in terms of borrowing on them in terms of potentially selling off part of them and actually maybe more advice as well there are all of these things i think we are trying to deal with now where it's not just about flexibility it's about some help and advice on the kind of the kind of big financial things that you need to think about which are not in the kind of the core skill set of people in relatively small organisations thank you kirstie and then i think jenny's got a supplementary on this area is that right so i'll come to kirstie then i guess just to echo what's already been said to some extent you know obviously clarity is is really important i guess from our members perspective you know multi-year funding and most of the funding at the moment is on a year to year basis so there's not any real ability to really kind of forward plan over you know two three five years which would provide some degree of of certainty though obviously as jenny's mentioned there are challenges even within kind of multi-year funding or arrangements but the other area for us is really kind of a move away from initiative driven funding there's lots of little pots of money out there but the time the effort to put in applications for pots of money and it's often for things that are seen as new actually there's probably already programmes delivering something similar across scotland so we're not really recognising the best practice that we have we're not really kind of scaling that or looking at how that that can be shared better there seems to be a constant look for something that's going to be the new the best you know thing that's going to come and there'll be a time limited pot of money attached to that but actually our members are saying it's almost not worth them putting in applications for that because of the time and the staff time that it takes to do that to get it up and running and then at the end of that programme no matter how successful it may be can they sustain it quite possibly not so there's a real kind of challenge particularly at the moment between pots of money that are available but actually our members are saying what they need is core funding to keep the lights on they don't need initiative driven funding they need to be able to continue delivering the core services that they have so it's really kind of clarity around moving away from always seeking new things to actually understanding what we have and preserving that. I'd like to really follow up on that because that was kind of the area of my questioning was there's different sizes of organisations with different needs in different locations and also Janet you talked about the fact that you're not simply in big cities you're in perhaps more rural areas so I'm just I'm interested if you could expand a wee bit more on your thoughts with regards to how flexibility is also required across Scotland perhaps different different areas and how perhaps rural culture is simply the size that fits urban culture doesn't slot into rural culture as well absolutely I mean I think it's a really good point because it's one again it comes up again and again for us it's you know particular members in rural areas you know they have facilities services you know with very small populations but it's a that's the lifeline of those communities and it's so it's recognising the importance of every asset in different communities across Scotland and the move that we have at the moment towards cost efficiency and cost management rather than you know focusing on service and impact on communities is perhaps moving away from that so there's more pressure on those smaller some of the smaller venues because things are based on footfall or how many people attend various different programmes in a week but obviously that is not taking into account the geography and the difference across communities across Scotland so there's a real issue there around kind of the geography but in terms of the flexibility as well there's a real need for you know as most of our members their assets are owned by local authorities or delivered through the trust model but actually it's the flexibility enabled by local authorities to look excuse me at different ways of using assets so moving away from perhaps the traditional model or what's perhaps you know the original contract that was written but understanding that the landscape has changed and there's not always that flexibility so there's still a real sense from some local authorities that things have moved back to what they were pre-covids you know the opening hours should be the same the services should be the same actually the world's a completely different place in terms of customer behaviour in terms of the crisis that we're in at the moment but also in terms of people's appetite for what they want to engage in in their free time and we're not necessarily having the freedom and the flexibility to to look at changing that I think there's a bit of a barrier to looking at change and change is sometimes seen from some local authority partners as failure you know so something's not working so you're changing it actually the world is changing and we need to be much more flexible we also need to recognise you know from our perspective our members are the experts they are you know the trust that are delivering these services that is their core bread and butter so they should have the full flexibility to make those decisions that are best for communities that is what they are contracted to do and without that flexibility they're not necessarily having the freedom to deliver what they would like to deliver or to use you know a library space in a slightly different way you know kind of moving away from what might be a traditional library model but actually it's not going to be right for every community and there needs to be some discussion around that and I think the final point linked to that is you know also looking at you know the transfer of assets you know it's something we don't necessarily look at enough in terms of community asset transfer you know both the good and the bad but again what we've heard from a few local authorities is that that's a failure either of the local authority or the trust it's not necessarily a failure it's a different model of delivery and it might be right for a different community and we've seen some really good examples but again we're not able to really kind of look and have open discussions open and honest discussions around what communities want we're still feels that there's quite a tight framework around the expectations of delivery okay yeah I wonder if you Janet you were mentioned by Jamie in our question I'll go to Janet first and then to Julia so yes I think the point about co-designing with communities and co-designing with artists is a really important feature in Scotland's cultural landscape and I think the it's interesting if you look at the arts funding system and I always think in considering what next you have to look back as to where we came from and the arts funding system was set up post-war it was essentially set up to distribute opera and ballet companies from London to the rest of the UK and then infrastructure followed that and so on everybody knows the history what's happening in Scotland or what has happened in Scotland alongside that is the empowering of individuals and communities responding to the geography of Scotland and some quite extraordinary work takes place I think in different parts of Scotland and I think the ecosystem needs to accommodate that so possibly moving forwards we need to think differently in terms of how institutions work and how they bring individuals through artists and communities into the fold in order to co-design provision with Scotland's workshops in the main artists led organisations which started off very small certain print makers who said four homes in Edinburgh and essentially over the last period in moving into a new home in Fountainbridge has grown exponentially but we hold on to the values and the kind of premise of individually driven artist led activity and I think that's where Scotland has a lot of strengths and where rural areas particularly really benefit if artists individually or artists are empowered through appropriate funding measures so it's the balance I think that needs to be gotten right and perhaps now is the time in thinking about future proofing the arts which is I suppose all of us have worked in the arts for a long time feel really responsible for perhaps looking at that broader ecosystem and what's the need and how can we safeguard public access to the arts which ultimately is what's important with public funds and how can we do that in the best possible way and as well as cherishing our built estates in terms of buildings that have been developed to accommodate artists I think all of that needs to be looked at in a holistic way and the arts are a changing and perhaps the model that was set up post-war isn't necessarily the right model for today's times. Thank you Julia. I just wanted to make a point that picking up on something Kirsty said about the need to recognise lifeline venues in rural communities and also I guess in town and city centres in a way because that's all having to be reinvented so cultural assets as local economic hubs I think is something that seems better recognised in the kind of mission of Highlands and Islands enterprise in south of Scotland enterprise than it is in the mission of Scottish enterprise in the central belt because as I understand it from high they're tasked with community sustainability and that means different things in a wider sense drawing on some of the points about how you get in a well-being economy how you get both bits of that the well-being and the economy and I think culture does that extremely well and if we could see that more explicitly acknowledged in the tasking of some of our national agencies that would be really helpful. Thank you. Donald, do you intend to bring in Sarah, please? Thank you very much, convener. It's been really good getting your powerful evidence today in addition to the submissions we've had from lots of organisations. I can't think of a committee meeting