Hansard

I am delighted to open this debate as convener of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee. I would like to put on record my thanks to our clerks for their work in organising our inquiry. I also want to thank everyone who took part in our lunchtime event to highlight the report.

We are joined in the gallery by representatives who took part in our inquiry, some of whom attended our evidence sessions. That includes people from the WHALE arts centre, the Museums Association, Museums Galleries Scotland, Creative Lives and Art27. We had performances from those who are delivering some of the projects, including Recovery Scotland, the North Lanarkshire Recovery Community band, Reeltime Music, Culture Collective representative John Martin Fulton, Storytelling Centre representative—also a representative of the Culture Collective—Jane Mather and Spotlight Shotts. I welcome those who are with us today.

As I said, I am delighted to open the debate. Our inquiry considered the important matter of access to culture in communities. As we heard, for many people, participation in culture in their community is

“what their cultural life looks like”.—[Official Report, Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, 4 May 2023; c 35.]

It is about being part of a local choir, a book club or a drama group, going along to a makeshift cinema in a town hall or library, setting up an open-mic night or joining in on gala day.

Scotland is a culturally rich nation, so it is important to ensure not only that communities across Scotland have the opportunity to participate in and enjoy cultural activities—and not only participate but be empowered to shape the cultural life of their place and their community—but that organisations that deliver cultural interventions in communities truly understand and respond to the unique needs of those communities. Indeed, the Scottish Government’s culture strategy is clear in that regard. It says:

“Giving people a greater say in shaping the cultural life of their communities ... can help protect Scotland’s ... cultural heritage”.

That gets to the nub of the place-based approach to culture, which is a key focus for the culture strategy, and it builds on long-standing ambitions to adopt community-led approaches to service delivery.

Our report considered the challenges and opportunities in delivering that place-based approach to culture. I thank again all the organisations that submitted evidence to the inquiry or took part in our visits, and those who took part in our round-table discussions during the inquiry. I also thank those who participated in our engagement visits to the communities in Wester Hailes, Craigmillar, Dumfries and Orkney. That rich evidence helped to inform our inquiry and the findings of our report. We heard countless positive examples of that place-based cultural work being delivered in communities. We saw at first hand the transformative impact that local cultural projects are having, including on regeneration, on creative placemaking and, particularly, on the support of wellbeing.

However, our report also identified several challenges facing national and local government in delivering that approach. Those challenges must be addressed to realise the ambition of the cultural strategy.

The deputy convener will expand on some of those challenges in his closing remarks, but I will begin with the importance of supporting the vital role of voluntary arts. We heard that the “vast majority” of cultural activities in communities are

“dependent on the efforts of volunteers.”

We saw that in action on our visit to Orkney, where we met the volunteer-run cultural groups that are the backbone of Orkney’s cultural life. We heard not only of the immense commitment from the community to make cultural activity happen but of the challenge of volunteer fatigue and burn-out.

We know that not all communities have the time and resources to volunteer. Given the vital role of volunteers in sustaining local culture, we are concerned about the impacts of those inequalities on opportunities for cultural participation.

We also heard calls for there to be greater support for the voluntary arts, with capacity building and regular microgrant funding for voluntary groups. We have asked the Scottish Government and Creative Scotland to explore whether further support can be provided, particularly to the communities with fewer resources.

I now turn to the wider challenge of funding. That was central to the evidence that we received.

The long-standing financial challenges that the culture sector faces, which have intensified in recent years, have been well documented. Indeed, the committee’s pre-budget report, which was published last week, says that the “perfect storm” facing the sector

“has not abated over the last 12 months”.

We heard that the wider budgetary pressures were constraining funding for cultural organisations to deliver place-based projects and activities, local government cultural services and publicly owned community spaces in which cultural activity takes place. Those funding constraints pose a significant challenge to the successful delivery of the culture policy. Community-based cultural projects need to be embedded over the longer term to be successful. However, that work often relies on short-term and volatile project funding. Indeed, we heard the phrase “donut funding” mentioned. Quite often, projects would be funded, but the infrastructure and organisational aspects that are needed to support those individual projects would not be.

We heard that the Culture Collective programme had been a powerful example of a national place-based initiative that had supported cultural organisations and artists to work in partnership with communities to develop local projects, and that that had benefited from being “funded at scale” over a two-year period. The Stellar Quines representative said that the programme had enabled it to show

“how it could be and what might be possible”—[Official Report, Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, 4 May 2023; c 20.]

if the necessary funding was available to deliver that work on an on-going basis. With funding for the programme concluding, the Scottish Government should now set out how its legacy will be built upon through future place-based initiatives and the new cultural strategy.

On our visit to WHALE arts centre in Wester Hailes, we heard about donut funding, which supports delivery but not the overheads from having a building or the infrastructure that is needed to support an organisation to do administrative and planning work.

A significant challenge for organisations was trying to deliver long-term transformative work. Who in the funding landscape should cover those overheads? We think that that question needs further consideration. We believe that there needs to be clearer understanding of the roles of national and local government funding for community-based culture in supporting the activity itself and the infrastructure that underpins it.

The emphasis on the role of communities and place in the culture strategy is very welcome. However, in practice, there still needs to be a much greater prioritisation of the role of community culture at the heart of the culture sector as a whole in recognition of the fact that, for many people, their cultural participation in their communities is perhaps the only cultural activity that they will take part in.

We have invited the Scottish Government to consider whether community-based culture should be funded separately from professional arts and whether they should not be seen as having parity. I note the Scottish Government’s response that that model will be taken into consideration.

Local government also has an essential role to play, but the on-going funding challenges that it faces are leading to real-terms reductions in spend on local cultural activities, which are often seen as low-hanging fruit. We are concerned about the impact that that could have on the delivery of services in communities. The Glasgow Life culture trust said:

“the health of local government finances has a direct impact on the funding available for the services that Glasgow Life provides.”

Community Leisure UK said that any reductions in spend on culture

“will now result in reductions in provision”,

as all the saving mechanisms had already been considered and implemented. The Museums Association said that that could lead to

“local authorities limiting cultural provision or removing free access to culture”.

National and local government need to work in partnership to assess the on-going impact of the fiscal environment—