 Okay. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for coming along. I welcome everyone to the national galleries of Scotland's second committee meeting of 2015. I ask everyone to switch off their mobile phones and any other electronic device as they interfere with the broadcasting system, even when they are switched on to silent. However, the committee members may use tablets for committee business, as the meeting papers are now provided in digital format. Good morning and welcome panel. What takes us on to the first item of our agenda is to decide whether to take item 3 in private. Do the members agree to take item 3 in private, which is to consider the evidence heard this morning to help inform our preliminary stage report? We move on to item 2, which is the main item of business today. It is to hear from the promoters of the bill, Michael Clarke, director of the Scottish National Gallery and Wilson, the project manager of the National Galeries of Scotland and Mark McMurray, senior associate of CMS, Cameron McKenna LLP. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting and ask if Michael Clarke would like to make a short opening statement. Can we also express our thanks to you and your fellow committee members for allowing us this early start, which is greatly appreciated? The Board of Trustees of the National Guides of Scotland was established by statute in 1906 in order to manage the National Galleries of Scotland, which comprise three collections, the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The Board's functions are among others to secure that the objects are exhibited to the public and generally promote the public's enjoyment and understanding of the fine arts. In particular, the Board wishes to ensure that Scottish art is presented to the widest possible audience in a gallery of world standing. The Board is very mindful of the advances that have been achieved elsewhere with respect to top standard displays of national schools. For example, in London, Tate Britain has had a complete refit, £45 million refit, and displays the British National School extremely well. Our cousins across the Atlantic in America, the museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, have had a completely new refit of its American wing. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has constructed a new building to display its American collection and, of course, nearer to home across the channel in Paris, in France. There is the Musée d'Orsay almost exclusively devoted to the display of the French national school. Those are the standards that we are looking to and those are the standards that we wish to attain by expanding and improving the display of the Scottish collection here. All the space within the current Scottish National Gallery building is currently being used for permanent collections or exhibitions. It is therefore proposed to extend the National Gallery building into the relevant land in Princess Street gardens to create approximately 500 square metres of new gallery accommodation in which the collection of Scottish art will be exhibited and thereby we can triple the space devoted to the Scottish collection and greatly improve the circulation throughout the building. Additional benefits that are anticipated from the project include improvements to the conflicting external elevation designs, improved landscaping in the gardens and improved disabled access. Throughout the planning stage there has been an ongoing consultation process with relevant bodies with an interest such as the City of Edinburgh Council, Historic Environment Scotland, Network Rail and the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust. We hope that this scheme will build on recent successes such as the redevelopment of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which celebrates Scotland's history and people and in the modern sphere our scheme of artist rooms, which has very successfully displayed leading contemporary art throughout Scotland. Thank you very much Mr Clark. That was so pretty here all about what has been happening with the bill, but we have a canary of topics that we would like to ask you and we are going to go over to Jeane first of all. Thanks very much for that. It is really good and I am particularly pleased to hear reference to the Scottish collection of course as not I think that it would be an issue in terms of planning, but it certainly I think of great interest to not only artists, but all of us in Scotland to see our collection, the national collection highlighted and presented in a much better way. I wonder about the financial benefits to the gallery. Do you see the development as producing more revenue and having greater throughput? We see the development as increasing our visitor numbers, which inevitably will mean a greater number of customers in the commercial areas, retail and catering. Also the circulation through the gallery will be greatly improved and at the moment only less than 20 per cent of our visitors get down to the so-called newing area where the Scottish collection is housed and beyond that area, as I think that you saw on the site visit, are offices which will leave according to this scheme and therefore there will be much greater access through that area again to the commercial areas which will improve the financial resilience of the organisation in the coming years. Further on the financial side of things, the cost of the project altogether and funding being in place and what is the timeline for work beginning? The cost of the project is a little over £15 million. We have a stage one heritage lottery pass for a grant of just under £5 million. We have other funding initiatives under way which are drawing in funds from elsewhere and there will be a public funding campaign as well. If everything goes according to plan, we would be envisaging breaking ground, as it were, in early 2017 and finishing around about the autumn of 2018. Can I take you through the need for a private bill, please? In