where we've had phrases like a perfect storm, dire financial situation and crisis and that that's being mentioned by so many witnesses not just here but in evidence so it's thinking about how we fix it and what evidence we need to put back to the Parliament. There's been quite a lot of comments about percent for art, tourist visitor levy being potentially really important new additional monies but they tend to be not something that you could guarantee everywhere at the same time so it may be very important but what about the overall status of culture? One of the bits of evidence that we got from COSLA and the directors of finance said that funding in local authorities had been cut by nearly a quarter in the eight years pre-Covid so there's something about reduction in funding at the local level and then we got your comments about the flat funding challenge when all your costs are rocketing so have you got thoughts about the equivalence of culture spending? It's not statutory so is there something we should be recommending as a committee about the status of funding for culture given the complexity on the ground and all the evidence that we've seen in the work that we've been doing in social prescribing about the wider benefits of culture so benefits of health, wellbeing, benefits of the economy, how do we capture that in terms of saying culture is important and it needs proper funding? Has anyone got thoughts on that? How do we make sure that it's ranked properly? Nobody's jumpin and desperate to answer that one. I think it's interesting that Sajana at the mentioned the need for research in this area and looking at it earlier in the submission but Julia, please come in. It would be good to take a fresh look at some of the evidence that was brought together in the last session of the Parliament about funding for culture in terms of European approaches to cultural rights and to the status of cultural workers and so on. I would like to say that we could make culture statutory under local authority budgets and that that would fix things but we all know that there's a cake at the moment and how do we make it a bigger cake rather than cut it into ever finer slices. That's certainly something that we've been very interested in as the way that the European systems embed into their processes that value that they give culture and that we give culture in this country as well as Jim mentioned up front. The other area that I think could be acted on more quickly is incentives for philanthropy or the kind of reliefs that several people around the table have mentioned in business rates and various other taxes. I was having a discussion with a generous philanthropy organisation the other day and they were echoing some of the same points that we've talked about this morning around long-term funding and flexibility of conditions for organisations to be able to do what they need to do but we find that they usually require some kind of foundational commitment to be there from the public sponsors of cultural organisations. The more we can preserve the sense that the culture sector is valued so that we can continue to leverage up that sort of benefit that would be great because the Edinburgh festival system for example is about 15 per cent public funding and 85 per cent income generated and that's between sponsors, donors and audience members but the difficult thing you have to keep in mind is that whole system because those percentages are not always the same across the whole of Scotland but we're trying to be irrigating of the whole local economy and if we move the system in a certain way we will only have the 15 per cent of public funding and we won't have the 85 per cent of the rest of the funding that comes into that system. Janet, I didn't see it and I'll come to Gashdie after that. I would say make it statutory even as a tiny, tiny percentage because as a principal it feels important but I concur that that's not necessarily viable. I think there is more opportunity for the national system and the local system to work more coherently together so at the moment we all have separate funding agreements with our national fund the Corrective Scotland and with our local funders which requires double the time from in terms of administration to be able to actually deal with that. If we could join that up and require that to be joined up and in the old days one would say you wouldn't fund a local area unless a local authority was able to contribute as part of that package that isn't always possible now but you might say a package of support needs to be provided by the local authority that includes rates relief that includes other kinds of professional support or incentives that make life easier for cultural organisations if that could be worked through then I think that would be transformative for how we function even when it comes to identifying KPIs if they can line up and be the same ones then we're not spending time administering the arts as opposed to actually delivering on the ground. Kirstie? Thank you. I mean I guess in terms of the argument around statutory I'm not sure from our perspective it make any real significant difference and we obviously understand local authority budgets are within a fixed envelope so actually there's finite financial resource there so you know as you said there's difficulties in terms of how that's allocated. I think for me it comes back to some of the earlier points around the cross department working and looking at different pots of funding and kind of joining those up so looking at the areas that culture contributes across different areas you know whether that's mental health well-being whether it's economy whether it's education so that means a whole range of areas that culture contributes significant amounts in terms of the outcomes it delivers but there's not necessarily any funding. I realise it's a challenge and obviously at the moment we're seeing a little bit of a move towards protectionism around budgets because everything is tightening but really what we need to do is kind of the reverse and actually try and have better conversations across departments around outcomes and you know focusing on what it is we want to achieve and how we get there rather than kind of the silo pots of funding which I think there's still a bit of a tendency for both at national and local government level and I think you know Janet's point around so that you know central and local governments you know kind of working better together and having much clearer support between the two I think would also be helpful in terms of streamlining some of that funding and making it kind of flow easier to where it needs to be and I think the final point really is around is around the research you know there's a lot of research out there there's an abundance of evidence around the impact of culture on health on well-being but it's how we utilise that. I think sometimes what we do as a sector is try and find a new bit of research that's going to make the case and it's going to be the thing that transforms hearts and minds actually there's probably a lot of information out there but we're not using it in a collective way as a sector in the best way to maximise that message so it's understanding what it is that's going to actually make the case change hearts and minds do we have it and how do we articulate that and I think that needs to be a much wider joined up approach to really have any impact. Thank you. Mark, can I invite you to? I think it's been very powerful evidence this morning and I think what I've taken from it is the sense that you know the world has already changed and it's about you know organisations have to change not a sense of failure but there needs to be that headroom and that support to enable that change to happen and I'm sure that other sectors are having to think about how they respond to a new world as well including health. I think Julia, Janet and Kirsty will mention the transient visitor levy I mean there is a commitment from the government to deliver that legislation the next year but I'm just wondering what the conversation has been at the local level around that levy because you know clearly it will be a discretionary power that councils can use and you know it may even be discretionary in terms of what they can spend it on as well although I think there's a very strong argument that it needs to be put into cultural wellbeing so I don't know how that local conversation is panning out and obviously there will be some dissenting voices in the use of such a levy from parts of the hospitality sector who maybe don't understand the benefits of how it could be used so I'm interested in how those early conversations are going because whether it gets used or not it's going to be pretty critical and pretty critical to extra funds that could be brought in so I don't know who Julia is nodding quite a lot but do you want to come in? It's obviously in the public domain that the city of Edinburgh council has committed to working to bring in the transient visitor levy when they have the power to do so so we have had quite a lot of discussions at local level about those very questions and I've been very buoyed up by the degree of consensus from across council members but also civic organisations about the fact that there needs to be a kind of virtuous circle between you know what the money is raised against and how it is invested so the idea that it would be tempting to divert it into a general pot for general needs I think is something that people across the board want to resist even in difficult times and some of the things that we've been talking about seeing the funding going to would be solutions to some of the issues that high demand on a city from visitors in concentrated bits in the city centre can bring and stimulus for more sustainable and good growth in tourism so under solutions obviously some of the city management issues which were amplified in the last two weeks of august with the refuse workers strike are top of mind in this city and also some of the things around community culture that we've been talking about this morning I think could be very much helped by a new