Hansard

Thank you for inviting me along this morning. This is my first week in my new role, and I am very happy to be here, representing National Galleries of Scotland. We are custodians of the national art collection, which ranges from art from the middle ages to modern and contemporary art. Through public funding, we provide free access to that collection for the people of Scotland and hold the collection in trust for them. In other words, the budget and the settlement that has come through allow us to do the work that we do for the people of Scotland. We continue to provide free access to the collection through our public offer at our three sites. We offer visits to our stores and loans to other museums and galleries around Scotland, the rest of the United Kingdom and internationally. We recently opened the Scottish galleries to showcase a particular strength of our collection. We have a changing programme of exhibitions here in Edinburgh, but we also tour shows domestically and internationally, and our outreach activities extend across the country to ensure that there is access to and engagement with the national collection. We are also committed to furthering our on-going work in equality, diversity and inclusion with regard to the collection, our people and our offer. We, too, have seen what has already been noted in terms of visitor numbers recovering post pandemic, and our online digital offer continues to grow year on year. That said, although we are able to do all those important activities with Government funding, the reality is that it is becoming more and more challenging to deliver the programmes and activities, because the funding situation is proving to be a challenge for us. The revenue budget increase for National Galleries of Scotland is only 1.8 per cent, once we take into account the 2023-24 spring budget revision for the first year of the pay policy, and there is the 5 per cent public sector reform efficiency reduction to take into account, too. Moreover, although we are expected to pay the second year of the pay increases, we also have increased employer pension contributions to meet. All that is against the same backdrop as everyone is facing, of increased utility costs. Therefore, the settlement, as presented to us, makes the path to a balanced budget very challenging, and we are currently working through the impacts on and options for how we deliver services in 2024-25. Echoing some of the sentiments that have already been shared, I would say that this is the reality of several years of underfunding of the arts and culture sector. It goes all the way back to the financial crash of 2008, which impacted on the budgets of NGS and many other organisations in a way that they have just never recovered from. If you look at the evidence from about 2011 onwards, you will see that, taking out the Government pay policy allocation and the variable elements of capital funding, we have had basically level funding since about 2011. That is challenging, with costs continuing to go up, but we are still committed to delivering what we need to deliver for the people of Scotland, and to safeguarding the national collections. However, although we are acting on behalf of Scottish ministers to make the collection available to people into the future, the reality is that 95 per cent of our grant in aid goes on our salary bill. That leaves only 5 per cent for the rest of our activities—activities that have a positive impact on Scottish life, health and wellbeing, and the arts and culture. We are not alone in this—indeed, I am surrounded by colleagues from other institutions and other parts of the sector—but the fact is that a high proportion of fixed and unavoidable costs arises from securing and caring for our priceless and world-class national collections. We also have to factor in the high costs of maintaining the buildings, estate and infrastructure that go along with them, and of our desire, ambition and obligation to meet a carbon-neutral future. Although I am representing NGS, those challenges are shared by other national collections such as the National Library of Scotland and National Museums Scotland. Those organisations are not represented at this meeting but, like NGS, they are basically facing a challenge in how to balance their budgets, going forward. There will be difficult decisions for all of us as to what that looks like. 09:00 To pick up on the earlier comments on the wider museums and galleries sector, I note that the funding situation across the board is not ideal, which is of concern for all of us, because we are all part of an ecosystem and we work together very much in collaboration and partnership. If the funding is not balanced across the board, we all bear the impact of that. We will hear more from Creative Scotland later, but we are all connected. For us to truly deliver on what the people of Scotland deserve, adequate funding is required, and we would welcome multiyear funding.