the promoters' memorandum, you summarised the legal obstacles for you to be able to do what it is you want to do. It is about the rules of the City of Edinburgh District Council Order Confirmation Act 1991 and also about whether it is common good land that is alienable or inalienable by the council. Could I look at that first and perhaps ask you to talk me through the reasoning to that and how we ended up at a private bill? For me, I was looking at if the land is inalienable, then only the court of session or a share of court can or allow it to be. If it is alienable, the council can, under the local government act of 73, change the purposes of it. Can you talk me through this question about if it is inalienable or alienable? If the answer is that it is inalienable, then why does a bill supersede the court of session? I ask my colleague Mr McMurray to answer it, thank you. Yes, the starting position is that the land is currently regarded as inalienable, common good land, which, as you say, under the local government act of 73, would require approval from the court before the council could dispose of that to the national galleries to allow the scheme to proceed. The purpose of the bill, which, obviously, I think that you said you were going to come on to the set of member council district act, which is an allostatured restriction, because that act of the piece of legislation is required to deal with the hurdle in that act. It was thought that what could be done would be to combine the two processes into one act, so that there is one opportunity and one consistent approach that would allow members of the public to understand and participate. The Parliament obviously offers further advantages in terms of accessibility and openness to members of the public to participate in that. It is inalienable land. I am still not clear then, if it is inalienable land, how we can deal with it through a private bill and it does not have to go to the court of session. Yes, the purpose of the drafting and the legislation would change the status of the land to alienable, which would then allow the council to use the powers under the local government Scotland act to dispose of that in accordance with the procedure set out in that legislation. That is clear then that, as it is inalienable through an act of Parliament, it becomes alienable and therefore the council can dispose of it to the national galleries. The other section of the bill, which deals with the 1991 act, therefore allows the council to change from inalienable to alienable to dispose to the national galleries but to limit what the national galleries can do with it within the 1991 act. The 1991 act has a separate restriction. What the bill proposes to do is to change the land to alienable, which would allow the council to dispose of it in accordance with the procedures in the local government Scotland act, but it is restricted to the purposes of this scheme, so the council could not then go ahead and dispose it for another purpose. It is predominantly linked to what the national galleries are proposing. The second set about the 1991 act ensures that, in disposing of this land to the national galleries, it is only on this piece of land that buildings outwith the 1991 act can be built and no other buildings can be built anywhere else on the common good land of the gardens. At the 1991 act, there is a current restriction on construction within the Prince Street gardens, which is designed to keep the gardens for public space. There are certain types of buildings and construction that can be carried out, but they are predominantly linked to the gardens function as a park. The purpose of dealing with the 1991 act in terms of the proposed bill would be to remove the small piece of land that the national galleries are seeking to acquire from the council and to take it out with the Prince Street gardens so that there would no longer be a restriction on the construction on that land. That is all quite clear, but I will get another two ways to explore that it could not have been done any other way other than by a private bill. For the play fair project, you needed an act of Parliament in 1992 because of similar reasons that we have gone through for this. Why could you not have amended the 1992 National Galleries of Scotland act to allow this further extension? The starting point would be the 1991 act because that covers the Prince Street gardens. What we need to do is limit the bill to anything that is necessary to carry out this project. The 1991 act would be the starting point. To remove this land from the Prince Street gardens would need to take an amendment to the 1991 act or to amend the definition of Prince Street gardens. The 1992 act that allowed the play fair project to go ahead would not have allowed you, by amending it, to have dealt with the inalienable versus alienable common good land. Is that correct? Maybe it is something that you could come back to us in writing. I know that I am getting very technical, but it is a private bill that is necessary in order for you to do what it is that you wish to do. Can you bear with me just a second? I think that that has covered all the technical things that I wanted to do. If that is okay, we would write to you to get further explanation of that if you were able to provide that in writing. I am happy to do so. One of the questions that I wanted to ask was about the relationship with Edinburgh City Council. Can any of the panel members describe where we are at with that? Yes, I can update on that. We have a healthy relationship with the City of Edinburgh Council. They have been involved in the promotion of the bill and are in agreement. We have had a council finance and resource committee—sorry, who could not ask a question? There has been a finance and resource committee that has approved the potential of the transfer of the land should we achieve the parliamentary bill. There are on-going discussions with them. In relation to the actual project, there has been a lot of