revenue stream that could go to in a ring-fenced way to that sort of purpose in terms of stimulus obviously we think the cultural offer in Edinburgh is world-class and needs needs to be rebased because it's had that erosion over more than a decade and we are also talking locally about what succeeds what was known as marketing Edinburgh you know how do we manage tourism and stimulate sustainable and responsible tourism in the future so those are some of the the purposes in Edinburgh that we've been talking about Kirsty and Janet you're both of your networks I mean are there similar conversations happening across scotland or is this just an Edinburgh conversation at the moment I mean I'm happy to jump in if that's all right so I mean from my perspective most of the conversations are within our membership network at the moment but it is very much you know understanding that it would be discretionary so this is not going to be something that's you know guaranteed across the whole of Scotland but it's about the encouragement and I think what there's a desire for is a steer from central government you know to really kind of mandate that if there is a visitor levy you know within a certain area that at least a proportion of that would go towards culture you know so taking away you know as Julia talked about that possibility of it being kind of a general pot where it would be anticipated it would be kind of you know sucked into other areas that have greater financial needs so it's more about the ring fencing a proportion if this was to come you know into force and having a very very clear steer around the role of culture in in the visitor economy and making sure that that's protected and I noted that scam I think had referenced a transient visitor levy and a percent for in their submission so clearly a conversation amongst the visual arts community I'm not pretty to the detail at local authority level across the country but I agree that if culture is the magnet that draws tourists to Scotland which we know it is then culture should benefit in relation to any income drawn down through that route. Sarah, sorry I didn't make it back any earlier. Yeah no no it's I want to thank everyone for the answers and I think that last discussion really reinforces the need for thinking about how you do get the cross-government working that I think you referred to very powerfully Kirsty because we've had some discussions about health and wellbeing and culture and the potential benefits and I suppose with the budget coming up this year it's how you make that maybe more explicit have you thoughts and the evidence that you or the information you gave us about how to make processes more straightforward KPI's given the differences between very big organisations and maybe more smaller lighter fruit community based organisations that's quite powerful so just thinking about one of the things that you've mentioned a couple of a couple of you and certainly in the evidence is about staff changes we got that evidence when we talked to venues earlier in the year over Covid and I think it's in your evidence prospect but the loss of young people from the sector who don't see it as a long-term career seems quite significant as our work that's being done in the sector to try and retain people in the sector and the skills and make it an on-going career option for young people I don't know if you David or Kirsty want to come in on that stuff David do you want to come in first thank you unfortunately actually the greatest turn of we see in the sector in the certain areas that we deal with is around people who are new to it who have been come in some of it is salaries as you expect expect me to say but actually a lot of it's to do with insecure funding and insecure contracts that Kirsty's referred to pots of money and unfortunately that can lead to a habit of saying well the pot of money is for three years therefore the contract is for three years and people either don't have that contract extended or indeed more naturally are worried that it won't be extended and then look for the work before the project ends and it's I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing such a high turnover now where people previously would have come in to the sector and stayed with it and worked in an institution and worked through it to become experts within their area they simply cannot find that way into those organisations and come into the sector and then leave again Kirsty I think the point around you know the insecure contracts and then obviously the link to funding is absolutely right I think also there's been a bit of a rebalancing of people's priorities particularly post Covid and the fact that a lot of cultural work is you know what might be seen as anti-social hours because you know if a lot of facilities are open at weekends or you have live performance which takes place in the evening and that's not necessarily something that people have wanted to come back to post Covid they've wanted to kind of move and rebalance time with families and kind of rebalance their work in personal life so there's been quite a significant loss because of that as well and obviously salaries not being able to to compete in that sense there is a lot of work that's going on and I know there's other organisations such as CC skills that are really looking at you know workforce in the culture sector and attracting people and supporting organisations to recruits there's been quite a lot of changes in recruitment processes when our members are talking about having open days and having interviews on those open days because actually if they have an open day somebody signs up for an interview they're not then turning up for the interview because they've got another job offer so there's really a kind of time pressure in terms of trying to attract people presents and attractive proposition to them and also kind of snap up people at that time and there's a real kind of look at you know benefits that can be offered because there's not the salaries that can necessarily compete with other sectors so what can be offered in terms of some of the wider benefits so I know that our members are really looking at some of that flexible working looking at kind of health well-being supports and some of the software benefits that can be offered but it is a very difficult kind of recruitment market for the sector at the moment and then there's really a need to attract more people and to retain people within the sector but you know as David said the insecurity a lot of the media around it is not helping people to feel a sense of security or to see a career pathway you know a lot of people are seeing it as kind of an entry level job but nowhere to go after that I think what we need to really do is create very clear pathways for people to develop, grow and progress so that we keep those talented people within the sector. Thank you I think this will have to be a final word from you Jim on this. Just to add I think in our world because our role is about supporting independent dance artists so people who are not in a dance or one of the two dance companies that exist in Scotland they very much have careers that involve that artistic practice, involve working in retail or hospitality, involve teaching dance, involve working in organisations like ours and I think yet all of the things that have been talked about before about the increasing insecurity of jobs mean that we are losing artists from the dance just as much as people from the administrative or the organisational side of things because people just cannot make a career that adds up between all of the different between their professional practice and everything else that they might need to put in there to earn a living so my bigger worry I think is actually this is not just about people working in organisations it's about the artists that we exist to support. Janet will give you a final word. Very quickly I suppose I just say the word opportunity cost so we have spent the last 70 years 65 years training educating building expertise in arts organisations and if we let that go what's it going to cost to be able to get it back in the future so I would feature that in any thinking in relation to that very small percentage of government spend that currently is invested in the arts. Thank you I'm afraid that's probably run out of time for this session and we'll get another session immediately after this so thank you very much for your attendance and as I said for your written and oral evidence today it has been profound thank you very much and I'll suspend to on-board new witnesses. Thank you. The agenda item is to continue to take evidence in Scotland's census and I welcome to the meeting this morning Agus Robertson MSP cabinet secretary for the constitution external affairs and culture. Paul Lowe register general for national records of Scotland who's joining us remotely this morning. Pete Whitehouse director of statistical services national records of Scotland and Penelope Cooper director of culture and major events at the Scottish Government and could I invite the cabinet secretary to make brief opening statement. Thank you very much convener good morning committee colleagues following the closure of the main census collect period on the 31st of May on the 22nd of August the census coverage survey also came to an end and while this mark may mark the end of live operations for Scotland census 2022 it certainly doesn't mark the end of the work required to deliver high quality census outputs. Scotland census is a highly complex programme which in common with other modern censuses consists of many elements. While it's understandable that much of the focus so far has been on the public facing elements of the census particularly the census return rate that in itself is not the deciding factor in determining the success or not of a census as the international steering group set out in the paper they provided to the committee and as professor Sir Ian Diamond and professor David Martin explained during the evidence session two weeks ago it's the combination of three pillars which will deliver the high quality census outputs that users require high quality census returns of which an almost 90% return rate has been achieved a coverage survey and peer reviewed statistical techniques and the use of high quality administrative data. This was the first primarily online census and generally this worked very well with 89% of respondents completing online. This exceeded the national record for Scotland's target of 75% and clearly indicates a strong preference for the majority of citizens to use digital rather than paper completion. The shift in public preference should be taken into account for any future census exercise or similar significant public engagement. This is also the most flexible census ever delivered with options for completing digitally by paper form and also through assisted completion by telephone and field force. Despite concerns the month-long extension to the collection period also led to significant improvement of return rates at both national and at local levels. The national return rate increased by 10 percentage points since the first of May but crucially the extension also ensured that there was enhanced coverage across the country with 30 of 32 local authorities achieving return rates of more than 85% and no authority less than 83%. 