discussion and consultation with them regarding the parks manager and the use of the parks in the longer term and the planning department regarding the shape and form of the building. We are in a grade 1 listed building in a World Heritage Site, so there has been quite a lot of attention. As you have seen, the day that you came for your parliamentary visit is a very active city centre location, not just for the galleries but for the use of the upper concourse level that City of Edinburgh Council has control over. There is a lot of work jointly with the council in terms of the management of all those areas and how the public move round them and enhance the visitor experience. It is an on-going discussion. We are not at the end of the journey with City of Edinburgh Council, but it is an open dialogue that we have with them. We have also been in contact with their legal team and the state's team to discuss the promotion of the land transfer at the next stage. Can I ask a more in-depth question about the construction process with the council about the access that we have been near and viewed through the gardens and the play for your steps? Can you explain a bit more about the relationship with the council and yourselves with regard to that? The gardens close at dusk at the moment, so the parks department closed the gardens down in the evening. We work with them in terms of if there are any evening events that the gallows are running with regard to access to that. There is on-going discussion with the parks department and the arrangements with regard to maintenance of the garden grounds and clearly the work that we will be promoting with the project will require a greater interface with them because we will be remodelling some of the land. We are creating better disabled access for them into the garden space. What we are trying to do through the project on the external elevations is to try to enhance the park and the gardens. We see that as a massive benefit to the council because the funding for the work that is being done will be carried out by national galleries. We see that as a very positive step as an offer to the council in relation to the transfer of the land. We will be doing quite a high level of work in the gardens to enhance what is already there. I think that that can ties us in quite neatly to the question about common good land. Often there is a great deal of controversy over common good land being sold or being used or being taken out of what seemed to be the common good. In this case, it remains within the common good in a sense. We are not selling it to a private developer. We are not doing anything that takes it away from public use, although it does change its status. Is there a financial agreement with another criticism sometimes that common good land can be sold at less than market value? Is there any financial transaction involved in you between the national galleries of Scotland and Edinburgh Council? I can say that, in terms of what the bill will do, it will change the status of the land to alienable common good land, which, as I mentioned earlier, would require compliance with the procedures under the Local Government Scotland Act for Disposal, which require compliance with best value and other considerations that the council would have to take into account. There is also a wealth of case law about what best value means and what the council can take into account with that, but there is no suggestion that there would be a disposal less than what would be best value. Given that the plans that we saw, I think that members of the public would be delighted, because, in fact, there is disabled access and we improved the play of fair steps. The memorial to the Spanish Civil War is, I think, going to be given more prominence. I think that there are lots of benefits to be had from that, and I presume that the cost of the landscaping and so on will fall within the national galleries budget for the project, as opposed to the council. Yes, it will. So there is a kind of, if you like, a quick pro quo on that. I just have another question to ask, and it occurred to me after, if that is with your permission? Absolutely. Accord to me after our visit the last time and knowing that the better access to the Scottish exhibition and so on, but if we, in the beaten way of things, extending space in a gallery might have given an opportunity to consider all of the collections and that rather than really kind of maintain that collection in that space with better access, but I wonder if there is ever a discussion about moving paintings around the gallery generally? Yes, paintings do move around the galleries for all sorts of reasons, and we re-display parts of the permanent collection. At the end of the day, one is creating a shell and future generations may choose to dispose the collection differently within the galleries. We have examples of the Scottish school intermixed with the European paintings on the first and second floors already, and we certainly continue with that. We would also envisage bringing some of the European paintings into the Scottish context in these new proposed galleries, because there are such important links that we would like to demonstrate in that respect. Therefore, the situation would always remain fluid. Thank you. Is there any further questions that you have been meaning to ask? Is there anything from the panel members that you think that we have not asked and that you have had written down aiming to tell us this morning and that it is not being covered? No? No? No, thank you very much. If there is anything that you know that you can always write into us and get that information. All I have got to do now is to thank you very much for coming along this morning and giving us some of this information. Thank you. We will continue on with the programme, which now takes us on to agenda item number three, which is in private. We agreed in the initial stages of the committee this morning to take that in private, so I will now close the meeting.