18 of those local authorities achieved a return rate greater than 90%. There are however some emerging indications of shifts in public attitudes in Scotland to the importance of the census and there is a need to understand these. This phenomenon appears not to be restricted however to the census but is emerging in other areas for example completion rates in broader Scottish social surveys. The committee recently heard from Surrey in Diamond that this is a trend which has been seen in declining participation rates across recent years and as such it will be important to understand and plan for such an event up front in the design and risk management for any future census. However with the final return rate of 89.2% I hope that committee members and indeed the public are reassured by the words of the international steering group who in their submission to this inquiry noted that they and I quote consider that the main census enumeration has provided the foundation for a high quality set of census outputs in terms of coverage of the population and indeed Surrey in Diamond's evidence that the census in Scotland will still produce and I quote really good data. As recommended by the international steering group the national records of Scotland are working at pace to secure the necessary access to key administrative data sets for the purpose of census estimation and adjustment. This expansion and enhancement of administrative data use beyond the original plans for estimation of census response will put NRS in a strong position to deliver a high quality set of census outputs for Scotland's 2022 census. The Scottish Government and NRS are extremely grateful for the time and expertise that the international steering group continues to provide as they move through planned post-collection quality control and assurance work. Over the coming months national records of Scotland will continue to focus on planned post-collection quality control and assurance work to deliver the high quality census outputs users require. Finally I also put on my record my thanks to the millions of households who participated in Scotland's census 2022 and I look forward to answering your questions today. Thank you very much. Thank you very much cabinet secretary. If I might open with a question about one of the criticisms at the time of the census was the decision to delay. The committee has centred quite a lot of evidence about it not being a reasonable comparison to the UK statistics authority in terms of capacity budget and indeed where they were in analysis of the data. Now that we have a better understanding of that, are you content that that was the right decision to make at that time for the quality of the census? Yes, I am. This is me looking back at the decisions that were made at the time which I didn't play a part in but obviously it's important to look at and try and understand the rationale behind decisions that were made. Firstly there is an international context to all of this. Out of 83 nations that plan to conduct censuses over that period, 59 of them, that is 71 per cent, delayed their census field collections. That included not only Scotland but many others. Germany, Italy and Ireland being three can provide the list to the committee if one would wish to know which other nations amongst the 71 per cent who made the same decision were only 10 countries, that's 12 per cent in that period, preceded with their field collection as previously planned. I'm satisfied that the rationale and not losing sight of the fact that the advice to the public was to minimise contact with one another at that time and that was the wider context of holding a census during the biggest pandemic in 100 years. I'm content that the correct decision was made and now that we know that we are within touching distance of a 90 per cent return rate for the census itself and can be assured that the quality of the data is of the standard that is required to complete the census. I think that the right decision was made at the time, yes. Thank you. I'm going to move to questions from committee and can we go first to Ms Boyack? Can I ask you Cabinet Secretary, you referred to changes in society's attitude this morning and you also referenced it in your ministerial statement. How much work have you done on that issue? You have just flagged other countries delayed their census, but in terms of compared with the 2021 census in the rest of the UK, what are the comparative differences in terms of low turnout areas and what lessons do you draw from that and what are the issues going forward because we've not had the same level of lower turnout rates historically? We could probably use the whole time of the session to discuss this question because it's a nub of trying to understand the experience of the recent census process here and trying to understand what will be required to take place at the time of the next census to make sure that we are able to collect the appropriate quality of data from society. I spent a lot of time with my professional colleagues who are here and online throughout the process of the census collection period trying to understand the phenomenon of reduced collection rates, especially in certain parts of the country, and I'll let them do some of the technical statistical explanation for that. I should say that this is something that is being currently evaluated, so you're asking us to take the temperature on the basis of what we understand thus far without having completed all of the work. I'm sitting giving evidence to colleagues who are unusual in society in that we actually spend quite a lot of time knocking on doors as MSPs and as candidates. Having been out, as indeed has Ms Boyack, who is out and I'm appreciative that she and a number of other MSPs took the time to go and actually see how the census was being collected and was able to see the phenomenon, which I think is entirely consistent with what we, as members of the democratic political community, are aware of. That is a reducing rate of participation in elections, reducing turnout, reducing rates of data that we are able to collect when we do doorstep visits, and higher numbers of people saying that they're not prepared to say, in the case of election times, what they're thinking about voting, and hearing a variety of reasons to explain why they won't be taking part. Before the end of the census collection period, I said to colleagues at NRS that I thought it was going to be particularly important to understand in qualitative terms and quantifiable terms the reasons for people who were not participating themselves. What were the reasons that they were giving as opposed to the reasons that others were interpreting that they were giving? It's really quite instructive and worth sharing with the committee so it's on the record. 1,200 people, so this is larger than a standard opinion polls sample size, were asked. Those are people who hadn't returned their census forms. What were their main reasons for not completing? Why were they not doing so? The biggest reason, 35 per cent, was that people felt that they were too busy. They didn't have enough time. The next biggest reason, 17 per cent, was that they were not aware of the census. The next biggest reason, 14 per cent, said that they didn't realise that they had to complete it. Lastly, but these all came in at 5 per cent or less, were concerns about privacy, about trust in government, about the nature of questions, about access to paper, etc. All of those points came in at less than 5 per cent. I would imagine that most people in the committee would recognise that kind of response from the times that we knock on people's doors. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, by the end of the process, now 90 per cent of people had returned their census rate. The question is how much more does one need to do in 2022, or in 2032, when the next census comes around, to maintain that high-level, high return rate? I note again my colleagues who are much more versed in the statistical side of this will be aware that New Zealand, who are about to begin, I think next year, undertake their census, have set their target for a return rate of 90 per cent. My observation in this is that we are seeing a phenomenon here in Scotland that is not unique. It is one that is occurring in other countries. The question is what can we learn from our experience so that we can maximise the rate of return next time around? Sorry, I don't want to hog the microphone here. There are colleagues from NRS who are wanting to make a contribution at this stage. I know that there is a lot of evaluation work that is being undertaken, and no doubt, when that is published, it will be shared with the committee. Are there any things that colleagues would wish to flag up at this stage in relation to my answer to Ms Boyack? Mr Whitehouse wants to come in. If you could raise your hand, if you want to come in, I can see you on screen, but I will provide Mr Whitehouse. I think the way I would look at it is that we know that there are areas of the country, and this is Professor's Martin and Tessurian Diamond talked about this, where response rates are lower, they are lower in the English and the Welsh survey and they are lower in the Northern Irish survey. We know going into our census that certain areas have more difficulty in terms of getting responses, and that's why we skew a lot of our work, a lot of our effort, a lot of our communications to get to those areas and those communities. So, we need to evaluate and work out how effective that has been, and whether there are other variations that one can employ. But I think what is coming through, and this would have been the same as the Professor's talked about, is that the general nature is as of people not wishing to respond to surveys and censuses in the same way, and that is across the globe. So, when we look at our census, we now need to look at a programme of work that has at its absolute centre, if we're going to do something akin to the 2022 model, is that big data collection, and as I said, that's 2.3 million households responding as fast amounts of information. We understand where we've then missed households. We do some complex, and Sir Ian talked about it. He's very interested and excited by the opportunity to do this statistical work, as I am. I am a professional statistician, but it's interesting. It solves a problem, but into that space is much more use of administrative data, and the benefit of that is that understanding through our good data that we hold, whether that's through our health system or elsewhere, helps us both understand that the communities that we haven't had returns from helps us get a very good estimate of the population, therefore, and then helps us to do good statistical estimation about the nature and the characteristics of those communities. So, as we know, some of the communities that are most going to benefit from the census outputs are where response rates have been more challenging, and that is where we are needing to do the work now with the administrative data with our estimation work to unpick that and provide the best quality data, which is our ambition. But, as the Cabinet Secretary says, these are problems that are existing around the globe now, and, therefore, some of the benefit of the international steering group, but also the benefit of the international census community, is to explore and invest in that, and that's part of our lessons learned as well. Thank you, convener. Just to add a couple of points, we've seen and I think we noted in the evidence session back in June that there is a phenomenon around this, but even if we look at our own census in Scotland in 2001, it was a 96 per cent response rate. In 2011, it was a 94 per cent response rate, so there has been evidence over the last couple of censuses of response rates gradually reducing. Now, it was our expectation, as it was for O&S and Niger, that we would attempt to get a response rate over 90 per cent and mirroring that of the previous census in 2011, and, obviously, in our case, we've got just under 90 per cent, which is a good and robust response. But, as others say, this is a challenge that's being seen around the globe. The cabinet secretary referenced the New Zealand census, the 2023 census. Now, they take their census every five years. Their last census in 2018 achieved a response rate of 83.3 per cent, which was notably lower than the position in Scotland, but they were still able to produce credible census outputs from that level of response rate. We are, as Pete has said, seeing this in other social surveys. They are gathered by the Scottish Government, so some of the big social surveys you'll be aware of, such as the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey, the health survey, the household surveys that are run as doorstep surveys. In the run-up to 2019 and 2020, all of them have been showing progressively reduced response rates. They have voluntary surveys, of course, and people can decline them, but it points to that broader trend. I'd also give the example of the O&S's labour force survey that they undertake, and that's also seen declining returns, and they're now getting sort of in the lowest of 50 per cent of the territory in that survey as well. This is not a unique phenomenon to the census, but it does provoke the question of what you then do if society's attitudes are shifting in that way, and how do we make sure that we increasingly build this into the design of future census activity? Thank you. Thank you for those responses. It's clearly been in much lower income areas in terms of the communications of those communities. I did specifically ask about different lessons across the UK in terms of numbers and outputs, and I think that people were surprised at the lower outcomes. What lessons do you draw, Cabinet Secretary, in terms of that communications, learning the lessons from this time for the future? Is education stronger communications before the census so that people are actually aware of it and that they do prioritise it given the importance of all the decisions that get made subsequent to the census on the basis of the return? First of all, it's important to understand the context of what communication was there with households. Because there seems to be an impression with some that there may have been too little communication about the fact that there was a census, why there was a census, its importance, its relevance, one's responsibility for taking part, that it might be explained in ways for people who English might not be a first language or for people who have other access issues. All of those were considerations that were explored fully before the beginning of the census, which then led to a, frankly, gigantic communication effort. I will spare the committee me going through every individual type of communication that was sent out to households in Scotland, but again, just for reference for the scale so that it's on the record, 2.7 million initial contact letters, 1.4 million initial reminders, 1.1 million second reminders, 679,000 further reminders, up to five reminders for non-responding households, 351,000 paper questionnaires that were requested by households, 165,000 paper questionnaires that were proactively sent out on a targeted basis to help people to complete the census. In addition to that, so that's people being proactively communicated with directly to households. Field staff from the census visited 680,000 households. They made a total of 1.6 million household visits in total. They handed out 92,000 paper questionnaires to households. I could go on about the work of the contact centre, the amount of times that the website was used and so on. It is difficult to understand that people would have the opinion that they did not know anything about the census when so much was delivered to their household or in the case of some households up to 10 visits from NRS enumerators. Ms Boyack is absolutely right to point out that there were particular, especially, social demographic areas where the rate of return was lowest. However, I have to say that it is where the degree of effort to try and communicate with people was highest. It was most targeted from the start and then during the collection process where there was a divergence between the projected rate of return with the actual rate of return, there was a significant targeted effort that was made to try and make sure that areas where there was the lowest rate of return, that gap could be closed. This is the heart of the conundrum, which is people saying, we have people saying, I did not know about the census, I did not understand why it was important, I did not have enough time to do it, although the process ran over months, and you have to weigh that up with the fact that people were communicated with. I talked to a convener about what was happening in terms of direct communication, in terms of general societal communication. 561 times television adverts were run, 68 per cent of the Scottish adult population saw them at least once, 51 per cent of the Scottish adult population at least three times, radio adverts that were run 11,873 times. The idea that the census was not communicated or was not communicated effectively just does not stand up to any fair scrutiny, but there is clearly a disconnect with some people who, for their own reasons, explained that they were not aware and did not have enough time, and the other reasons that we know about were the fact that, notwithstanding the fact that there was extremely full spectrum communication from mail to doorstep visits to very, very high-profile advertising, that still a proportion of the population was extremely difficult to reach. I think that Ms Boyack will have had the experience in watching enumerators going to doors, after doors, after doors and people not being in, and then people who did answer, then saying that they weren't going to take part. Was that a moment in time? I'm not sure it is, for the reasons that Paul Loh has said, given the international and comparative information that we are aware of. Does that mean that we shouldn't think about things and learn lessons? Absolutely. This is where I come to say her boyack's question about what is it that we can be doing and doing more of. I think that the education point that she makes is a very, very good one. What is it that can be done, especially in communities with the lowest rates of return in advance of the census, to increase understanding in family households, for example? That is something that one could do more of. Incidentally, that did happen in Scottish schools in the run-up to the census. Again, another effort was undertaken in advance. Is that something that we should do more of? Yes, it is. If anybody has any ideas of further ways in which we can reach communities that are hard to reach, I will look to my colleagues to give some more information on that. The number of third sector organisations that played a part in the census 2022 is remarkable. From faith groups and community groups to charities and employers, the number of organisations across Scotland runs into the hundreds who were doing their best internally to help to explain to attendees at the mosque, to people who used certain charitable services. The examples go on. Every effort was undertaken to try and think how we can reach people, especially those who are hard to reach. At one stage, the offer was made to members of the Scottish Parliament to help to provide community leadership in certain communities where return rates were low or church ministers to do likewise. One really did try and harness all available routes to reach communities where the return rate was lowest. On the final point, the direction of enumerators during the extension period to parts of the country where the rate of return was lowest was absolutely scientific. Where is the lowest return rate? Where are the enumerators that we have who are trying to drive up the return rate? One was even trying to do it on the doorstep, direct manual completion of the census, standing in front of people at the doorstep or helping people with written questionnaires and in those communities where the return rate was lowest. Did it work? Absolutely, it did. If you look at the change in the extended period of the census, the biggest change in rates of return was in those parts of the country where there had been the lowest rates of return for the social demographic reasons that Sarah Boyack identifies. Is there more that can be done? No doubt, but I would definitely not want people in the committee and elsewhere to be under the impression that there was not a significant effort across all means to try and get the maximum return rate in the census. There most certainly was. To the cabinet secretary and his officials and from the NRS and elsewhere, can I ask you first of all the cost of the census? You indicated in June that the extension came with an additional cost of approximately £9 million, although that was revised. Can you advise the committee on the final cost of the extension and the final total cost of the census? The additional expenditure was £6 million, and that equates to 4.3% of the £138.6 million lifetime cost for the May 2022 census. The extension increase of lifetime cost of the census to £144.6 million. The extension added 4.3% to the cost of the census, and the final total cost of the census was £144.6 million. Moving to the concept of lessons learned, which you will be aware of Serian Diamonds evidence last week to that extent. I think that you yourself to be fair committed to that earlier in the chamber earlier this year. I mean not to revisit old ground, but the stark reality of Scotland's census is that it is approximately 8 to 9 per cent behind the rest of the UK's census in 2021. In addition, certain areas of Scotland, Glasgow in particular, our biggest city, had a very low rate in comparison to other areas of about 81 per cent. Will you commit when you undertake the lessons learned exercise to looking specifically at the disparity between Scotland and the rest of the UK, but also the disparity within Scotland, within local authority areas? I think that that has arisen this year in doing the course of parliamentary scrutiny of this as a key issue. Further to your point, it is entirely reasonable to ask why was there a variable rate of return between Scotland and the rest of the UK. It is a perfectly reasonable question to try and get to the bottom off, but I would say equally that we should also be comparing our experience with elsewhere, especially with the rest of the industrialised world, where one can make especially sociodemographic comparisons to see where there are similarities and where there are differences. I think that we are not at the end of the process yet in understanding the differences. I think that it is unavoidable to conclude that the factor of people being in their houses, because that is what they were during the pandemic, is a significant contributory factor to the ability of being able to reach people, particularly in more challenged social demographic backgrounds. Just in terms of an exercise, because I am not sure if Mr Cameron was one of the MSPs that went out and saw the census collection, I think that he was not able to see, the efforts that went into knocking doors again and again to try and reach people. Obviously, if you are not getting people in a lot, it is going to be difficult to try and get them to take part in a process. One might conclude, and it is a very unscientific conclusion, but I am just drawing it as the non-statistician and the non-census professional. There is definitely something in that, but to my mind that does not make me revisit the question of whether the timing and the decision in Scotland was correct or not. I think that the decision in Scotland, as it was in the majority of countries, was to not go out and send thousands of people into communities to knock on doors to have face-to-face conversations with people at a time when we were telling them not to do that was the right response in Scotland. To the point of Mr Cameron's question, should we be trying to learn every lesson from the experience in Scotland in the rest of the UK and the rest of the world, especially countries with which we can compare ourselves best? Absolutely. The reason why is that I think that we are dealing with a societal trend here. I do not think that we are dealing with a specific moment in time. If there is a specific moment in time, it may have been in those countries where a census was being conducted during a lockdown, but for all the rest of us, I think that we are dealing with an on-going trend and we are going to have to work out, as we are in many other areas where we are trying to get information from people, how we are able to do that, where people do not want to or do not trust or do not understand or do not have enough time, as they said, was the reason for not taking part. Thank you for those answers. Just to follow up on that a little, will you commit to publishing the lessons learned document for the benefit of Parliament? Is that something that you can commit to? It is for the NRS to make decisions as to what it is that they are going to be publishing, but I would want maximum transparency, so not only that NRS cannot understand what those might be, but that the Government ministers understand them and that those who hold us to account do. Can you also include, please—this is a point that was raised by Maurice Golden, who is not with us today—that he raised last week about the impact of including what might be described as sensitive questions within the census. This was a really interesting point that he raised last week with Surin Diamond. Is that something that you could explore and reflect upon? I am in favour of reflecting on everything. In terms of that, one person's sensitive question is another person's less-than-sensitive question. If I go back to the statistical response that we had when we actually asked people what were the reasons for not taking important things, I think that I am not wanting to repeat myself at length. People's concerns about certain types of questions came in at less than 5 per cent as a main contributory factor to them taking part or not taking part in the census. Does that mean that one shouldn't think about that? No, of course one should think about that. Frankly, we need to think about everything. By the very nature of what a census is supposed to provide in terms of understanding society in the 21st century, there are a wide rate of questions that are asked to understand the kind of country that we are in. I will leave it to the statisticians to go through the range of the types of questions that those are. The census now is a million miles away from where the census was 20 or 100 years ago, and that is because we require much more information to provide the public services among other things that we wish to provide in a way that is reflective of society, which is why we have to ask the broadest range of questions. To the central point, should we be prepared to think about all kinds of questions? Absolutely. Finally, can I ask a question about a letter that has been supplied to the committee from Mark Pont, who is the assessment programme lead with the Office for Statistics Regulation. It is a letter to Mr Whitehouse, so he may want to bring him in. He makes a point about transparency. He says that he considers that it would be in NRS's interest to be more transparent now about the steps that it is taking to generate good quality census estimates. We consider that being transparent about the various current activities plans, processes, etc., would assure users of NRS's trustworthiness and reassure users that they can confidently explain high-quality estimates from the census. Do you accept that? Yes, we do accept that being transparent is absolutely fundamental to what we are trying to do, and that is why I think that in that letter the earlier bit of it welcomed the fact that we have been transparent and we work very closely with Office for Statistics Regulation and take their advice, take their support. Mark has written to me, as you have said, saying that this would be a good time to do a little bit more on the evolution of your methodology. To that end, we have published a paper that is on our website that says—and it very much aligns with what you heard from the professors a couple of weeks ago—about how we are building into this administrative data solution with more statistical and estimation methodology, and we are learning from our colleagues in the UK, but also very importantly around the world. If I may, there were a couple of other points that I just wanted to come back on. We will be publishing for Parliament a review of the census. That is something that is there and will happen in 2024. We are doing reviews of each element of those programmes, and all of that will feed into that report about where we are. Professor Martin, in his contribution a couple of weeks ago and Sir Ian, spoke about variation being something that is there across all censuses. I think Professor Martin talked about areas of England and I think maybe affluent areas where people were considered to have left the area to go and live in a second home or somewhere out of their city and concerns about what that means. We work and we have a conference coming up with our colleagues across the international census forum, which brings in America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and ourselves in the UK and our four nations. We come together to learn from each other because we are facing into the same issues, which is, as the Cabinet Secretary says, how do you get people to respond in 2021, 2022, 2031, wherever it is, to things in a way that they are increasingly not wishing to do? That is where we get the stats there, we get the methodologies, we get the admin data. The last point if I could make, sorry, it is just a factual thing because it has been mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Glasgow's response was just under a sort of 85, so it is 83 point something, I cannot remember the actual detail, but it is not 81, it was 83 plus. Thank you for that correction. Yeah, thanks. I wonder if at this stage there are particular lessons to be learned about those hard to count groups, so more transient populations, students for example, those with English as a second language, those in particular types of housing. Just reflecting on what you said earlier, Cabinet Secretary, about the marketing, there was a lot of marketing that went out there. Is that sort of marketing targeted at those particular types of groups and what kind of lessons could be learned about how that could be improved going forward? The answer is yes. Is there still more that can be done absolutely that there will have to be a full toolkit of ways in which one can reach different parts of society? I think that it is just a reflection of the fact that we are living in an ever more atomised society. What I am pleased though is if the one looks at the different ways in which support was offered, support for people who had English as a second language and some needed translation, support for people for whom their eyesight was not good, that they could complete the census on the phone with somebody helping them through it, that those people who preferred to do things in written form as opposed to doing things online could have a written census form, that people were given it when there were doorstep visits, when it was suggested that they prefer doing it with paper, but not losing sight of the fact. It is quite important that we do not lose sight of this, which is the extremely high rate in which there was a digital return of the census. This is the first time that this was prioritised in the way that it was this time round. We are a society in flux where younger people are absolutely at home using digital access to services, and the 9 in 10 return rate digitally shows that people were content to do that. What we were having to do this time round was to recognise that there are still people for whom that is not their natural or preferred way to take part in the likes of a census, which is why there were then additional range of ways in which people were able to take part. In terms of the likes of students and other particular groups, I would be interested to know as part of the process, which is still on-going, about how effective were the internal communications, for example, in the university or college landscape, or within certain faith communities, where there might be a higher percentage of linguistic minorities and so on. There definitely are lessons that one can learn from that. What worked particularly well and what does one need to do more on that? I do not know if my NRS colleagues have got anything to add on any early impressions that we have from all of that. My immediate reaction is that all of the logical processes that you would put in place, working with groups who can work on behalf of the census so that they can go into their communities, talk about benefits, talk about the importance of being part of it, talk about the safety of the census, the security, the data and the purpose of it, all of those happened. Whether we can do more of them, that's a question, but also the activities of all of the kind of engagement, as you would imagine and have expected, I don't feel we left any stone unturned here. I think in terms of all of the work that we did to learn from how do you get to people, help them, support them with translations, with opportunities to phone in a help centre and give your response online, talking very, very heavily about the benefits to our nation, the benefits to our society, our communities, all the way down to the individual neighbourhoods. We really emphasised all of that and yet in certain areas it obviously has not resonated as well as we would have hoped. But the question from a statistical perspective now is how do you maximise engagement to get that vast amount of data and then know what do you do if we in the future, as is happening across the globe, continue to have those challenges? And so what are the, as the professor spoke about it, what is that third pillar and how do you make that as equal part in terms of our understanding, I think, nationally and societally, that that is what a modern census is? I mean the world is changing and you showed us earlier the impressive stack of written communication. I did, when I was out canvassing earlier in the years, see quite a lot of that communication reminders and leaflets just kind of drifting around stairwells next to pizza delivery menus as well, unfortunately, and election literature, I must put through the door. But yes, I mean I'm interested to know, particularly when you look at tools social media, was there a campaign on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram and what was the effectiveness of that? Were there different types of messages? Because I saw a lot on terrestrial TV was very community minded messages about planning for education and schools absolutely appeals to myself, but there's maybe different types of messages for different types of groups, particularly people who are not permanent residents in communities and maybe moving on after a year or two. If it's helpful to the committee, I'm absolutely happy to provide the background on the different types of messaging that were used across different platforms from television through to social media, and it was full spectrum communication and it was aimed at different target audiences. I don't need to tell Mr Ruskell a great detail this. Obviously, the audience that would be using TikTok is quite different from an audience that uses Facebook, which is quite different from an audience that will be watching certain television channels that will be quite different from other types of audience. It's just a reflection of the time in which we live is the one that has to communicate across all of these platforms and more. No doubt the conclusion is going to be that we're going to have to do more of that the next time the census comes around, but more than that, and this is a point that Paul Low was saying earlier, and I think that this is really important because the lessons that we're learning from this, I think, are not unique to the census. They are reflective of a societal trend and a challenge for anybody that is wanting to collect information about the public to help to provide the best public services in the case of the census or understanding the labour market or understanding any other number of things about society at different stages. How can we do that in a way that it is then as genuinely reflective of the whole of society? This is a point that I know that Sarah Boyack has spoken about before, and she's right to highlight this. Because of variable rates of return, in shorthand, the more affluent an area, the higher the turnout, the lower the income demographic, the lower the rate of the return. I'm very much simplifying, but it is one of the most significant factors. We have to make sure that we have mechanisms in place so that the conclusions of, whether in this case the census or for other statistical products, there are methods in place that mean that you have a reflective, a genuinely reflective final census or survey. That's where it's really important. I've got no reason to disbelieve that the committee doesn't understand this, that what happens in terms of the work that takes place after the census, that we have the survey work, which I think I'm right in saying I'm looking at my NRS colleagues here before I overclaim here, I think is the biggest survey in Scotland after the census, and we're talking about the best part of a return of 30,000, between 25,000 and 30,000. I'm literally, this is off the top of my head now, I think it is off that order. As people on the committee would know that a normal statistical representative survey normally is at about 1,000. You're talking about an exercise that is 25 to 30 times the size of that, those are really significant efforts that are being undertaken to try and make sure that one is getting targeted information. Sorry, I should have stressed the point that this is targeted within those harder-to-reach parts of the return from the census to make sure that the overall picture, not only amongst other things, provides the statistical certainty of population numbers, which are confident about it, but also provides that level of granular detail about different communities and different people of different backgrounds and different communities, so that when we are trying to provide public services, whether that's health or education or any other number of important public services, it is done so on the basis of reflective high-quality data. I'm confident and my NRS colleagues are confident that that has been achieved in the 2022 census. Dr Allan? You alluded to this a little, and it's certainly something that we brought up in previous sessions, but in reaching a decision to delay was part of that decision looking at how historically abnormal a census taking place during a pandemic would have been. Was that part of your consideration that it's difficult to think other than a war of more abnormal circumstances? Dr Allan used the word you, so I wasn't part of the decision, so it's very difficult for me to think my way into my use to use the Scots form for which Dr Allan is very well qualified to deploy. I need to turn to my NRS colleagues who were part of that decision making process. Paul Lowe has put his real, as well as his virtual hand-up to answer that. It's not for me to second guess. The rationale to me just reading through things is exactly the same rationale that led to nearly 60 per cent of other countries in the same circumstance to come to the same conclusion, but I'll leave it to Paul Lowe to take us through things as he was actually there and part off the process itself. Thank you, convener. Thank you to the cabinet secretary and Dr Allan. There were a number of factors that informed our decision making, Dr Allan, but certainly the point you raised, and I believe that we talked about it a bit in June as well, was a relevant factor. The census is about taking a snapshot in time, but it's also about taking a representative snapshot in time, which can then be used in subsequent years. We were using 2011 census data, for example, in some of our analysis of Covid and the impact of Covid on people from different populations and different ethnicities some years later, so it's that ability to use it in a range of ways, sometimes not anticipated, that's really important. As I think Professor Ryan Diamond said to the committee a couple of weeks ago, there isn't an algorithm here to make a decision about whether you went in 2021 or you went later, but 71 per cent of the countries in the world went later because of Covid and a significant proportion that did then run it made changes to their census, including O&S and Nisra colleagues who made some changes to their census. One of the challenges is that the census gathers lots of important information about a range of things. Where are students? Where are they studying? Where are they placed? Where are people working? How do they get to work? Where do they live? The pandemic introduced some really short-term but significant shifts in society. People were not necessarily commuting to work. Students were at home, not in their place of study, so there's a range of data that's effectively skewed by the circumstances of a pandemic. The challenge that the organisations who took census during the pandemic are having to face into and have faced into is how do you make then adjustments to that census data to take into account the fact that society wasn't in the right place? You'll have been aware of local authorities in London borers expressing concern about undercounts of population in the census because it was taken in a pandemic and a lot of people didn't end up staying in their usual places in London, as an example. So there wasn't any one right or wrong answer. There was an approach and then there were things that had to be managed as a consequence of that. O&S were also very mindful that if they were to delay their census, picking up on Mr Cameron's points earlier on finance, it would have cost them £365 million to delay a year or nearly 39 per cent of their programme budget of nearly £1 billion Obviously, we were able to do that at an additional cost and I appreciate that, but it was 18 per cent and £21.6 million to do that and to gather that data. I certainly think that the data that we've gathered in Scotland in March 2022 is probably reflective of how Scottish society looks like and will look like over the next few years, so hopefully that helps. I was struck when you were talking about the way and the different ways that you could get information out to people about the census. I studied statistics for one year when I was at secondary school and I have to admit that it wasn't my favourite subject, but last night Sarah Boyack and myself attended the Culture and Communities Cross-Party group and there was an exceptionally interesting presentation at that by the leader of Dundee University's archive and how they have opened their archive out to school children, different ages of people, to share stories about the past. I haven't got the exact quote, but a quote from Nelson Mandela in 2005. Archives are also about making the future, so I'm following on from Mr Cameron's questions. I'm interested to hear about how this is something that you could perhaps be doing to emphasise to people like me, who statistics isn't my favourite subject, that the importance of this and the lessons that we can learn. We've got an example of a woman who was suffering from mental health issues and she went back to the archives of one of the hospitals in Dundee and from that they've learned from that, they've done a play, they've taken it out to the communities, she's been on various different medias, so I'm just wondering if there's stories like that that might help to tell the positive story of the census and as a result to get through whichever one of the three pillars we get better results. First off, convene, if you don't mind me correcting the record, my last answer, I talked about 60 plus percent of countries delaying their census. It was 59 countries, it was 71 per cent of countries delayed from the census period. To Ginny Minto's point about storytelling in the sense of communicating more effectively, I think undoubtedly that has to be part of the solution. In effect that is what was happening. I don't know if all committee members actually saw the television adverts that involved. I thought really imaginative ways of communicating the connection between taking part in the census and this providing a local hospital or other form of public service. These efforts were being undertaken to try and help explain why this was not an abstract exercise, it was something that was really going to matter to all of us. Can one do that better, well, undoubtedly, and in 10 years time, who knows what Scotland will be like? I have some hopes about how it will be in 10 years time. I see Donald Cameron smiling in agreement. Good, while we're making progress. Sorry, I'm being a bit cheeky there. I think that the trends that we are trying to understand here I think are going to continue in terms of the changing nature of society and the fact that we are going to have to be imaginative in being able to reach out in different ways to different people in different places and not expect to have the same impact or rate of return on things. I'm sure that colleagues here, and I think that it was really important to hear that our NRS colleagues here are part of international networks that work with colleagues, especially in comparable countries, but further than that as well, to try and learn what others are doing as well. I don't think that there's a silver bullet in any of this. I don't think that there is something that was missed that would have made a significant statistical difference. I think that the lengthening of the collection period was really, really important to helping to reach those places where, notwithstanding, the extensive communication work that had taken place, there just clearly needed to be more. It's different and direct, and we will have to calibrate that in the best possible way for the next census, but I think that there is something in Jenny Minto's point about schools. It's something that I was speaking about with officials. In fact, before the evidence session here, it's good that there were efforts undertaken in the run-up to this, but I think that if you can imagine kids going to school and understanding what the census is and why that's important and then going home and then being able to help explain and ask parents about the census and when are we doing it and all of that, I think that's quite an important part of the equation. Education is a part of that, and I think that we need an imaginative response. It's been done already, as are all of these other things, but can these things be reviewed and better understood and their effectiveness be assured? Yes, and I think that it's just constant improvement, but that's what the colleagues at NRS do already. It's all about doing a job, learning the lessons, reviewing it, implementing the changes that need to take place, publish what they're doing. I'm all for hearing people saying that they're wanting transparency on things. Please go to the NRS website and have a look at what is there. Have a look at the documentation that has been provided. It is extensive, and I haven't said it already, but I'd like to put on record my appreciation of the really hard work that went into Census 22 from NRS and, by extension, everybody else that took part in the process to the enumerators, to the people in the call centre and so on, because there was an extraordinary effort that went in to making sure that we could get to the stage that we're at now, which is to have high-quality data that will mean that Census 2022 that some people were casting doubt on, let us not forget this, including in the parliamentary chamber here. It's just factually incorrect to suggest that Census 2022 will not be providing high-quality data. It is, it will, and it has delivered. It is having to deliver in a different way to previous Censuses, and I think that trend will continue. I think that all lessons that need to be learned have to be learned, and no doubt we will come back to this committee convener to report on what those are. My colleagues here are extremely intellectually curious. They want to know what has to change and how to do it, and I think that countries elsewhere in the world are looking to Scotland to better understand this phenomenon because they realise that they are dealing with the same or similar phenomenon as we are, and you cannot get much further away geographically in the world than New Zealand, and they too are speaking with colleagues here about the experience here to try and make sure that they can maximise their return rate, and they have settled on a number that is remarkably similar to the return rate that we secured here in Scotland. That exhausts questions from the committee this morning, cabinet secretary. I thank you and your officials for their attendance at committee this morning. We are now moving into private session for a further agenda item. Thank you very much.